Re: -discovering your gear that sits on your board

[William Walker <billwalker@baymoon.com>]

 Jeff The Duke sez:

 I don't use gear with an idea
of what I think it should do so much as see what it does and then
think how I can use that.

Thanks for saying that Jeff , because that's also the way it is for me with gear. I explore a piece of gear and try to pull as much as I can out of what the designer came up with. If given the chance to talk to the designer I might proffer a suggestion in person, but in much of the  corporate music manufacturing world that isn't possible unless you have an inside connection. I go to NAMM nearly every year and most of those designer guys are more interested in chatting up rocker chicks.  I personally didn't have much input on the feature set for the LP-1. Frankly  That was all Bob with a lot off input from my brother Rick and Steve Lawson, and latter from a consensus of user suggested options.  I think they built a pretty great feature set, one that I'm still uncovering things on three years down the line.  I didn't have any input on the  line 6 M-9 other than join a chorus of users with pedal board real estate issues in wishing there was a slightly more compact version of the M-13.  Both pieces of gear are continuing to inspire me and offer up new possibilities. Last night  MR Inside was going way out side with the M-9's ring modulator and an expression pedal. Now I've always loved ring modulators. I had an AH frequency analyzer for a number of years, but I could not see the point in hanging on to something I used really sparingly. This is true for several different vintage effects that I would love to use on occasion , but not necessarily feel the need to own as individual pieces. Those include ones I used to have like the ada flanger, mxr phaser and flanger, echoplex  and space echo, or lusted after when they were new but I didn't own  like the tri stereo chorus and original  boss chorus ensemble.  In addition as I've spouted numerous times before, just on its merit alone as a delay this thing has more options than most dedicated floor delays.  A typical set of delay options for me might be a volume swell delay or reverse delay in to a sweep or analog delay in to a stereo delay all set to compatible rhythmic values with a dedicated expression pedal to morph them all slightly, and slaved to  incoming midi sync from my LP-1. From the bit I've checked out the timbenderit  is really cool and I wish more delays allowed the ability to set an expression pedal  to control the input feeding the dealy for freeze style effects. That was one cool thing I liked about the original vox tone lap, that  you could assign an expression pedal in that way.  

Bill