I’ve been rehearsing with a new cover band for a while now. As our setlist developed, we gravitated toward a hard rock sound. This shaped my decisions about the gear I’m using with this band. For some other recent projects, I’ve been using smaller tube amps (mainly a Peavey Delta Blues or a Fender Blues Junior), running the amp clean and using pedals for overdrive and distortion. But in this case, doing the cover scene, I know we’ll play a lot of smaller stages. And, I’ll need a lot of high-gain tone, but won’t need (or want) a lot of volume. So, rather than the tube amps I’ve been using, I decided on the Peavey Bandit 112 for my amp. The Bandit is solid state, but delivers solid clean and high gain tones, and has other useful features like a foot-switchable volume boost and a keep-it-simple direct out.

In advance of our first gig tomorrow night, I also picked up a new pedalboard. I anticipate doing a lot of gigs with this band, so I wanted to do a board tailored to the sounds we’re after. Pre-input, I have a Jim Dunlop volume pedal (with the Boss tuner hooked up to the “tuner out”) and a Morley “Bad Horsie” wah. Through the effects loop, I’m going with the Boss Giga Delay and the Line 6 Modulation Modeler. As this is a cover band, I wanted to have the broadest palette of effects with the fewest pedals. The Giga Delay is programmable, and has the useful feature of toggling between two delays. I generally have a short delay on, and use a longer delay for solos. The Line 6 offers a nice array of choruses, flanges, phasers and tremolo. Those two pedals easily cover the ground of six “single” stompboxes. In all, I’ve got a good range of sounds for this band, with the simplest setup (and lightest-to-lug amp) I think I could get away with.

To mount everything, I picked the Pedaltrain Pro, which is simple, has plenty of room for the layout I’m using (with room for future expansion), and a nice sturdy gig bag.

Here’s a look at the Pedaltrain Pro:

Here’s the board loaded up, ready for tomorrow’s gig:

Though I’m always looking for possible improvements, I think this setup will work well for this project for the foreseeable future. If we book some events in bigger rooms, I will be tempted to mount a wireless on there, though!