At the feet of Hugh McManners of HM Band

Photographed at RTYD at the Fiddler's Elbow (Oct 2010)

And here's an explanation by Hugh himself:

The pedal set-up uses Eventide delay and modulation units which produce very high quality stereo effects, to switch into the PA when required – for intros, solos and so on – by leaving the dry signal still coming out of the backline amp. It’s triphonic as opposed to stereo, which retains the guts of the backline guitar amp pumping out the non-Eventide signal, whilst adding a very wide chorus (for example) through the PA. The feed to the PA is balanced line out via a stereo DI box, and the sound engineer has to pan the left feed hard left, and the right feed hard right.

The switches, splitter and and mixer are Lehle – which I recommend, particularly as if you phone them up out of hours, Burkhard Lehle himself answers the phone - and your questions!

The power supplies are all GigRIg Generators and Distributors with Virtual Batteries.

We tried monitoring the triphony onstage at a large biker rally, but it’s a bit swirly and confusing, so for us it just sounds like something strange happened ‘out there’. It does however work really well out front, particularly as venues get larger and wider. I didn’t use it very much on Thursday as we’d only done a three hour rehearsal so the material itself wasn’t secure.

Underneath the top level of switching, expression pedals and the Eventides, are rows of the usual stomp boxes – a Hot Cake and a True Tone fuzz, ancient digital delay, phaser pitch shifter...., controlled by a true bypass loop switch. There’s a Deja Vibe chorus and a TC polytune tuner unit, which allows you to tune all 6 strings at once.

The expression pedals control the Eventide delay and modulator units – altering any of the many parameters. For example the modulator does a far more musical version of a Cry Baby wah – plus all many of other manual and auto-wahs. They can mix wet and dry, or any other effects. Things like Leslie rotators, flangers and phasers work really well. The two Eventides are linked by midi, so that tap altering tempo (of delays etc) only has to be done once for everything on the system.

I’m trying to complete it all, reduce its size and very greatly simplify its operation by using a midi looper switch. At present I’m having problems with a company in Seoul who make the ideal unit - called “Loopholic”, which I’m sure this will all get sorted out soon.

However..... I also have very minimal system which I can carry in a small bag along with everything else, for when I don’t have to bring backline and can use London Transport – or when playing with a blues band!!

HM Oct 2010

http://www.rock-til-you-drop-musicians.com/profile/HughMcManners