Badger 18 dry, Express 5:25 wet, everything in between doing one job each. Three voices: a ballad lead that blooms, a tighter articulate one, and the one with no attack left at all.
Three things that decide whether this works
All three run against instinct, which is why they're first. Get these wrong and no amount of patch-tweaking rescues it.
Fat in a mix lives at 250–500 Hz. Every time you reach for the bass control to get fat, you get flub instead. Push the low mids and leave the bass alone.
Rolling the top off before a drive removes the harmonic content that makes saturation sing. Let the pedals see brightness; trim at the DCX at the end. That's what a console channel is for, and it's why it lives last.
If the Mobius, TimeLine or BigSky pass any dry signal, you have a second dry path arriving fractionally late against the Badger. The comb filtering is exactly what makes wet/dry rigs sound thin instead of huge. Mix full wet on all three. The Badger is the only dry.
Signal path, and what's live per patch
Select a patch below and the chain redraws. Amber means engaged; dashed and dim means bypassed for that voice. Teal is fixed infrastructure — it doesn't switch.
Front chain → splitter
Dry leg
Wet leg
The fat liquid ballad lead. This is the direct answer to the brief. Suhr S, neck pickup — neck-plus-middle if you want more air over the top.
Not clean here. The dry amp's compression and bloom is doing work the pedals can't fake.
The pre-delay is the trick. It keeps the pick attack defined so the reverb blooms behind the note instead of smearing its front edge.
The Henderson side. Tighter, more articulate, attack intact. Same rig, opposite priorities — here you want to hear the pick.
The SD9's mid hump is the engine, not its gain. Low drive, high level — that's the whole move.
Small and tight. Mix still 100% wet — you control the amount at the wet amp's volume, not the pedal.
Maximum liquid. Holdsworth territory — the note arrives without you hearing it start. Every gain stage engaged but none of them working hard.
Saturation from cumulative stages, not one pedal straining. That's what gives sustain without fizz — and it's the one patch where you want the attack flattened.
Zero pre-delay on purpose. This is the only patch where the reverb should smear the attack rather than preserve it. The Drybel Vibe is a live alternative to the Mobius chorus here.
Two things worth more than any setting above
Play a sustained note with both amps up and flip the polarity on the wet leg if your splitter allows it. One position will sound noticeably fatter in the low mids. That single check does more for "fat" than every number on this page.
Settings here describe each pedal's role in the chain rather than its exact panel labels. Verify against the boxes before dialling — particularly the Venus and the Butter Machine.
The wah, Thornicus and Drybel Vibe sit ahead of the compressor and stay out of these three patches. They're colour, kicked in over the top of whichever voice is running — not part of the gain staging.