Here's a photo of Thom's pedalboards from The Smile's gig in Taormina on July 20, 2022 (photo by infernojim).
The guitar board has changed a fair bit in the past two years. But the vocal board has remained largely identical. The setup in the photo above is from The Smile's May-July 2022 tour. For the band's Nov-Dec 2022 tour, the vocal board was the same.
If you do a web search for pictures of the Cosmos and the H9, you'll find that they look quite different from each other. So you shouldn't have any trouble deciphering which is which in the above photo.
That said, we'll include a list of the vocal pedals for the curious. For info on the guitar board, check out the entry for "May-July 2022" on Thom's pedalboards page.
Vocal Board, Top Row, From Left-to-Right:
- Earthquaker Devices Rainbow Machine
- Boss RE-20 delay
- Eventide H9
Vocal Board, Bottom Row, From Left-to-Right:
- Soma Laboratory Cosmos looper
- Boss FV30 volume (volume for OP1 chain)
- Strymon DIG delay
- Boss FV30 (volume for Cosmos chain)
- Boss FV500L (expression for DIG)
It must be noted that the physical layout of these pedals has no relationship to their signal order (how they're connected to each other). They are placed where they are on the board purely for convenience of use.
In fact, there are three separate signals passing through Thom's "vocal" board. Two of those signals are effect sends from the FOH mixer. A microphone cannot be connected directly to a pedalboard without a serious reduction in sound quality. So instead, Thom's vocal mic is connected to the FOH mixer (likely via a high quality microphone preamp, ). This also gives flexibility: the mic's signal can be passed through various studio effects (compressors and equalizers) before hitting the pedals. Placing different pedals on different effect sends gives further flexibility.
The third signal passing through the vocal board is the output of Thom's Teenage Engineering OP1. Although the OP1 and most of its pedals are kept on a small pedalboard with his synth gear, the FV30 is placed on Thom's "vocal" board so he can adjust the volume of the synth loops while singing on Free In The Knowledge.
Thom's vocal setup for the current (summer 2024) tour is largely identical, except that he's replaced the Eventide H9 with an Eventide Pitchfactor (we pointed this out in a recent post about their March 2024 rehearsal setup). This suggests that Thom has been using the H9 for pitch shifting sounds, rather than any of the other sounds the pedal is capable of.
Good luck with the assignment!