Guitar Effects Pedals
I love using effects to alter the sound of my guitars. In the past, I've tried many of the digital multi-effects units but the sounds that move me most always seemed to come from "old school" analog effects pedals. Keeping my signal path from guitar to effects to amp to microphone seems to give me the most organic guitar sound. When my guitar starts to sound like a living breathing organism, I know I'm heading in the right direction.
I'm a big fan of the boutique pedal builders because I like the idea of supporting these mad scientist musicians experimenting with different circuitry in their basements. It's obvious that they care about their products in a very personal way and I've been really happy with the pysical quality of these pedals. Many of these pedals have managed to capture the classic sounds I'm after while at the same time reducing background noise and increasing durability.
In the last year, I've also gotten into doing some of my own modifications to my pedals and I've even built two from scratch - a tonebender clone and an electra distortion variation I call an Electric Church pedal (see below). The pedals that live on my pedal board (shown above) are the ones I turn to every day. I also have a few others that I use for recording from time to time as well as a few that I'm still in the process of bonding with. It takes time to develop a relationship with a new pedal because every modification of your sound requires adjustments in your playing style to find the sweet spots.
Below, I've presented all the pedals in my signal chain moving in order from the guitar output to towards the amplifier input. I'm including samples of each effect so you can hear the effect each pedal has on the guitar's sound. I begin each clip with a quick sample with the effect turned off so you can hear how the pedal changes the sound. I'm playing my Fender Stratocaster guitar through my S2Amps Micro Plexi Amplifier on all of these clips.
Barber Tone Press
This is a great sounding pedal and it seems extremely well built. The standout feature that differentiates it from other compressor pedals is the blend control which allows you to mix the original uncompressed guitar signal in with the compressed signal.
Turned all the way to the left, you hear mostly the uncompressed source guitar. Turned all the way to the right, you hear a warm squashed guitar sound reminicent of the classic guitar compressors of the past. This provides a lot of flexibility in adjusting your sound. Set near the middle you can still have the agressive attack of your pick sound while at the same time increasing your sustain.
I often use this effect to play around with feedback as it's pretty easy to get some wailing and howling going with the compression turned all the way up.
Teese RMC3 Wah Pedal
The great thing about this pedal is that you can configure it to sound like almost any wah wah pedal that's ever been made. The downside is that there are so many options, it's kind of overwhelming which can make it hard to dial in just the sound you're looking for.
I haven't managed to configure it to reproduce my ultimate wah sound perfectly - which is somewhere in the neighborhood of "Still Raining, Still Dreaming" by Jimi Hendrix -but I'm having a lot of fun trying!
Catalinbread Ottava Magus Octave Pedal
Octavia pedals add an octave above the original guitar signal. The are very sensitive to volume and attack and when everything falls into place the notes kind of explode or 'bloom' as some people put it after the intial attack. Playing two notes at once can yeild a ring modulator sound where the two frequencies add together to produce odd sounding overtones. Not necessarily beautiful - but mutated!
I fell in love with the sound after hearing Jimi Hendrix's Who Knows from the Band of Gypsys album. Jimi broke a string and drops out of the mix for a minute or so and when he comes back he has the wah and octavia swtiched on and has the most incredible strangled twisted sounds coming out of his guitar.
I bought and sold several Tychobrahe Octavia inspired pedals before settling on this one. Some of the other pedals I tried were too metallic and harsh sounding. Others only sounded good if I had everything set just right (play at the twelfth fret, turn down guitar tone and volume controls, select the rhythm pickup) which just seemed too limiting. This tiny pedal just sounds good no matter the configuration.
Boss FT-2 Dynamic Filter (rehoused)
This pedal is an envelope follower (sometimes called a touch wah) which alters the sweep of the EQ based on the dynamics of the note.
In the usual mode setting, it sounds most trebly when the sound is loudest and then sweeps towards the bass as the note decays, yeilding a wah type of sound for each note that is played.
Jerry Garcia used this type of pedal quite often in songs like Estimated Prophet and Shakedown Street.
KR Musical Products Megavibe
The Univox Univibe sound is usually associated with Jimi Hendrix who began using it regularly in the second half of his career. It's a type of phase shifter that was originally invented to imitate the doppler shift sound of a leslie rotating speaker.
The Megavibe is one of the best clones of the original that I've heard. It has a jack on the side that you can use with a footpedal to control the speed and two settings, chorus (the classic watery sound) and vibrato (pitch shift).
The univibe effect is one of my favorite sounds. I like to place it before distortion pedals otherwise I can sound to wishy or fizzy. My fuzzface pedals however like to be connected directly to the guitar pickup with nothing in between and loose some bass response when this pedal intervenes. I found this cool schematic for simulating a guitar pickup in a signal chain to deal with this and added that mod to this pedal with a bypass switch on the side. It doesn't solve the problem completely but it does help and makes the sound more "chewy" when I have the fuzz engaged.
Fulltone '69 Pedal
This is the classic Fuzzface pedal with germanium transistors that you hear on the three Hendrix studio albums. I really like having the contour and bias controls 'outside the box'. It really helps in dialing in the best sound. Germanium transistors are very temperature sensitive (better fuzz when cold) and it's really helpful to be able to tweak them for the current operating conditions. The fuzz sound is very warm - especially compared to the fulltone '70 pedal which has silicon transistors. That's the only pedal I've found that sounds better through a cranked Marshall amp.
Fulltone '70 Pedal
This would have to be my Desert Island pedal. I've had this one for a long time and it has that spitty nasty fuzz sound that I keep coming back to.
The Mids control is a nice addition to the standard fuzzface circuit. Jimi Hendrix switched from germanium to silicon fuzzfaces toward the end of 1969 in all of his live shows and never went back. His use of it on the Band of Gypsys album exemplifies the sound of this pedal.
I love the way that this pedal, when pushed, it can sound like it's almost on the verge of complete chaos. It's also a great pedal for playing with feedback.
Electric Church Pedal
I built this pedal from scratch. It's a variation on the Electra distortion circuit which was a circuit added to some Electra guitars in the 1970's and provides a soft clipping sound. The schematic I used was designed by Fred Briggs which he calls Clock of Tone since it was based on the lovepedal COT50 (Church of Tone) circuit, yet another Electra distortion variation.
I added a master volume and a control for increasing the headroom of the circuit. It has a sweet warm sound and called it Electric Church because the sweet warm clipping sound of this pedal reminds me of Jimi... but then again most things do!
Lovepedal Kanji Eternity Overdrive
This cool looking pedal is yet another variation on the original Ibanez Lime Green Tube Screamer pedal. The Tube Screamer pedal is an overdrive pedal that got really popular after Stevie Ray Vaughan started using it in the mid-80s. The main characteristic of these pedals is the mid-range hump which really helps the guitar cut through in the mix - especially for soloing.
The thing I like most about this variation is that it manages to preserve the low end. I got really turned off to using my old one because it was all midrange and no highs or low which made the sound very two dimensional. This pedal, in contrast, sounds much fuller and is very sensitive to dynamics so the sound really jumps out at you when you dig in.
Cusak Tap-a-Whirl Tremolo
Tremolo pedals change the volume of the guitar signal in a rhythmic way. This pedal has a ton of different settings which allow you to set up different rhythmic patterns in addition to the usual sine wave tremolo sound that you hear on many classic tube amps.
I've only had this pedal for a short time but it's a lot of fun to play with. My Fender Deluxe Reverb is the only amp I have that has built in tremolo, so having this pedal allows me to get that sound on my other amps - plus a whole lot more.
Homebrew Psilocybe (rehoused)
This is phase shifter pedal is made by Homebrew Electronics and it can produce several different trippy sounds. I rehoused the pedal in a smaller box with the jacks on top so that I could fit it on my pedalboard.
It can sound similar to my Megavibe at some settings, though a little more phasey and a little less liquidy.
The two switches allow you to change the sound pretty dramatically with some settings yeilding almost a wah-wah effect.
Interestingly there is no knob to control the intensity of the effect so it's always pretty much full on. Slowing down the sweep can make it seem less obvious, though.
MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay
This pedal is very inexpensive and provides a nice warm analog delay sound which does a decent emulation of an old tape echo for the price, which can't be beat.
It has a switch at the upper left which activates some modulation of the delay which you can adjust to add some warble to the sound. There are trim pots inside that allow you to adjust the depth and speed of the modulation. I have mine set fairly deep but not too fast.
There are a lot of other trim pots inside which you are not supposed to adjust but I did anyway. I managed to get the delays to sound more crufty and distorted which was more the sound I was looking for.
I don't like when the delayed signal sounds too close to the original since they tend to step on each other and sound like crap. I play with this pedal turned on most of the time with a medium delay at a low volume which helps to fill up the sound and create a little bit of depth without becoming a distraction.
LoopMaster ABY Box (modded)
I use this swticher to send my guitar signal to different amplifiers. I modded it to include an effects loop and bypass switch. I use it to bypass all my effects at once and get a clear signal straight to the amp. This allows me to turn on several effects all at once as well as to avoid the slight high-end signal loss from the cable and connectors running between all my pedals. I have managed to minimize the high end signal loss in my effects chain by using George-L cables between my effects and trying to keep the connector cables as short as possible. I've also made sure that all of my pedals (except for the Kanji) are (3PDT) true bypass. The signal loss is very slight and not too noticeable but by using the loop bypass switch on this pedal, I can get the completely pristine guitar sound with one click.