blackstrat

It's not the most exciting pedal in that it's just a clever switch, but I do like the possibilities it gives.

It has two switchable loops. In one loop I have my Diezel VH4-2 working as a preamp and in the other I have my Peavey Classic's pre amp. This allows me to switch between which preamp I want to use whilst also keeping my delay and modulation effects in the FX loop - post preamp.

Guitar goes in to the input. Red loop sends to the VH4 and returns from the VH4 preamp output. Green loop sends to the front of the amp and returns from the FX loop send. That's the two preamp loops. The left switch toggles between each loop and the right switch bypasses both loops, which in my case means I have no preamp as the signal goes straight to the FX return via the delays - so I'll keep the right switch always on.

Then the output of the pedal goes to the modulation and delay pedals and then to the amp's FX return.

I got my first guitar in about 95 and have been totally self taught. I stagnated massively for around 15 years in the middle when I infrequently played then got frustrated all I could do was some Nirvana power chords.

Started playing again around 5 years ago and had my guitar professionally setup - what a world of difference that made! I've made decent progress since but it's still all just the odd riff or solo here and there and there's a lot I can do a lot better. Using YouTube videos is only getting me so far and some 1 on 1 I hope will do the trick.

My wife started taking piano lessons and it inspired me to do the same for guitar. I'm sure it will be helpful even if they're going to rip my technique up and start again.

Have you had lessons or are you self taught? What helped the most for your playing?

I thought I'd never see the day.

For King Tovalds and Country of FOSS OS's

Wear Arch, but I run EndeavourOS. If EndeavourOS launched a line of shoes I'd probably wear them.

A Player strat in black with maple neck. So far I'm pretty impressed. The neck is nice, the back is satin and the fretboard is glossy, but not sticky like I thought it might be. The electrics all seem high quality. Fit and finish all excellent and almost as good as my PRS SE. Came setup with the bridge very floating and the 9 gauge strings old and corroded, but whatever they were coming straight off either way.

I've already modded it to end up with the guitar I really wanted.

New single ply black pickguard, decked the trem, tightened the truss rod, and a new set of GHS Gilmour strings.

Now I'm very happy. I just love looking at it as much as playing it.

Thought I'd share what I think is one of the most beautiful guitars I've seen: my PRS SE Custom 24 in bright Bonnie Pink. The light was catching it quite nice this evening.

This thing plays as good as it looks. The neck is really nice, the frets and edge of fretboard are like butter, the trem is really nice with a push in bar. The high fret access is just superb. I love the pickups that have some great bite, but clean up with volume and tone adjustment. The split coil setting, although not perfect adds a lot of versatility so I dont often want to swap guitars just for some single coils - well, most of the time.

Only criticisms would be I think it should have some with locking tuners, but as a £90 add on I can see why they did it to keep the cost down - having since added them I really like the PRS locking system.

The pickup selector switch I find to be quite out of the way and the trem bar gets in the way if wanting to switch mid song. A LP is hard to beat in this regard.

Overall a definite 9.8/10, very highly recommended.

It's been a long time in the making, but this is the happiest I've been with my board for a while.

Signal chain: TU2 -> Blues Driver -> Vox Valvetone -> Diezl VH4-2 -> Wampler Pinnacle Deluxe v1 -> Wampler Pantheon -> EHX Rams Head Big Muff -> Mooer E-Lady -> Front of amp

FX Send -> TC Electronic Flashback 2 -> EHX Oceans 11 -> FX Return.

Running it all in to a Peavey Classic 20 Mini Head and a Harley Benton 1x12 cab with Vintage 30 speakers. The little red pedal is plugged in to the amp to toggle the channels (clean / OD) and the boost (on / off).

Considering it's by far and away the biggest pedal on the board, the VH4-2 probably gets the least amount of use. But what it does is so unique that I'm not getting rid of it.

The Oceans 11 is my most used pedal as it's never off. Otherwise I use the Pinnacle the most. It has such a good tone that reacts to the volume knob on the guitar so well. I find I can do almost any OD / distortion sound I want from it.

The Pantheon, BD2, Valvetone and Rams Head all do their particular thing that the amp and Pinnacle can't. So even though there's a lot of drive pedals here I don't feel like there's much overlap at all. It means I can play Gilmour one minute, then Tool the next, Van Halen another and Clapton another.

Stuff no longer on the board: TC Electronic mojomojo (too similar to other things), Boss DS-2 (not my kind of sound these days), Behringer noise gate (turned out my noise issues were caused by a Boss RC1), Behringer CS400 compressor (I want to like it and maybe I'll put it back on but I haven't been able to get what I want out of it).