Morningstar Wet/Dry/Wet Rig

I am an unabashed LOVER of the Morningstar midi ecosystem. It is so intuitive and easy to program and just about anything you can think of you can do. A huge advantage it has over the RJM PBCs is that it has a screen big enough to show you what each button correlates to. While their controllers don’t have any loops available, their ML5 and now the incredible ML10x allow for the easy addition of 5 and 10 loops respectively. The ML10x is reorderable and allows you to run in parallel which is huge particularly for wet effects. Sound cool? It is! Anyway enough Morningstar love… ONTO THE BUILD!

This board was an absolute pleasure to put together and wow does it have a lot of routing options (more on that later). Fantastic pedal choices here. Who doesn’t love a Stryfecta? I had not gotten to try out the new Empress ParaEq MKII Deluxe so I was stoked that it was involved in this build. It absolutely lived up to the hype what an incredible tone shaping tool! There is a TON going on under this board between the Goodwood Underfacer, Cioks power supplies, relay switch, and the ML10x but I was able to keep it well organized.

The Details:

• Pedalboard

  • Creation Music Company Elevation 24x16

• I/O Junctions

  • Two Creation Elevation 4 TRS Patch Bays one per side

  • Goodwood Underfacer underneath the board

  • IEC in on one side, USB out for easy programming on the other

• Power

  • Cioks DC7 & Cioks 8

• Midi

  • Morningstar MC8 Midi Controller

  • ML10x Reorderable Loop Switcher

  • Omniport Relay Switch (For midi control of the red remote functions on the Kilt)

• Utility

  • Underfacer RMT Switch which allows you to mute your board with one press and sum to mono with a held press

Signal Path:

• In patch bay

• Out patch bay to Underfacer

• Out Underfacer to both the Polytune 3 Mini Noir and the Morningstar ML10x

• In the Morningstar ML10x

  • Origin Effects Cali76 Compact Deluxe Compressor

  • Xotic EP Booster

  • EHX POG2 Polyphonic Octave Generator

  • JHS Kilt v2

  • Browne Protein (Blue and Green side in separate loops via TRS)

  • Empress ParaEQ MKII Deluxe

  • Walrus Julianna Chorus/Vibrato

  • Dunlop DVP5 Volume Pedal/Dry Out/Audition/FX Loop (more on this later)

• Out ML10x in Stereo to wet effects

  • Strymon El Capistan

  • Strymon Mobius

  • Strymon Timeline

  • Strymon BigSky

• In Stereo Underfacer returns

• Out Underfacer in Stereo into patch bay

• Out pedalboard in Stereo

Routing Options:

• Mono Summed

• Stereo

• Wet/Dry

• Wet/Dry/Wet

Before I wrap this up we have to talk about all these routing options and how we pulled them off. Shout out to Goodwood Audio for their amazing Underfacer making this easy. If you read through the signal path you saw that one of the loops in the ML10x is not just the volume but a lot of different things. This loop is routed out through the volume pedal and into the mono Underfacer return which then splits out to both patch bays with one being the dry out, and the other being a send/return. This send/return can be used to audition new pedals, add a whole second pedalboard, or as a traditional FX loop. Because it is the ML10x you can move it anywhere you want! Extremely cool.

I think that about wraps it up. If you have any questions about this build or want to get rolling on your own build don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Thanks for reading!