[joeguam]

Midwinter, I understand your approach and the reason you've chose that route for your rig, I just believe there are much better/simpler/effective ways to go about what you're needing to do. I'm not sure how many gigs you've played in your life, nor how many you plan to play with your new rig, but my advice is not to cut corners the first time around....it will become much more expensive down the road.

I think there are quite of bit of us who will say that if you plan to play 100+ gigs a year, simplifying your rig setup/teardown is crucial. Sooner or later you'll be asking yourself how you can minimize the pieces of gear you need to haul in/out of a gig. Frankly, a tuner pedal for each instrument just to mute is not the way to go.

However, if you're only going to play 10 gigs in the year, and you're looking for something to just get you through them, your idea will work. Although, I think you mentioned you plan to gig quite a bit right?

There aren't many musicians who gig regularly with 4 instruments. I gig with 3 every time. The pros on tour that gig with multiple instruments have stage hands to swamp them out between songs. Even with stagehands, people like John Mayer still use custom looper/switch pedals to easily select the predetermined effects for each instrument. Heck, I think John Mayer has a separate switch built into his custom looper for each song!

So you can use your setup to achieve your desired rig, it will work. However, here are some thoughts you might want to consider changing. My hunch is that you will end up changing them after few gigs anyway, having to sell off a few pedals and buy others (I'm guilty as charged as well).

- You're duplicating your tuner 3 additional times which means you'll need 3 add'l power supply spots on your pedal board
- You have 4 unnecessary DI pedal functions when the cable runs are short to your nearby mixer. You could get much better EQ functionality without combination DI functions (like the Empress ParaEQ)
- Handling effects through your mackie aux sends will still require you to stomp on/off the effects appropriate to each instrument or song (a custom looper pedal would do this automatically for multiple pedals in one stomp)
- You have to carry a mixer & mixer stand in/out of gigs

I'm my experience, simplifying your stomps between songs is just as important as simplifying your rig setup/teardown. I'm sure you'll find yourself muting your current instrument but forgetting to unmute your next instrument (I'm guilty of this again), and you might miss a drop-in lead note or chord with your band.

Anyways, hope this info helps, either way, half the fun of gigging is buying/selling/trying different gear. Post a picture of your rig when you have it done so we can check it out. Laters.