How to read this
HIS — in a named file of yours, with a date. DERIVED — follows from a control layout confirmed to exist, plus a stated reason; reject it if the reason is wrong. GAP — not verifiable, so left blank rather than invented.
Pedals are clock face. The Badger and Mesa are on their real numbered 0–10 panels — and see the last section, because those two conventions do not reconcile in your own sheet.
1 · The ScottG sound
A dark, mid-forward, sustaining fusion-blues voice made by a loud clean signal hitting a small amp that is genuinely working — not by a pedal straining. Your own mechanism, verbatim: “Sustain and midrange come from the amp being pushed hard by a loud clean signal, not from a pedal being pushed hard by a quiet one.”
Four things make it yours rather than Landau worship:
- The console bracket. “Landau goes guitar into pedals into amp. You've built a desk channel with a guitar in it — a Neve-flavoured germanium preamp at the front, a 610-flavoured tube preamp at the back, drives in between. Nobody else's chain looks like that, and it's the single most identifiable thing about your rig.”
- Deliberate darkening. The Butter Machine's Sparkle trimmer is a ~6 kHz peak built so Landau's leads cut a dense LA mix. “You're playing in a room on your own in Norfolk. Turn it down, bring the Low-Mid up, and the pedal stops being his and starts being yours.”
- More space than he would allow. 100% wet Mesa leg, BigSky “longer and higher than the tone police permit”, Badger tight and dry.
- Subtraction. “Six drives in series is the enemy of that sound” — four states, and the AC+ is off in all of them, on purpose.
What it is not: a chase for a bigger pedal; bass used to get fat (fat is 250–500 Hz, and the Badger's stack is passive, post-gain, cut-only — “isn't a suggestion, it's physics”); or a rig needing a footswitch to go clean→lead. The volume knob is the channel switch.
Harmony: minor-Dorian. B minor / D Dorian through mid-2026, then a clean migration to E and A — E7→A7, E Dorian ⇄ A Dorian one note apart, E7♯9, A minor from late August. Dorian appears in 56 unique files, ahead of Aeolian and Mixolydian combined.
2 · The chain
DRY CHAIN → JAN RAY → BROADCAST → VENUS → BUTTER MACHINE → AC+ → DCX BOOST → splitter
├─ dry → BADGER 18 MkII
└─ wet → MOBIUS → TIMELINE → BIGSKY → MESA 5:25
wah · fuzz · vibe patched in ahead for the Hendrix material
HIS patch_sheet.html 2026-09-02. Mobius routing is genuinely open: Sept 2 puts it on the wet leg; Sept 7 puts it in the Badger's valve loop with a reason (“post-preamp chorus is a clean-tone tool; it smears drives”). Both yours, five days apart. It is left out of all three tones below, per your own constant: off unless the card names it.
3 · The three tones
These are your three — BED, CORE, SING, States 1–3 of patch_sheet.html. Not renamed. SCREAM (State 4) isn't one of the three by your own instruction (“use sparingly”).
Guitar. Suhr S Custom, ML Standard, neck. HIS “the Custom 24 is too hi-fi for this.” Position 4 for chords — “the quack adds definition.” Volume 6–7 · Tone 6–7 and leave it.
| Pedal | State | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Jan Ray | BYPASS | “Nothing in front of the Broadcast. Let the guitar hit the germanium directly.” HIS |
| Broadcast | ON | Level 1:00 · Gain Trim 9:00 · Low Cut 10:00 · switch LOW · 24V HIS |
| Venus | BYPASS | “Save the valve for State 4.” HIS |
| Butter Machine | BYPASS | — HIS |
| AC+ | BYPASS | “Off. It stays off in three of the four states.” HIS |
| DCX | ALWAYS ON | Drive 9:00 · Level 12:00 · L.F. 12:00 · H.F. 11:00 · Mode EQ · Voice MED HIS |
Drive one above Power. MOSFET boost off — footswitch only, there is no boost knob. Room level at the Ironman II Mini, not the Drive knob.
Wet leg. TimeLine dTape 440 ms, Repeats 10:00, Filter 11:00, Grit 9:00, Mix hard right. BigSky Hall ~4.0 s, pre-delay 40–60 ms, Tone 12:00, Mix hard right. Mesa Ch1 Clean, Gain 3 / Bass 4 / Mid 6 / Treble 5. HIS
“Any dry leaking through here arrives fractionally behind the Badger and comb-filters against it. That single mistake is what makes wet/dry rigs sound thin.”
Play: the drone ladder, then the Sweet Jane engine, then the E7♯9 progressions — that material wants a clean amp behind it: “let the amp stay reasonably clean behind them.”
Conflict to settle. For the Reed material you wrote the opposite reverb — “short and dark, not a cathedral” — and “Broadcast off” (08-31). patch_sheet (09-02) has Broadcast on in every state. BED needs two reverb states. Run the ladder both ways once and write down which.
Guitar. ML set home position is volume 7–8 — “These pickups are designed to live rolled-back — full-up is the solo boost, not home.” Tone 6–7.
| Pedal | State | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Jan Ray | ON | Gain 9:00 · Treble 11:00 · Volume 1:30 · Bass 12:00 · sat. trim 1:00 HIS |
| Broadcast | ON | unchanged, “nudged up a hair to keep pace” HIS |
| Venus / Butter / AC+ | BYPASS | — HIS |
| DCX | ALWAYS ON | unchanged HIS |
Your prose is “Gain 10–11, Power Scaling down until the amp is genuinely clipping at a survivable volume” — this is that, in dial numbers, Gain one notch above BED.
Correction worth knowing. The commonly-quoted Jan Ray line Bass 11 · Treble 1 · trim 2:00 is the Custom Standard's card, not the Suhr S. The Suhr S card is Bass 12 · Treble 11 · trim 1:00 — which agrees with patch_sheet State 2 and with your own reason (the ML pickups already supply the top). Use the Suhr S numbers on the Suhr S.
The volume map is an April document about a dead rig. scottg-the-one-tone.html measures its six rungs on SD-9 → AC+ → Badger, attributing behaviour to the SD-9, under the law “Everything is always on. Nothing switches” — the exact inverse of the current sheet. The shape transfers; the mechanism doesn't. Re-measure four rungs on the current chain. One session, and it retires a stale file.
Guitar. Suhr S, neck, tone rolled to ~8, volume 8. HIS
| Pedal | State | Settings |
|---|---|---|
| Jan Ray | ON | untouched — “Stays underneath exactly as State 2. Don't touch it.” HIS |
| Broadcast | ON | Level 1:00 · Gain Trim 9:00 · Low Cut 10:00 · LOW · 24V — modest low cut “because you want the Butter Machine seeing full-range signal” HIS |
| Venus | BYPASS | “Three gain stages is one too many.” HIS |
| Butter Machine | ON — the voice | Gain 10:30 · Tone 11:00 · Volume 1:00 · LOW-MID trim 3:00 · SPARKLE trim 11:00 HIS Front panel is Volume / Gain / one Tone. |
| AC+ | BYPASS | “If you need more than this, the problem isn't gain.” HIS |
| DCX | ALWAYS ON | H.F. 10:30 — your words are “treble back another notch”; H.F. is flat at noon so one notch below CORE is the smallest honest step DERIVED |
Between Suhr's “On The Edge” and “Saturated Lead”. At Power 10 the amp is in Mode 2 and Drive is the master volume, so the keep-Drive-within-2-of-Power rule doesn't apply here — different mode, not a violation.
Night route to the same result: Power 3–4, Drive one above Power — “Drive above Power = whisper sustain”.
Wet leg. TimeLine dTape ⅜ ≈ 375 ms, Repeats 4, Mod on, full wet. BigSky Hall 5–6 s, pre-delay 40 ms, Mod on, full wet. Mesa −4 dB vs dry. HIS “Long pre-delay so the wash blooms after the attack, not over it.”
The test, verbatim: “Hit one note high on the neck and let go. It should swell rather than decay. Fizz means too much gain and not enough volume.”
4 · The practice container
Unchanged from music_by_design_pack04. Do not redesign it.
| Block | Min | Content |
|---|---|---|
| OPEN | 3 | P1 Seed Minute — or P8 The Thumb |
| CORE | 12 | the lane's exercise, or the Constrained Vamp with a card drawn |
| STRETCH | 7 | whichever the week grid says. “Not the one you fancy.” |
| CLOSE | 3 | P7 The Listen. Always. No B option. This is the spine. |
P7 in full, because the pack is useless without it: “Cubase, wet + dry as two tracks. Loop still running. Record eight bars. No second take. Guitar down. Listen back once, eyes closed. Write one sentence in a text file dated today… One sentence about the playing.” That sentence is tomorrow's first constraint card.
Metronome, your five rules collected:
- Click on 2 and 4, never 1-2-3-4. “Clicking every beat lets you hide.”
- In session: four clean cycles earns +5 bpm; one fluff costs 5.
- Week to week: +4 bpm max, only if clean in 4 of 5 sessions. A failed week holds; two failed weeks drops 8.
- Sometimes slower is the harder direction — “drop to 60 rather than going faster.”
- Weekly anti-click test: three minutes no click, then start it. Drifted slower = you're playing it as an exercise; faster = as a song.
The looper is a rig control, not a prop. The TimeLine's 30-second mono looper is “almost certainly the feature you've never switched on.” Arming it costs you the delay for that block.
5 · The spine
The rig is already a practice instrument, and one paragraph of yours proves it:
“The loop returns through the Mesa while you play live through the Badger, so the rhythm part sits in a different place in the room from the lead. That separation matters more than it sounds. You can hear the chord change from across the room.”
That's why this is one pack and not two. The wet/dry split is not a tone luxury; it is the teaching device. The dry Badger tells you what your hand did. The wet Mesa tells you what the room heard. P7 records them as two tracks for exactly that reason. The volume knob being the channel switch is what makes tone and technique the same control — so a tone document that doesn't tell you what to play is half a document.
And the fixed variable that lets you tell a tone change from a hand change is the seed: E · G · E · D — four notes, one bar, hanging on the ♭7. Run it in all three tones. When the seed sounds different, you know whether it was the rig or you, because the notes did not move.
Arithmetic nobody had done. Eight bars at 80 bpm is 24 s — inside the looper. But your progression says drop to 60, and eight bars at 60 is 32 seconds. It will not fit the 30-second TimeLine looper, and that's the stage the gate depends on. Loop four bars at 60 and switch twice per pass.
6 · Errors found in your own files
The red team verified every control against manufacturer sources rather than trusting the drafts. These are real, and the first one is inside a measuring instrument.
renegade-practice-console-v2.html asks you to tick “My F♯→A bend (B-string fret 7→9) arrives in tune.” In Bm, 5→♭7 is a minor third — fret 7→10, not 9. Same error as b(9) in landau-henderson-exercises.html L1 (whose prose also says “up a whole step”) and its Dm transposition. Fix this one first — you're scoring yourself against a wrong target.guitar-shop-set.html — the top voice is one scale step high throughout, giving a 6th then five consecutive minor 7ths. Correct A-minor diatonic 6ths on that pair:
e|--5---7----8---10---12---13--| G|--5---7----9---10---12---14--|The machine-verified footer can only confirm notes are in A minor — it cannot catch a wrong interval, which is exactly what happened. Same off-by-one in
four_more_blues.html RIFF G2.tonepack01_four_guitars.html (09-07) gives:
- the Badger a PRESENCE control — it has none. Power / Drive / Gain / Bass / Middle / Treble + footswitchable MOSFET boost. It's a Badger 30 leftover. It appears in the Constants block, the prose and all twelve rows — and the same table drops Middle, the control you elsewhere call decisive.
- the Butter Machine separate Bass and Treble — it has one Tone knob plus two trimmers.
- the Venus “Gain” and “Tone” — it has Volume, Bias, Drive, Hi, Mid, Lo + Tight and Line Driver switches.
- the Badger's numbered 0–10 controls on a clock face.
patch_sheet.html's rendered dials label the Broadcast with a Tone knob and the DCX with Boost/Treb/Bass. Neither pedal has those — though that file's prose is clean, which is what this pack used.
Its musical intent is sound — the four-guitars-as-four-physics-problems argument is the best thing in it. Its knob names are not.
patch_sheet.html declares “knob positions are clock face”, then gives the Badger “Gain 9–10”. Through your own CLOCK map that's 2–3 on a 0–10 dial — below the floor your own deep dive sets (“lower than 4 and you won't get enough crunch at guitar vol 10”). The Badger's panel is numbered. Pick one convention and stamp it on the sheet.tonepack01 says 25W always (“a wet amp that compresses swallows the delay repeats”). Direct conflict.PRS pickups:
tonepack01 reasons from 85/15s; the newer, pickup-specific dossier documents PRS 59/09 uncovered. Use 59/09 — the Sept 7 brightness reasoning is built on the wrong pickup.7 · What I could not verify
Las Lunas GAP — one occurrence in ~410 files, a subordinate clause with no controls, no chain position, no values. The Vemuram panel is Level / Gain / Bass / Tone / Treble + an A/B toggle, but you have never written a setting for it, so there is none here. One line from you and it goes in.
Cali76 GAP — wishlist in June, owned by September, and exactly one documented setting in the entire corpus: “low ratio” — on the Eastman, doing fingerstyle chord melody, in a different programme. No documented chain position, so it gets no slot in the three tones. Which variant is unresolved: Compact Deluxe and FET both have IN/OUT/DRY/RATIO/ATTACK/RELEASE; the plain Compact has no Dry knob, so your June quote rules it out; the Stacked has no Ratio control at all, so “low ratio” rules that out too. (There is no “Cali76 64” — 64 mm is the Stacked's enclosure width.)
Suhr Thornicus — genuinely in the chain, but your one written line's panel labels were never confirmed against Suhr documentation. Dial by ear; don't trust the names. Wah / Vibe Machine — no settings anywhere. Strymon Deco — zero occurrences across both corpora; not on your board, omitted.
Suhr S treble bleed. Whether there's a treble-bleed cap in the volume pot cavity changes how BED and SING behave as the knob comes down — and every roll-back claim above assumes there isn't one. It is not on your dossier's five-item check list. Add it.