Eric's Gear Page

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Special Order

Upon my discovery of Zebranalogic, I took to heart that they would make custom gear, and were very interested in vintage synthesizers, so I commissioned them to make me a nine volt CV source for my pedalboard that could function as both a straight source (like my normal CV source) or as an LFO.

Communications and oversight

One of the troubles of special ordering gear from Peru is that there might be a little bit of a language barrier: I did want something small and battery powered, I got a brick with an internal power supply attached to what looks like the plug from an old vacuum cleaner.

It does function: when set to 9v, it emits a steady voltage, which can be attenuated by the Voltage knob. When set to LFO, the control signal is pretty rough around the edges... the smoother waveforms (sine, triangle) lope around their corners, and sort of hiccup or jump through their cycles, while the sharper ones (square, sawtooth) ones make an audible pops when they cycle. I know that a square wave LFO makes some sharp jumps in voltages, but the unmusical popping that comes from my filter when attempting to use this control signal is new to me: no filter on any synth has ever had their square wave LFO sound this bad.

And then there's the build quality. The pots and switches feature a corrosion that looks fifty years old, and the box is a thin, folded piece of metal with a sort of thick, goopy-looking coating. The box is sort of falling open at its seams, and the coating has begun to chip and flake off. All in all, a pretty crappy box, but unlike my other Zebranalogic purchase, at least it functioned when it arrived, however poorly.

Shit Effect Pedal Geeks Say

2012-02-18T20:36:00.000-08:00

Aside

Especially worthwhile for anyone who's actually had an involved conversation about velcro. I've heard myself say a few of these things, I've heard others said...

Electro-Harmonix Bass Balls (modded)

2012-02-07T00:03:00.000-08:00

Electro-Harmonix

Filter

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Double Wah

Once you know the sound of the EH Bass Balls, you will recognize it anywhere: it is an envelope follower pedal, with two filters attached to the envelope, and a very vocal sound... sort of a "yeawoa" on trigger and release. These have been on offer since the funky 70s, so there's not a lot of room to move-- the Bassballs sounds like the Bassballs, and not much else...

But it is a really cool sound. It may be an obvious effect, but it is one of the most compelling envelope followers I've ever used. Playing off of its responses sort of modifies ones playing to alternate sharp, barking notes with long, vowely open strings or legato runs. It will get tiring if overused, but as an effect... what an effect!

It comes with a switch for distortion... and it's sort of a scratchy, nasty distortion... but it does really bring out the ruder side of the filters. For my money, I'd rather run my own distortions either before (for a more quacky filter) or after (for more harmonic highlighting of the filter sweep) the filter and have a little more control over the sound, but on its own, it gets the job done. It certainly has its own personality.

Trim Pots and the EH Enclosures

There are two trim pots inside the Bassballs, each controlling the center frequency of one of the filters... soldering full sized pots to the board in order to replace trim pots is one of the easiest modifications any pedal can have, and doubly so if it's an Electro-Harmonix box-- though their oversized enclosures are hellish for pedalboard real estate, they give us plenty of room to wire on the board, and lots of surface area to add knobs and switches.

Truth be told, the filters sound best in their stock position, but it is fun to experiment: leaving one to fire away at the midrange and reducing the second to a woofy rumble can really bring the thunder out in the low end, and cranking the filters up into more trebly territory can make the effect very subtle... set right, it could be a nice soloing effect, with a little sweetening of the high mids.

This is a pedal anyone can afford and a modification anyone can do... This is a pedal I'd recommend to just about anyone.

Boss HR-2 Harmonist

2012-01-24T01:27:00.000-08:00

Boss

Pitch

Builder:

Type:

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Intelligent Harmony

Once upon a time, only the richest and most label-backed of players could afford the kind of extravagant rack gear that allowed an enharmonic harmony part to be played along with their original single-note lead lines. For years, guitarists had doubled breaks with a harmony (say, up a third) by simply double tracking in the studio, but when it came to live work... the part just had to be left unharmonized if they couldn't afford one of these magical rack units. These rack harmonizers summoned the Power Of Computers to create a duplicate of your tone in any key of your choosing, coining the phrase "intelligent" pitch shifting: it understands which key you're in, unlike, say, my DigiTech Whammy, which will harmonize in 3rds, but always the same interval.

for the common man...

As time went on, digital effects became more common, and eventually the intelligent pitch shifter found its way into a stompbox... a pedal I found used for maybe $100. Which I suppose is a decent price for this pedal-- I'd hate to pay more for it. Never having played on the expensive rack harmonizers (who am I kidding: we all know I'm talking about Eventide, right?), I can't vouch for their quality, but I'm sure the old adage "you get what you pay for" comes into play, because the HR-2 doesn't sound very good.

The pitch-shifted copies of the input signal sound very twee and mechanical, and there is some very noticeable latency in the harmonized notes (it is always obvious that your computerized harmony players are coming in after you, struggling to keep up). Personally, I've never had any real trouble with the tracking of this unit-- it seems to have ace pitch recognition-- but it just never sounds good.

On the Board

So how the hell is this thing on the board? Well, there was a conversation at practice one night that included "You know what that part needs? Harmony." And I thought... I actually have a pedal for that. Since the HR-2 has been in my studio for years, and I could manage (with a crowbar and some industrial grease) to squeeze it onto the board, I applied the solution to the problem: I brought in the harmonizer.

ubik.songlist--

used in:

eltit gnos, totem wolf, the
alternate version of disrepair

And that doesn't make it a better pedal-- it still sounds junky, but (truth be told), the HR-2 gets the job done... in precisely the way that a band with no guitars, a bass-bass, and a lead-bass would need: it can turn one melody line into two or three melody lines. The arguable point is that I never used it in the studio, and but the HR-2 can pull through at shows, when the band is raging, it's the machine that makes the harmonies happen... and better they happen than they don't.

...but I'm double-tracking those harmonies on the recordings.

Guyatone BL2 Bottom Limiter

2012-01-19T18:46:00.000-08:00

Guyatone

Dynamics

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Locking the Bass

One of my favorite things about the Guyatone mini pedals is their dead simple efficiency-- while I do spend a great deal of time being a control freak, the truth is, once I have something set up the way I want it, I leave it set. The BL2 is set up to lock and flatten a bass with the heavy limiting squash you hear on a lot of rock records... not an effect I use all the time, but a useful effect for a particular sound.

The Bottom Limiter is the only Guyatone bass effect I own (though I own several mini's, most of them were built for guitar), and I picked it up because, instead of setting up a compressor for the squashed bass sound, I can plug in the BL2, and it's always there... set threshold to taste (how far do you want it squashed?), balance the levels, and that's that. There is an option for fast or regular attack , depending on how much you like to hear the "snap!" of the bass note before the limiting clamps it down, but beyond that, there's nothing to adjust.

TC Electronic Polytune

2012-01-05T23:31:00.000-08:00

TC Electronic

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Polyphonic Tuners

It wasn't that long ago that polyphonic pitch detectors seemed like science fiction; everyone knew that your harmonizers, sub-octave generators, and (more recently) pitch shifters just plain wouldn't track on chords. Now there are polyphonic tuners for under $100... that's kind of amazing.

The T.C. Electronics Polytune is as intuitive and hassle-free a tuner as I've ever used. It still serves as a mute switch at the end of my signal chain, it's a small pedal and doesn't take up too much space on the board, the switching is true bypass, and it has a bright, large, readable display. As tuners go, this one's top tier even without polyphonic pitch detection; I hit a D, the display reads “D” and lets me know if I'm sharp or flat. Simple.

If a guitar player strums all their open strings, an display of six green bars represents each of their strings-- if one is sharp, the green bar will drift up as a red bar, or a red bar will appear below the green bar if that string is flat. A bass player will appear as the center four bars, and the pedal will detect if the player has a 5- or 6-string bass; my ubik.tenor shows up as the rightmost four bars because the Polytune sees me as the highest four strings of a 6-string bass.

The pedal displays the polyphonic tuning display when you hit open strings and switches to a a standard chromatic when it hears a single note. It does this automatically-- you don't have to switch it from poly mode to mono mode; you just tune up. The display itself is large, bright, and legible; the documentation claims a light-sensing intelligence, but whatever that entails, it applies invisibly. I've never set up in the daylight, so I can't vouch for that particular condition, but it's worked just fine for me from the lit room to the darkest stage.

ubik.songlist--

used in:

pretty much all of them

Replaces:
Korg Pitch Black

The polyphonic aspect of the pedal doesn't support alternate or dropped tunings, so, while it is fine on my ubik.tenor (though it's odd, the Polytune sees it as a standard-tuned six-string bass... just missing two strings), it did send my Korg Pitch Black off to support my D-tuned, sometimes drop-C, bass in a Kyuss/Melvins stoner rock band. Not that the Polytune couldn't do the job-- it functions as a chromatic tuner exactly the same way the Pitch Black does-- but I can actually use the polyphony in ubik... and the polyphonic thing is pretty damn cool.

Maybe I should say “the pedal doesn't support alternate or dropped tunings... yet.” It's worth noting that there's a mini-USB port at the top of the pedal, allowing TC Electronic to provide program updates and software upgrades. I assume there probably will be extra functions or tuning modes in the future, or there would be no justification for the port, but aside from polyphonic alternate tuning support, I can't think of anything this pedal's lacking.

TC Electronic

2012-01-05T18:12:00.000-08:00

I was surprised when Wikipedia informed me that TC Electronic's first product was actually a stompbox-- I always knew them for their rack gear. Back in the 80s, they were one of those companies putting delay/reverb boxes into studio racks... usually pretty keen stuff.

They started putting out mid-priced, multi-feature stompboxes and extravagant guitar multi-effects a few years back, but they attracted my attention when TC started putting out small footprint, individual pedals. They're doing both analog and digital pedals, and seem to be forward-thinking and intelligent about both. So far, so good, as far as I can see.

Homemade Blue Bypass

2011-12-20T19:38:00.000-08:00

Homemade

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True Bypass

I have to admit, I'm not the super crazy true-bypass snob many pedal obsessives are (the True Bypass debate lives here), but there are times where you might need an external send/return style box to switch several pedals out of your chain... or certain pedals where the actual bypass is unbearable. So, you need a true bypass box.

Mine currently resides on my gigging pedalboard: it's a little blue bypass box originally chosen to switch out my two bluest and lousiest-bypassed pedals, the tone-sucking MXR Blue Box and the AD/DA noisy Digitech Whammy pedal (which also generates just enough latency to be annoying). As the whole system evolved, and the Blue Box was replaced by the true bypass MI Audio Pollyanna, the loop became more about control-- it can switch out a full chain of Whammy/Octave/Wah in one stomp, and it also switches the Boss FV-500L in and out of the audio path; the FV-500L is a volume pedal when the loop is active, and it can function as an expression pedal for the Moog Filter when in bypass.

Let's spend some money!

ubik.songlist--

used in:

pretty much all of them

True bypass loopers are all the rage now, and you can buy them from over a dozen boutique pedal builders for a hundred bucks or more. Honestly, this is silly: a true bypass box (by its very nature, it must have no circuit, no buffer, no adding or subtracting) is just a little bit of wire, four jacks, a stomp switch, and a box to house it (and an LED if you want to get fancy). I built mine for about twelve dollars. These are the easiest things in the world to build, there are wiring diagrams galore online, and anyone can do it... hell, I can't think of a better beginner's project for stompbox design.

Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail

2011-12-09T13:02:00.000-08:00

Electro-Harmonix

Digital Delay

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The Fallacy of Springs

Here's another effect where I was looking for a specific sound and tested a bunch of pedals to get there: spring reverb. I still have a real spring reverb tank at home, a stereo model that was never meant to be used for instruments, but it's a nice sounding (if noisy) box, and if you cheat, running the instrument into the Left input and take the signal from the Right output, you can get 100% wet reverb signal. The no-dry-signal spring reverb was my test case for these pedals: if you're trying to recreate spring reverb, can you recreate the all-spring sound?

The Boss reverb pedal was the worst, for the wet reverb signal... utterly trashy sound. The DigiTech wasn't much better. They both had an awful "ping!" one any pick attack that, while I can understand why the people designing these algorithms think that "ping!" is the initial sound of spring reverb (or close enough), it's a lot more in line with hideous caricature than actual character. The winner in my testing around is the Holy Grail, which remains on my pedalboard to this day.

Not Quite Real

While the 100% wet spring reverb sound is not something I do live very often, that the Holy Grail can do it at all was enough of a selling point for me to chip in-- logically, I'd rather blend the reverb that sounds good in with my dry tone than have to rationalize using only a slight amount of reverb so you won't have to focus on how lousy the effect is. I usually leave the reverb set at about 50%, and usually on the spring setting; from there it functions just fine as a spring reverb. It's not a perfect recreation, but it was the best alternative I had on tap, and I like it just fine.

The Hall setting is also a fine-sounding reverb, but I'm of the opinion that the hall/plate/room reverbs in most forms (on rack units, or guitar multieffects) are some of the most abused effects in players' rigs, almost always sounding like refugees from the 80's or evoking the sounds of amateur bedroom players. Similarly, I have yet to find a use for the "flerb" setting, a modulated reverb.

And then some

ubik.songlist--

used in:

silence, external retraction, the planet's kerploding!

Since picking up the Holy Grail, E-H has released the Holier Grail and the Holiest Grail, each with more options than the last, as well as taking up more space. Similarly, Line6 has put out a ToneCore reverb, with a huge number of controllable parameters, and I have always liked the ToneCore pedals I have played.

While all of this is tempting (especially the ToneCore), my Holy Grail is almost perfect-- it has one knob and one switch, and gives me what I want. Unless there is a perfect emulation of a spring reverb on the market, I really don't need to upgrade. Plus, mine is true bypass (ordered from Analogman.com), which is a plus for a pedal towards the end of my signal chain that doesn't get used all that often.

Morley ABY

2011-12-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

Morley

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Passive Splitter

This is a pretty no-frills box: two outs and one in, one switch to switch between output A and output B, another switch to toggle between a single output or both at once. Much like my homemade bypass box and channel switcher, this will work without a battery because it is essentially just a couple jacks and switches... it only needs power to light up the LEDs. Because there's no circuit to speak of, just a few jacks wired together, it also works backwards: to ins merged to a single output.

As a toggle between two channels, it works well enough, but as it is an unbuffered unit, you'll usually run into trouble blending two signals with the "Y" function of this... signals will mush, the volumes will be off, nothing will seem quite right. Some jobs are best left to mixers. This box still has its uses, but there are plenty of limitations built into something this simple.

Danelectro Grilled Cheese Distortion

2011-12-03T22:11:00.000-08:00

Danelectro

Distortion

www.emeraldcityguitars.com

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Fixed Filter

The Dano Grilled Cheese is a bit of a goof-- not something that would sell for a lot of money, I'm guessing, but a fun throwaway effect that might get used every now and then. The gain is fixed at a relatively heavy drive; the only controls are for output level, and the frequency of a bandpass filter... set the filter, and you have a squawky, fixed-wah sound (I think most people mention Dire Straits' Money For Nothing when they talk about that particular effect).

With such an odd set of tones coming from this box, it's not really conventionally useful. At best, it's sort of an oddball effect, a fun pedal to use in overdubs for four bars, and then have it sail away... but it's a really noticeable effect. And "strange" outstrips "pedestrian" on most days, for me.

Axis Research Fuzz Faze+

2011-11-22T00:46:00.000-08:00

Axis Research

Distortion

Sold

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A Matter of Taste

What I first knew as "a fuzz pedal" was the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi... and I decided immediately that I like fuzz. Though there are still heated arguments among gear whores and pedalheads as to what is or isn't technically fuzz (or distortion, or overdrive), the Big Muff has always been my ideal-- that's just me as a player. I like the creamy, hyper-saturated, "melty" sound that the Muff-style circuits give me, but I was always on the lookout for the perfect fuzz.

The first thing I learned on my quest is that my dense, sustained, super-rich sound isn't necessarily the norm: there's another, much more popular archetype for what people think of when they think "fuzz pedal," and that's the Fuzz Face. Fuzz Face circuits are kind of brittle and scratchy to my ear, but they've served lead guitarists like Hendrix and Townsend well through the years, and are one of the defining sounds of the 1970s.

This type of fuzz never, ever meshed with my instrument, projects, or playing style, and always sounded blatty and unpleasant when I played them. Kind of like the Tubescreamer, they work for plenty of people; they don't work for me.

Believing the hype

When I discovered the website for the Axis Research Fuzz Faze+, Ivan Pavlov could have started a research project on me: I was floored by the description This was a boutique, handmade pedal by a company that made one (and only one) fuzz pedal... the "faze" in the title tickles the psychedelic tendencies in my brain... the write up claims it's "like having six legendary germanium fuzztones"... the secret mode appeals to my noisy, experimental, circuit-bender side... oh, and did I mention that the pedal is hallucinogenically sparkly? When the site claims the pedal provides "the warmth, distortion and magic unattainable with today's digital technology," I was stoked... but I wasn't aware of the Big Muff/Fuzz Face divide.

When I plugged in for the first time, I thought the pedal was broken: where was that warmth I'd been promised? This was a scratchy, harsh sound, and I couldn't get any of the sounds I'd previously used when I plugged into a fuzz.

The six-position mode selector had given me hope-- if I didn't like the sound when I first plugged in, I had six fuzzes in one pedal... one of those six has to be what I'm looking for, right? No such luck: though the Axis website has made this more clear since I ordered one in 1999, the six-position switch is basically an EQ, and though it shifts the sound from bassier to brighter, nothing changes the fact that it will always sound like one (and only one) fuzz pedal.

I actually contacted Axis Research to seek help, and they were very helpful (and guided me to modify the pedal, to hopefully correct my issues with the pedal)... but they really couldn't answer the bigger issue: this is not my style of fuzz. Once again, I can't stress enough that Fuzz Face style pedals work well for many, many players... many players that aren't me.

There is a "Satisfaction Guaranteed" disclaimer on this pedal, and Axis Research and I came to the conclusion that this unit was never going to satisfy me, no matter how I modded it. They are a fine and decent lot, as good as their word, and they accepted my return with no problems.

Emerald City Guitars

2011-11-15T21:41:00.000-08:00

Stores

Emerald City Guitars has been my favorite local music store for the entirety of my Seattle residency. It's warmer, more inviting, and more fun to browse than any of the big chain stores, and (bonus!) it's totally independent.

A little independent spirit goes a long way with me-- this store has accommodated me more than once, beating other stores' prices, a no-questions-asked return when I didn't particularly care for the Box of Rock, and the owner gave me a lift one sunday when I was a little short on time... you know, the personal touch.

It's fair to say there's not much here for bassists (or traditional bassists, anyway), as it's a medium sized store. Guitars and amps abound, and, since they buy used equipment, there's usually a good selection of vintage, boutique, and out-of-production gear on offer.

Their pedal selection is pretty impressive: they were the first store in town to carry ZVex pedals (I bought my Machine here, over a decade ago), they had the Guyatone minis when I assumed I'd have to order the SV-2 online (and sold it to me for less than any online store I've seen,) and they're now a Catalinbread dealer. Taking in used gear, they can feature some strange and esoteric stompboxes, too, so it's generally a pretty fun place to browse.

It's fairly telling that, when I set my sights on a specific effects pedal, I can find it at this little store in Pioneer Square. They don't have everything, sure, but their tastes coincide with mine often enough that they have what I'm looking for.

Emerald City Guitars

83 S. Washington St.

Seattle, WA 98104

Akai P1 Intelliphase

2011-11-08T19:22:00.000-08:00

Akai

Phaser

Sold

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Underrated

My first standalone phaser, the Akai Intelliphase was a real gem... I wish I had kept it. I gave it to a friend after I'd picked up the Moog phaser, which, wonderful though it is, never quite manages the kind of light touch the Akai had. I believe the Akai was a 4-stage phaser, where the Moog goes no lighter than 6-stage (and as deep as 12-stage), which accounts for its subtlety, but even then, it was silkier than its MXR and Electro-Harmonix counterparts.

The Akai had better control than several name phasers, too, offering speed, depth, and feedback, which allowed for that slow, deep phasing I prefer. A number of classic phasers offer only a rate control, and the big names (Boss, DigiTech) have similar controls but lousy sound (both have ceased production on their mediocre analog phasers completely, and now offer terrible digital phasers). The Akai could do everything from subtle vibe sounds to lush, rolling phase, and did all of it very, very well.

The unique feature of this particular phaser is that it has some dynamic control. A switch can disable the threshold control, or it can be set to phase the quiet playing and bypass when playing hard, or vice versa. It's a neat feature, one I've never seen on any other pedal (most dynamic effects in phasers affect speed or depth), but I never really found a use for it.

Jacques Trinity

2011-10-27T20:10:00.000-07:00

Jacques

Filter
Modulation

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Three Function Wah

Picking up the Morley Wah/Volume, I had gotten my hopes up for having a wah on my pedalboard, and then when the Morley wah turned out to be a dud (it is still an exceptional volume pedal), I still had my heart set on having a wah in my live rig-- I'm no traditionalist, but I love my filters, and it would be nice to have the lead guitarist trick of the wah handy if I ever wanted it. I'd sold my Crybaby a while back because of its scratchy pots (I hate maintaining those things) and an awful, tone-sucking bypass that was just awful in my live chain. Plus, with the Morley on the pedalboard, what kind of wah was I actually going to have room for?

Well, the Trinity answered the size question right off-- it's no bigger than a small MXR pedal, four knobs and no rocker pedal, smaller than a standard Boss stompbox. The wah is controlled instead by a small pressure-sensitive dome that connects to the expression input jack, which is a fairly unique approach to the wah. I find it very comfortable; it wasn't difficult to get used to, and there's no potentiometer in the circuit, so no crackles.

What really inspired me to pick up the Trinity was the interactivity of the controls-- this is an auto-wah, an envelope follower, and a normal wah, all at the same time. Aside from being able to set the "start" frequency of the wah with the Manual knob, the Trinity can have an LFO driven, almost chorusy, wobble dialed in on the auto-wah, and then the wobble will open up any given amount depending on the pick attack and depth of the envelope follower, while the whole system (LFO+Envelope) can be swept with the expression pedal... and that's one extreme example of doing everything at once.

ubik.songlist--

used in:

the spangler, disrepair

Replaces:
Morley Wah/Volume

As a simple wah, used like any other, the Trinity sounds excellent, and performs well. The additional features push this one over the edge, though-- I really love having the envelope follower active and still being able to sweep up through the range. The depth of functions make it an excellent sound mangler as well, and it's usually an ingredient in the sounds where no one in the audience can figure out how I'm making that weird, weird sound.

Boss FV-500L

2011-10-18T17:05:00.000-07:00

Boss

Control
Volume

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Volume and Expression

To quote Joel: "Jesus, you could land airplanes on that thing." The Boss FV-500L is roughly twice the size of the pedal it's replacing (the DOD FX-17), but I was running low on options, and I needed a single pedal to be both my volume pedal and the control for my Moog.

The first Boss pedal ever to end up on my board, this one seems pretty solid. The sweep is adjustable by a side knob, the torque is easily adjusted by a switch on the bottom (I found it a litte stiff at the start... easily remedied), and it solves a number of my volume/control problems.

ubik.songlist--

used in:

the planet's kerploding, no such thing as an open ended equation, bloody indecision, totem wolf

replaces:
DOD FX-17, Bespeco Volume, CV Source, Ernie Ball VP Jr,
Morley Wah/Vol

I made it a point to get the stereo model so, if necessary, I could run my audio signal through the left channel and a voltage source through the right. As it turned out, it wasn't necessary: the pedal's "Expression" output serves the Moog very well, and the side knob that controls the range of the volume sweep also allows tweaking of the expression output.

The length of the throw and smoothness of the pedal are top notch, and the FV-500L has given me more focused and accurate control over my swells than I've ever had before. I'm slightly worried about scracthy pots... we'll se how that goes (especially since the thing is a brick-- I don't know how I'd get in there with contact cleaner), but it is nice to have a passive volume pedal again. I have too much to power as it is.

Dava Control Picks

2011-10-15T22:56:00.000-07:00

Dava

Accessory

Builder:

Type:

Picking a Winner

I realize that picks aren't sexy gear like expensive pedals, but I've been a Dava devotee for a long time, and, like all the gear I talk about, I have a lot of real world use backing up my opinion.

Because I began my musical life as a more normal bass player, picks were a bit of a mystery to me-- when it became a necessity, I just ended up with whatever came around. I didn't have a preference for what kind of variety of plectrums were in the world... hell, I didn't even know how to hold one (to this day, I still have terrible pick technique), so the question of which picks to use was fairly moot when I began.

I was working at a music store in the mid 90s when I discovered the molded, green Dava Control picks, and I was totally sold-- these were the original, dark green, molded picks. They're still Dava's most basic pick, a molded nylon pick with a gradiated middle; the “control” of Dava Control was the shaved center of the pick. By most measures, they're heavy picks, but if you back up your grip, the thinner middle of the plectrum will be heavy, medium, or light depending on where you grip it. I found these picks immediately comfortable, and they were favorites of mine for as long as I had access.

Flash forward about a decade, and let independent manufacturers sell their wares directly online-- I honestly hadn't been able to find Dava picks in stores (and, like I said, they were favorites of mine... so I was looking for them). I did find them online, however, and I was impressed that Dava had grown. My standard green Dava Control picks were still on offer, and I ordered them immediately, along with a sampler pack of everything else Dava had been up to since I'd lost touch.

I don't want to disrespect the original picks, but the new Dava picks trumped them immediately. A choice of plectrum is absolutely a question of personal preference, but the new, two-material picks are the only ones I currently use. I want to say that the Grip Tip picks are the best picks in the world, because they're a rubber grip on a delrin or nylon point-- I hate the way delrin (the material of the Dunlop Tortex picks) feels in my hand, but I like the way delrin hits the strings. Dava's rubber grip is comfortable, and the delrin tip is excellent in its control and attack... the best of both worlds.

When I'm at home, the Grip Tips are the picks I use when I'm writing songs... but Dava's Rock Control picks win for live shows: those things are comfortable, easy to hold, they do the “I'm holding something comfortable but there's delrin attack on the strings” thing that the Grip Tip picks do, but the Rock Control picks are undroppable. For me, that's the real trick-- these picks are bigger and slightly less nuanced than Grip Tip picks, but when I'm playing a show, the Rock Control picks never fall out of my sweating hand on a hot stage. They're comfortable, easy to use, fit the “one gauge for any user” that usurps any thin/medium/thick argument, and I've never dropped one on stage. I can't beat those criteria.

Dava's got a lot of variety, incuding metal picks (a nickle-tipped pick with a molded grip... so it's not an inflexible shank of metal in your hand), jazz style picks, and even the original Dava Controls that I first fell in love with. As far as I know, they're the only interesting pick-maker that isn't forcing players to deal with heavier-than-heavy, stiffer-than-stiff picks... there are people out there making dense picks out of rich materials, but they're always too rigid and heavy for me. Dava really runs the gauntlet, offering everything from celluloid to nickel picks, but all with comfortable, easy-to-hold grips.

I find these to be the most playable picks I've ever used, and since I've rediscovered them online, I haven't used anything else.

http://www.davapick.com/

Ibanez CS5 Chorus (modded)

2011-10-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

Ibanez

Chorus

Builder:

Type:

Status:

A Use for Chorus Pedals

I bought this to hack and bend it; I have no great love for chorus pedals in general, and my overall impression of the Ibanez SoundTank (aka "potato bug") line of pedals, after a few years working at an Ibanez dealer in the mid nineties, is that they're sort of crappy. One of the benefits of a cheap all-plastic construction is that it's easy to drill; another is that these are not well-loved pedals, and not hard to find on the cheap.

My happily modded CS-5 goes deep into vibrato territory, now, both in being able to cut the dry signal and change the depth of the pitch shifting. Stomp boxes that allow for pitch shifting vibrato are actually pretty hard to come by, so making these changes actually make the pedal fairly useful for me: it can now go from a standard chorus shimmer to a subtle vibrato sound and on into "help, I'm trapped in a washing machine!"

The lack of pedal real-estate on which I could stick extra knobs and switches has left the battery compartment forfeit, which is not a real problem; though I'm quite fond of this pedal in its adapted state, it's still a wimpy plastic box with a dodgy JFET switch, and not something I'd trust too much in a live situation (the Ibanez potato bugs' switches fail slightly less than the old DOD pedals, but not by much).

DOD FX-17 Wah/Volume

2011-09-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

DOD

Volume
Control
Filter

Sold

Builder:

Type:

Status:

CV and Volume in one tiny package

Long out of print but hardly a collector's item, DOD's FX-17 is a fantastic little pedal you can pick up for $40-$60 used, if you look around. It works without potentiometers (always a huge plus in volume and wah pedals) and has a comparatively small footprint, nearly 1/3rd the size of the Morley it replaces on my board. The wah seems decent enough, but I have no real use for it, as the Jacques Trinity covers every wah function I can think of.

The FX-17 is a nice, solid volume pedal, with the added perk of having a 5v CV output-- so technically, it's a wah/volume/CV pedal. This pedal replaced my Bespeco and Voltage Source as well as my Morley, and lived in the loop with my Whammy. When switched out of my audio signal, I use it as a CV controller to sweep the Moog filter. Switched into the audio path, it is my volume pedal.

Formerly On Pedalboard
Replaced By:

Boss FV-500L

Though combined uses of this unit got me down from three pedalboards to two, and let me replace two of the larger expression pedals in my rig to with this little guy, I found I had a bit of a problem with the sweep. Most likely a symptom of the pedal's unique circuit, there is a distinct jump from the heel-down silence to the start of sound... it jumps in as opposed to smoothly sweeping in. This affects both the volume and the CV (it does the same thing with my filter sweeps), and it was a bummer to have to trade this in for a larger pedal... but after kidding myself for a while, I just couldn't live with the sweep.

Interview: Empress Effects

2011-09-18T01:10:00.000-07:00

Interview

Empress

Interview

Builder:

Type:

Steve Bragg of Empress Effects

I conducted an interview with Steve Bragg, founder of Empress Effects. As a back-and-forth via email (a first for the gear page!), we delved into starting an effects company in a boutique-rich market, complexity versus simplicity, and the balance between features and usability.

Eric: Empress pedals are fairly complex and, while not unreasonable, somewhat pricey. With the effect pedal market in the middle 2000s nearly flooded with independent/boutique builders, launching a company with a higher end/higher price identity seemed risky. What inspired you to the complex and multi-featured side of the pedal world?

Steve: It's true, there's a ton of boutique builders out there, which to me makes selling higher end products less risky. There's tons of competition when it comes to dirt pedals, and it's really hard to differentiate. But the number of companies doing features like tap tempo and presets is a small subset of the overall market. I was programming microcontrollers in university, and the idea of putting them into pedals was really exciting.

Eric: The Empress site says you've been working with electronics since high school. Were you doing audio work then, and did you pursue Electrical Engineering specifically to make pedals?

Steve: In high school, I got together with some friends and we tried making a robot. We never got past the power supply, it was a pretty huge failure. I blame it on the crappy books I was learning from. If you want to learn electronics, and someone gives you one of the hundreds of books called Circuit Analysis, say thanks and then secretly burn it. Books called Circuit Analysis really suck for teaching you electronics. They make you feel like an idiot cause you can't solve linear equations involving ten variables. If you really want to learn electronics, get a book called Art of Electronics, it is so sweet! (the lab manual for AoE is awesome too!)

Sorry, getting off track. In high school we also made some guitar effects from schematics we found on geofx.com. I tried making a Tycho Brahe Octavia pedal. Never got it working. I really sucked at electronics in high school!

I really forget why and when I decided to go into electrical engineering. I don't think I had any idea what I was going to do. After two years, I was disillusioned with university. Most lectures were a waste of time, I found it much more productive to learn from the textbook. Profs should really read about the Gutenberg Method: http://entropysite.oxy.edu/morrison.html.

Anyways, I was thinking of dropping of school, but instead I moved to Kingston to study at Queen's with my friends. I skipped as much class as I possibly could, and that gave me tons of free time to learn interesting stuff and work on some neat projects. I started this project of making a big switching unit, kind of like the Switchblade. I worked on it for years, but I never finished it. I also made what I called a lucid dreaming inducer, which ended up giving me some pretty weird dreams.

Eric: After finishing with school, you could realize all the kinds of projects you wanted to do before all the training. How was Empress born, and how did you first get pedals out into the world and into players' hands?

Steve: I think Empress was really born when a friend asked me to build him a trem pedal. I think he was just looking for a simple boss clone, but I had other plans. A year later I had the Empress Tremolo ready, and he had bought a Boss Tremolo. So I put out a press release to Harmony Central and the response was great.

Eric: From that tremolo onward, Empress gear has always a creative set of features, with a lot more variety in function than any of its competitors (the Superdelay's reverse/octave setting comes to mind). How do you find the balance between what is possible in a pedal, what the user will use, and making all the variety controllable?

Steve: The balance question is a good one. With the phaser, it started out with 7 knobs and a ton of toggles. It gave you a bit more control, but the complexity wasn't worth it. So we slowly whittled down the number of knobs and toggles into something that we found gave the user the best balance of control to simplicity.

Eric:We just saw the launch of Empress' new compressor pedal, so my last question has to be: what's coming up next from Empress?

Steve: We've got a bunch of projects that we're working on. Most of them are sort of long term stuff. But before the end of the year we should be putting out a series of mini-pedals. They are the subcircuits from our multidrive pedal. So there will be a fuzz pedal, and distortion pedal, and an overdrive. It will be interesting for us, because we've never sold anything below $200 before. I'm curious to see how they do.

Eric: Excellent-- I'm looking forward to seeing the new gear launch. Thank you for talking with me. Any final thoughts before we call it a day?

Steve: Final thoughts? Well, in the last week or so we've begun looking for commercial space to move into. When I first started the business, I ran it out of my parents' house, then I moved out and ran it out of my house. Now we've got 5 guys, and it's getting pretty cramped. So I guess Empress will be hitting a milestone pretty soon.

...and there we have it. Empress Effects can be found at http://www.empresseffects.com/, and are widely regarded by pedal aficionados to be great, high-quality, high-end pedals by just about anyone publishing opinions music gear. As an Empress user myself, I highly recommend checking them out.

Rotary Draw Latches

2011-09-13T01:12:00.000-07:00

Aside

SouthCo

Accessory

Builder:

Type:

"Is he really...

...going to spend time writing up latches? Latches?"

Yes. Yes I am-- simply because I've built my own pedalboards (plural: take note, I've done this a few times) and part of the gear page is some advice and simple how-to. It's not all reviews of pedals... it's also power, cables, connectors, pedalboards, and by that logic, latches.

The simple draw latch is the easiest kind of latch to find, the cheapest to buy, and therefore the latches that landed, by default on my boards. The re-occurring problem with them is that they "settle" after install, and, the clasp can come loose when the gear is sitting around. While carrying the gear, between the lid and the board will keep the latch tight, but if you're not paying attention when you pick up your gear, you might have a nasty surprise.

Worse, my last set were the boring, stock-standard, off-the-shelf Ace Hardware draw latches... and they have padlock eyelets in the mechanism. I can't stress enough how much trouble these are: loading and unloading the board with all the other heavy cabinets and gear sitting in the back of a moving vehicle, those eyelets are the reason I always travel with pliers. More than once, I've had to un-bend the bumped and jostled eyelets to that I could open my board.

I found a set of rotary draw latches from SouthCo, and their parts sheets, specs, and measurements are up at the SouthCo website... pretty handy when you can't hold the pieces in you hand and gauging how they'll fit your gear. SouthCo's a wholesaler, though, so I found their pieces for sale to the general public at Amazon, which made the whole process easier. The only reason I didn't start with these is that they weren't readily available at local hardware stores... but they are readily available by these links. I highly recommend them.

The benefit of the rotary draw latches, and the reason you find this kind of latch on all the music cases (Anvil and SKB, just to name a few) is that they pull tight and lock in-- now, when I close the pedalboard, it stays closed. These latches don't have weird, latch-freezing protuberances, either, so the whole thing operates much more smoothly.

Zoom 506 Bass Multi-Effects

2011-09-01T18:29:00.000-07:00

Zoom

Multi

Builder:

Type:

Status:

"Bad" sound

Let's define our terms here: many of the Tone Snobs of the world are "snobs" not because they adhere to any great principle of what sounds good or bad, but more to the ideal that only one method of deriving a tone is valid, and they turn their nose up at all those who don't comply. This is the mentality that has hundreds of Baby Boomer guitarists buying custom tube amps, pushing them with their preferred flavor of boutique Rangemaster or Tubescreamer clones, and frantically searching eBay for the vintage wah that will make them sound like Stevie Ray Vaughn.

Personally, I (less-than-humbly) assert that I am fairly picky about tone, maybe even snobbish, but I am entirely obsessed with the sound that comes through the speakers, and I care very little about what I have to do to achieve my sonic desires. Where I often need dynamic, realistic drive, I also might require cheap, digital sound... which, believe it or not, fluctuates in and out of fashion as something to emulate. I still own my mid-90's digital multi-effects box, and in much the same way someone my crave Red Baron frozen pizza, I sometimes crave terrible digital effects. When this is the sound I need (and it does happen), I am happy to have a real low-quality digital effect processor handy.

No fuzz should sound like that...

In a multi-effects box, the whole is usually greater than the sum of its parts-- while the included phaser, compressor, reverb, and echoes might not live up to the quality of their standalone counterparts, the patch that combines them into something named "Spacey Chimes" will tend to come off sounding fairly neat. And so it is with the inexpensive (even when it was new, over 10 years ago) Zoom 506: it is truly an effect, and it sounds like a time warp to the days of lower resolution... You can build a patch of chorus, reverb, and slight overdrive and it will sound like you're playing through the kind of spatial effects Tron might have used when not standing up to the MCP.

Not until Line6 released the Pod had a digital unit offered up any kind of "realistic" distortion, and it is still debatable as to how well the Pods (now a few generations advanced from the original) capture the realism of overdriven amps or classic fuzz pedals. Well, make no mistake: the 506 is pre-Pod, and the inability for its distortion to sound like anything but pure digital buzz is its strongest feature. The higher the gain on the 506, the more synthetic and unreal it sounds, topping out with the Fuzz preset with the gain all the way up (if I could get this sound in a smaller stompbox, it would be on my pedalboard).

Fact of the matter is, for all the bit reducers and lo-fi effects that have found popularity, nothing offers the kind of low fidelity sound of actual cheap gear from the pre-modeling era. While this thing isn't ever going to be my Go-To distortion pedal, it's a hell of a special effect, no less unique and attention grabbing than the Machine or the Blue Box.

Robot Factory Lo-Tech No-Fi Bot

2011-08-23T19:50:00.000-07:00

Robot Factory

Distortion

Builder:

Type:

Status:

Oscillo-Fuzz

While not technically rare, per se, there's a subdivision of the fuzz pedal known as an "oscillating fuzz." This kind of fuzz always has a Gate control of some kind: there is an always-running, feedbacky tone inside these fuzzes that generally needs to be shut off in some way... or not. This usually leaves the user with the options of a hard-gated fuzz pedal, or a pedal that generates a tone when the user isn't playing. ZVex makes the most well-known version of this effect, and my Noise Swash is also a member of this family. For me, I've always wanted a version of this on my board... just because there's nothing quite like the oscillator/gated fuzz sound.

Squelch

The Lo-Tech No-Fi Bot (LTNFB for short) wins a lot of points for an amazing amount of controllability over how the oscillation will perform: at its most simple, the tone is an octave down, and as a gated fuzz, it's just part of the thick body of a dense tone. When you leave it at its simplest, it has a blatty, 8-bit, square wave fuzz tone, a grindy, on/off sort of character that would justify the name of this box, even without the oscillation.

A good indicator of what this pedal is capable of (and of what it wont't do) is that among its plentiful controls, a gain knob isn't among them: this thing is always fuzzed out, hard clipping, inelegant fuzz. That's it at its most basic: we haven't even delved into the oscillator or modulation yet.

The Oscillator

The oscillator comes with a Frequency control, first and foremost, so the tone within the fuzz can be pitched up to anywhere from its low octave, to unity, to an unholy shriek. The base frequency of the oscillation can be modified by an Envelope generator, which can give it sweeping effect, and a square wave LFO (with knobs for Speed and Depth) that can do everything from pulse subtly to make siren noises. These can be used in tandem: the LTNFB can make arpeggiator, sample and hold sounds when using these control functions together.

Flipping the switch from Gate to Osc takes the beast out of the box: it is still controlled by the LFO and the Envelope, it will still play with your instrument as you play through it, but when the incoming signal fades, the oscillator will continue to blaze away. With the LFO, that can make the oscillator a pulsing (or shrieking) siren, and if one were to manually sweep the Frequency knob, the pitch can make listeners... for example, bandmates at practice... clap their hands over their ears (and with my bandmates, already used to me being myself and making the noises I make, that says a lot). This thing can get violent.

The LTNFB can be an instrument unto itself: if there is no signal going into the machine, in Osc mode, it will act as a tone generator. That's half the reason for having one.

and it goes further

Not to make this a Home Shopping Network "but wait, there's more!" issue, but there are two more stunningly clever options built into this pedal. The first is a switch that grounds out half of the LFO cycle: that means the modulated pitch goes from a bleeping siren to a choppy, pulsing, twitchy signal. This works both when the machine is gated and when it's in Oscillator mode: it'll be part of played notes, and it will provide chopped and modulated signal when left on its own.