I played my first show with the King of Tone last night. I kept my old standby the Sparkle Drive MOD handy and was kind of glad I did. The boost side of the KoT was great. The distortion side was good for some things but single note solos and some "Marshally" rhythm sounds not so much. The Sparkle Drive has a better and more usable single note sound.
The strange thing is that I shot the pedals out during sound check with the bassist and he really liked the KoT (he doesn't know any of the story about the pedal, he just listened to a new pedal for the first time) but once the band got going it was the usual story.
I used the compressor and Spark Boost combination a bunch last night. The Velvet Fuzz gets used quite a bit for my louder rock solos as well. It's interesting how I have a selection of pedals that don't really sound super different from each other but I'm selecting them on the gig almost more for how they feel to play different parts through as opposed to what the audience is hearing.
I spent a little time last week moving some of the patches around but I realized that over the last few months I had gradually shut down must of the delays and reverbs out of my crunch sounds. I think that one change I'm going to make is running the expression pedal through the ES-8 and then running the expression pedal outs to each Strymon device and have the pedal either control the modulation rate in the case of the Leslie and tremolo sounds with a fixed delay sound or for the general clean and dirt sounds having the expression pedal dial in the amount of ambience from the delay so that I can adjust the amount of wet for each room.
