I hope everyone had a great Christmas and New Year. I have been wanting to talk about the way I have set up my HD500 for a while but been too busy with other projects. This morning I had a major issue. It appeared that I had lost all of my patches which forced me to scramble up a quick basic brand new patch about 10 minutes before showtime. I messed around with the board tonight to happily discover that the entire problem was in my head. I was not hitting the right button to reload the other sound banks. All this was a result of a total lack of sleep. Last night was New Years Eve after all. 🙂 Since I had things out on the floor, I took some pictures and put this post together real quick.
Pictured above is the rig I ended up putting together between January and July of last year. I am sure most of you will agree, this type of project never ends. I am sure I’ll be filling up that remaining space at some point but am happy with the flexibility and portability I have now. I haven’t done anything with it since the end of summer other than tweak patches to include the fx loop.
Requirements
I wanted something that would work well in a variety of situations and give me a large palette of great tones to work with. I play at church and plug in straight to a PA so I wanted something fairly light and quick to set up for that purpose. When I am playing with a band, I like to have an amp too. This setup ideally should work well either with my 5150 half stack or into a Tech 21 Power Engine 60. Sadly I have not experimented enough with the 5150 to say whether I like it in that scenario but it sounds great into the PE60. Note that I have heard very good reports of using the 4-cable method to maximize the sound of both your amp and the HD500.
The Tour
For the tour of the board I decided it would be easier to show it in a short video rather than try to describe it so I recorded something and put it up on YouTube. I have been experimenting with some music and comedy videos out there just for fun and wanted to do something a bit more serious that might have a chance of helping someone who is thinking about effects, boards, gear, and setting things up.
Here is the link, I hope it is of some value!