Ending on a pedal
Actually, that should be "Ending on some pedals". In my final CreativePact session of 2015 I delved into the effects pedals situation for the vocal and saxophone parts in Automaton. It marks the first time shopping has been a CreativePact activity (at least for me).
I started out with the effect chain for the saxophone, simulating a tenor with my trusty (but not entirely sonically accurate Proteus 2000 sound module). I have two delay pedals at the moment: a Boss DD-7 and an Aria AD-10; my first step was to test them back-to-back to decide which to use.
As you can tell from the photo above I chose the Boss, mainly on the clarity of the delays. But Aria fans fear not! I went a little further and added an Aria PS-10 Phase Shifter pedal, which gave the output a nice warm phasey woosh (it's a phaser pedal after all). The PS-10 outputs mono, so I placed it before the DD-7 so the phasing occurs on both sides of the stereo field.
In an additional "oh yeah" moment, I spotted my Boss FV-500L volume pedal (used during my days of laptop improvisation with HELOpg) and realised it would be so useful at the end of the chain to control the final level of the effects return. And BAM! My saxophone effects chain.
For the vocal part I was stuck as I have no reverb pedals. The only answer? Get shopping! I settled on the Behringer DR600 reverb pedal, which is stereo in and out and is cheap. I'm thinking I may run the vocal through the pedal in the recorded track too, thereby mitigating the problem of different reverbs on the live and computer parts.
So that brings an end to this year's CreativePact. I'll write a summary post in the next few weeks and follow that up with an epilogue after the show. So long.