My tonex setup

[John Ray]

I thought some folks might be interested. This is my compact rig work in progress for playing banjo, dobro, and pedal steel at the same gigs with seamless almost instantaneous instrument switching!

I am using a tonex and have had a lot of help and support from Joe Rogers as I'm sure a lot of you have! Can't say enough nice things about Joe's help.

For my pedalboard stand, I just took the top off of one of the cheapest music stands you can get and put this tiny piece of plywood that I've used as a pedal board for years onto the bracket from the music stand. The pedalboard fits into a laptop case I got at Goodwill. I also cut the music stand tubes down to size so it all fits in a little suitcase when broken down. This sis right to the right of my pedal steel in easy fingertip range.

I use the gigrig three2one abc switch. It has a preamp that's individually adjustable (and switchable) for each channel. Very handy for getting the acoustic pickups a little hotter and the tome is pretty transparent. Not as good as the lr baggs, BUT it's a small package and very workable for this mission of having a compact rig for several instruments.

I use the Peterson mini as my kill switch and have all the tuning presets for pedal steel dobro banjo in there. The gig rig Three2One ABC switch also has a muted tuner out but it doesn't have a light or anything to indicate that it's going to kill mode so it could be a little confusing. you just have to long hold the button and it goes to tuner and mute the signal, and then you just click it once to go back to where you were, but could be on kill and you wouldn't know cuz there's no indication I can tell when it's in bypass. So prefer to use the Peterson inline with the signal. My only other complaint with the gigrig is it has a little click in the signal when you change channels. just fyi for people playing big gigs.

I don't really use delay much with my pedal steel at all but need it for just a couple of songs so I use that as the last thing after the tonex and like having the knobs and tap tempo for the delay easily accessible so will keep the tc electronics pedal on there.

For the tonex, one trick I've found is that you have to set the gain input trim a little on the higher side for the steel and then turn all the amp model volumes down pretty low on each steel preset like around 2-3, to get good volume match with the banjo/dobro. If you try and bring up the volume of the acoustic instruments with the compression it starts sounding weird, and you can't use the amp model volume to change the volume of an IR only channel (like I'm currently using for my bank and dobro). You want to have all these channels volume-matched when they go to front of house.

Bank 1 are my favorite pedal steel amps, bank 2 for dobro, bank 3 for banjo, etc so I have 2 or 3 presets for each instrument to have something tonally different and ready at hand for each room. Still not completely happy with the dobro sounds I'm getting, but making progress and it's workable. I also run c6 lap steel and electric guitar through here to sometimes.

Currently using banjo IR from sigma audio for my banjo and dobro signals. I also have the jd aura captures from joe which are good.

Happy to field questions or hear your thoughts/input

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