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so my chain is this:

korg dw8000 (think strings, primarily)

into: ehx ring thing -> ehx flanger hoax -> zoom choir -> XXX -> montreal assembly jaywalking delay (with dwarfcraft great destroyer in the loop) -> ehx holiest grail -> source audio wah (used for volume swells)

what should XXX be? i just sold off an autowah to clear the space, but i am not opposed to another.

you've got the modulation covered, i think. i'd say some kind of filter, either an envelope filter or a standalone filter with expression pedal control and/or programmed sequences/sweeps on the chipset. there are a million EFs out there, so the question becomes what kind of controls you want and how many parameters you wast to control. for a programmed filter, the gold standard is the Subdecay Prometheus DLX; a less expensive alternative is the Copilot Tap Gyroscope. for sheer beauty of sound i like the Iron Ether Xerograph Deluxe, which has a warm, squishy quality that's the most synth-like of any of the relatively simple/reasonably priced filter pedals out there.

the other things i'd suggest would be a fuzz or an EQ. with a keyboard i'd look at a fuzz like the Ab-Synth which has a synth-y quality on any instrument; i prefer parametric EQ to graphic EQ, but graphic EQs are much more common, to the extent that i can't really recommend one over another. i have 2 Boss GEs, which like many Boss products are good, simple utility boxes. if you can settle for seven bands of graphic EQ they're entirely adequate.