Good and bad buys

I mentioned before that I bought a really cool 5 way ABCDE swtich for my amps at home, but I also bought a smaller A/B switch a few weeks ago to use for my "gigging" board. I don't gig of course, I'm no where near ready for that, but I do go to my regular jam sessions both with students and more recently with adult collegues and members of Breda ex pats, and unplugging my gear and lugging it around is a pain, as indeed is restoring it all when I get home.

So I've been slowly putting together another pedal board. I have one for "home" use which basically is to allow me to use my VL4 system so my Hybrids can switch easily between pedals/amps etc. I like my G-Dec amp and various amp modding software for home stuff.

This however is my "gigging" board that I plan to take in future, its self contained, reasonably compact, and tidy. Though pretty cheaply made and with a pish poor practice amp system that I normally bypass. The A/B channels for example are not seperate, you can plug into any and get an output from both...hmmm not really a problem though.



As you can see, I have a tuner, an AB swtich, an acoustic simulator a multi effects pedal for standard effect types and the crown in the jewel a Big knobs Tube 808. This bascally lets me do most of the stuff I can do at home on any amp I want to plug it into, all be it with some fiddling on site, where at home I just select presets on my G-Dec or Garageband style software. (I love plugging this into my Fender Champ though, that 808 is mega)
The reason for the AB switch is to do with playing acoustic bits on my hybrids, they really need to go through seperate acoustic channels when in proper acoustic mode,(as opposed to an electric going into the acoustic simulator) and I want to send them to my Zoom A2 multi pedal to give deeper sounding acoustic sounds into a PA. rather than into the electric channels amp.

Gosh this is a long boring technical post innit...anyway...after my delight with my custom made switch pedal last week. I'm mega pissed with my shop bought switch, basically it bleeds signal to the unselected channel, which if amplified creates a distorted electrified echo to your clean acoustic sounds...in other words crap.
I returned one of these already and was really pissed to find the replacement has the exact same fault, so I guess its shoddy manufacturing.

I'm going to send it back for a refund and get my custom switch maker to make me a simple A/B and do it right.

As you can tell by the rant I'm pissed off about this, I hate buying goods from reputable places only to find out they are crap. So this is a warning to anyone else who might be tempted...don't buy an Electro Harmonix Nano Switchblade A/B switch.






















Ahthankyew