Thom’s pedalboards at London’s Roundhouse on May 29, 2022. Photo by Matthew Baker.
For The Smile’s most summer tour of Europe, Thom had one pedalboard for vocals and a second pedalboard for guitar and bass. He used a similar arrangement (but with different pedals) for all of Radiohead’s tours since 2011. For Thom’s guitar and bass pedals for The Smile’s European tour, see this post.
Thom’s vocal board is conceptually similar to the one he used at The Smile’s London gigs in January. As before, he has multiple signal chains, with a volume pedal to control the input volume to those chains. This allows Thom to control pedals in the same way you’d use the “send” knobs on a mixer. However, it seems he has a more elaborate setup than previously. In live photos and video, we can often see that his vocal pedals are “active” even when no vocal effects are heard. This suggests that some kind of pedal switching unit is used, perhaps controlled by the FOH engineer. As such, the FV500 and FV30 pedals may control different effects on different songs.
In addition, Thom has added some more boutique effects. He swapped out one of his RE-20 delays for a Strymon DIG, and swapped out his Line 6 DL4 looper for a Soma Laboratory Cosmos looper.
- Boss FV500 volume pedal
- Controls input volume for Thom’s vocal effects.
- The Same
- Boss FV30 volume pedal
- Controls input volume for Thom’s vocal effects.
- Speech Bubbles
- The Opposite
- The Smoke
- Strymon DIG dual delay
- Some songs listed under the RE-20 may be the DIG instead.
- Boss FV30 volume pedal
- Technically not part of the vocal chain, this FV30 controls the volume of Thom’s OP-1 and its looper. It’s located on the vocal board so Thom can adjust the volume of the loops while singing and playing acoustic.
- Free In The Knowledge
- Soma Laboratory Cosmos looper
- Boss RE-20 Space Echo
- Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses
- Speech Bubbles
- The Opposite
- The Same
- The Smoke
- Thin Thing
- Earthquaker Devices Rainbow Machine
- Thin Thing
The songs listed for the RE-20 are partly based on The Smile’s Magazine performances in January. It’s possible that Thom has switched to the Strymon DIG for some songs. Regardless, he uses vocal delay quite a lot. In this video, Thom can be seen tapping the tempo on his RE-20 (most likely based on the height of Thom’s foot) at the start of The Smoke.
The Strymon DIG may look like an El Cap in some de-saturated photos, but the pink of the DIG is clearly visible in this photo.
It sounds like Thom’s Soma Cosmos is responsible for the semi-random drawn-out vocal loops on the new track Colours Fly. It seems Thom’s new gear is helping to inspire new tracks, since his new EQD Spatial Spiral and Fender EOB Strat both appeared on the new song Bodies Laughing earlier this tour.
Thom’s pedalboards at Amsterdam’s Paradiso on May 27, 2022 (dnkrhmr).