Boss Rc3, Micro Terror, 7 String

[Michael Inglis]

So I've had an Esp Ltd sc-207 for about a year that I modified a bit and put some fishman fluence Stephen carpenter pickups in it. At home currently I'm using an orange micro terror and an orange ppc112 with a v30 celestion. The problem I'm having is with the tone from the sc207. It sounds very tin like an metallic. I've raised the action, leveled the frets and while it's helped it's still not where I feel it should be. This morning I decided to try it without my pedals again and it sounded much more articulate like it should be not 100%. I narrowed it down to my boss rc3 looper. With the rc3 in front of the amp it just muddys it all up an sounds tin like.

I'm wondering if anyone else has had this problem or might have a guess as to why I'm getting such tin like tones from my 7 string. I'm going to get a dsl100hr next week and I'm thinking with the ability to shape the eq more it should really help aside from when the boss is up front. Anyone else have similar problems with the fishman fluence pups, rc3, or a 7 string with a micro terror? And is there a true bypass mod for the rc3? Thanks for any ideas

 

[GuitarIV]

The problem you have is twofold: on the one hand your Micro Terror has no effects loop, so you are putting the looper pedal in front of the distortion, on the other hand you have one speaker which makes things worse when the looper plays back and you play over it, especially with overdriven sounds. It's the equivalent of plugging in 2 guitars into one amp and trying to jam with each other, there's only so much a speaker can reproduce and things muddy up.

I have the Micro Terror, I have the Boss RC-3 and I have a DSL 100. When I was using it together with all my pedals I always made sure the RC was last in the signal chain, and last in the loop of the amplifier. So basically whatever effects I had going on, it all happened BEFORE the RC input, then it hit the poweramp section. This works great when you engage a totally clean sound with delay and reverb, record something with the pedal and then switch to distortion, the RC will play the clean sound you looped and you can shred away. It however still leaves you with the problem of having one speaker cab reproduce more than one guitar.

Are you getting a 1960 cab with the DSL? If you do, that leaves you the option of using the cabinet in stereo, so one side of it could be your DSL 100, the other your looped sounds going into the Micro Terror set to clean. Basically using 2 amps, one for your actual playing, the other for reproducing your loopers sounds.

So this is what I would try: set your cabinet to stereo, go from the guitar straight into the DSL, take a Y cable that splits your signal, plug one end into the DSL send, one of the two ends into the amps return, the other end into the input of the RC. From the RC you go into the Micro Terror set to clean. The DSL goes into one stereo in, the Micro into the other. Make sure to set the impedance on the DSL to the right value, I think it's 8 ohms instead of 16 or 4 when set to stereo. The Micro Terror will be fine plugged in cause it has a solid state powersection and there's no output transformer you might blow.

So your DSL goes into one side, when you loop something the RC sends that to your Micro Terror that replays whatever you looped and sends it into the other side. This should work if I didn't make a mistake in my thought process, others might chime in. Be aware that noise from ground loops might happen depending on which outlets you use, so a noisegate might help. Then again active pickups are rather quiet so you should be good.

If you have questions or don't understand what I mean just ask.

Hope this helps, cheers!