There Is No Simple Rig

Over the past year, a lot of good gear left this bench.

A hand-wired TS808. A RAT. A Distortion+. A Keeley ECCOS. A Boss RV-5. Vintage Ibanez pedals. MXR pedals. None of them failed. None of them were disappointing. Most of them were excellent.

That is what makes the selling worth explaining. The usual story is that gear leaves because it was not good enough. This gear left because the rig it belonged to asked for more than the life around it could give.

The pedals were not the problem. The friction was.

The one that stayed

One drive pedal stayed, and it is the strangest keeper on the list: a Benado Soul Burner that has not been played yet. Every pedal that left had been proven. The one that stayed is an unknown.

The decision was not tonal, because it could not be. It was financial and philosophical. The Soul Burner was designed by a builder inspired by the Soldano SLO-100, and in particular by what Mark Knopfler did during his Soldano years: one serious amp voice, played with hands that did the rest.

That lineage is the argument. Not that this pedal can reproduce a Tube Screamer, or a RAT, or anything else that left. It cannot, and it does not need to. The question it has to answer is different: is one inspiring drive enough to make the guitar get picked up?

Chasing every sound is a hobby. Having one sound that invites you to play is a rig.

Rig friction

There is a name worth giving to the thing that was actually sold off: rig friction. It is everything a rig demands before it produces music.

• Cables to connect, test, and troubleshoot
• Decisions about which pedals make the board
• Swapping and re-ordering
• Comparison — the quiet pressure to A/B instead of play
• Setup time before the first note
• Mental overhead: remembering settings, signal order, what sounded right last time

None of these costs show up on a receipt. That is why they are easy to ignore when the gear is arriving and impossible to ignore later. For many adult musicians, the scarce resource is not money and it is not gear. It is uninterrupted time.

When time is the scarce resource, every unnecessary cable carries a hidden cost.

A big board does not just offer options. It charges rent on every session. Twenty minutes to play becomes five minutes of setup, five minutes of doubt about which drive to use, and ten minutes of music. The rig did not fail at any of its jobs. It failed at the only job that mattered.

The question changed

For years the organizing question was a collector's question: what pedal can reproduce every other pedal? That question has no end. Every answer suggests two more purchases.

The better question turned out to be smaller and harder: what rig makes me actually play?

The answer, for now, is four pieces, permanently connected: guitar into the Soul Burner, into a Victory Copper run as a standalone pedal, into a T-Rex Room-Mate for reverb, into a Crate VC-508. Nothing gets unplugged. Nothing gets compared. The rig is always the same distance from a note: one power switch and one pick.

The Copper deserves a note, because using it as just another pedal looks like a waste of its routing capability. It is not. Capability that goes unused costs nothing; capability that demands configuration costs playing time. Running the Copper the simple way is not settling. It is the point.

There is no simple rig

It is tempting to call this a simple rig. That is the wrong word, and the reason it is wrong is the most encouraging part of the whole exercise.

A four-piece rig still contains an enormous space of possible tones, because most of a guitar sound never lived on the pedalboard in the first place.

• Picking dynamics — fingers, pick, angle, attack
• Guitar volume, and everything it does to a drive circuit
• Pickup selection
• How the drive and the preamp interact at different gain levels
• EQ interaction between pedal, preamp, and amp
• Tube response — how the amp behaves as it is pushed
• Reverb as space, not decoration
• Musical context: what is being played, and why

Multiply those dimensions together and the space is not small. Reducing the number of components does not reduce the expressive space nearly as much as people assume. It mostly reduces the number of decisions standing between the player and the instrument.

A rig is not simple because it is small. It is simple because nothing stands between the player and playing.

The real optimization

A minimalist rig does not succeed by containing the fewest pedals. It succeeds when it removes enough friction that the guitar gets picked up more often. That is the only metric that survives contact with a full life.

The Soul Burner may turn out to be the wrong drive. That would not make the decision wrong. The pedal is replaceable; the shape of the rig is the finding.

The ultimate optimization is not maximizing available sounds.

It is maximizing minutes spent making music.