Loopy Demos

Nebula - blue fx devices

volume

tone

mids

gain

The Nebula overdrive by blue fx devices is a unique tool for creating juicy, saturated guitar tones easily.

The clipping in the Nebula is my favorite kind: op-amp clipping. In addition to that, the controls on it are very useful for shaping your tone for recording and live situations.

We have a tone knob, which seems to be a classic high-pass filter knob. All the way up, it lets all the high frequencies go through. Turned down, you can shave off highs.

The mids control is the selling point here for me. Turn it down to create space for vocals and other midrange instruments. Turn it up to poke out of the mix and be heard. It also seems to be very interactive with the gain knob. With more mids, it sounds like the gain is coming up as well.

Finally, I want you to take a look at that pedal and admire the beautiful aesthetics. It's minimalistic and tasteful, yet charming with the Orange-style icon labels. I love that the pedal is flipping the bird at me.

While the knobs on the side may appear weird at first, this makes total sense on a pedalboard. There is ample space to kick on that foot switch without risking to hit the knobs and change settings. Also, that foot switch feels super heavy duty, unlike anything I've tried before.

If you're looking for a juicy, crunchy low to mid gain overdrive, I highly recommend you to check out the Nebula.

Recording Notes

Rhythm Guitar

• K'mo Memphis Std., classic T-style pickups (both pickups)
• Nebula
• Strymon Iridium (Chime)

Lead Guitar

• Gretsch Electromatic Jet G5230, blacktop filtertron bridge pickup
• Nebula
• Boss DM-2w Delay on a quarter note setting to add space
• Strymon Iridium (Chime)
• Panned slightly to the right

Bass

• JMJ Mustang, tone 100%, Fender flats, played with pick
• Keeley Compressor Mini with medium compression
• Smallsound/Bigsound Mini Overdrive on medium gain setting and a little underbiased
• Iridium with bass cabs
• Some EQ tweaks for mixing: boosting around 80 Hz, cutting around 200 Hz and slight boost at 2 kHz

Ambient Stuff

I used the Walrus Audio Lore to add some more interesting ambience to the mix. I recorded with two different delay/reverb programs hard panned left and right respectively.

I used the lead guitar loop with the Nebula in front of the Lore, but turned the mix to fully wet.

In the DAW, I automated the volume of these two tracks, so that the volume (i.e. ambience) increases towards the end of the loop.

I thought it just added a nice stereo touch with the slowly swelling reverb.

Drums

• Indie rock drummer Gavin on the Brooklyn kit
• A fair amount of compression to the whole kit mix
• Kick and snare treated separately by reamping it through the SS/BS Mini Overdrive on a gated, medium gain setting.

The whole mix was "mastered" with slight use of compression, exciter and limiter on the master track.

Links

• Get detailed specs on blue fx devices' website

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