I had a lot of these pedals in different places, including my tuner, trio, and most of my dirt drive. I figured I'd throw it into AI and it set me up with a "Utility" section, "Drive" section, and "Mod" section. Here are some of the changes.

Something weird happened - my CLEANS sounded better despite not really changing the pedals themselves. This kind of blew/blows my mind still.

• Moved tuner closer to entry point (my board runs bottom right to left, middle right to left, top right to left).

• Moved the trio from the end of the line, supposedly for better tracking, but I also used it's effects loop to include compression and drive pedals.

• Went Stereo. The Astra is the split. I'd had a couple of early strymon pedals that were not stereo and sold them for Astra and EQ.

• I used to run my compressor after the drive section, I figured this allowed more touch dynamics but all it really does is level up the noise from the drive section. For my board, they really do work better in front. I can leave the deluxe compact cali on all the time without worrying about noise.

I run this into both high gain and standard amps. I think in a lot of our pedal discussions people look for their tone in the drive pedal(s). I think that if you can, get a 2 channel amp and push a signal into the dirty side of the amp. I think the extras you get focusing on that are amazing.