Pedals are deadly, man. I’ve had a lot of the same pedals for like 20 years now, which I bought mostly out of necessity. I mostly rely on the amp itself, including whatever distortion options are built in. Until the last year, I don’t think I actually bought a pedal since…2005, maybe? I started thinking more about them when my brother-in-law gave me all his old ones; he’s more of a guitar collector, who used to spend money on nice gear he never actually used.
Here’s my current setup:
In order, it’s:
• Ernie Ball Volume Pedal
• Boss tuner > Boss GE-7 equalizer — got both of these in high school because uhhh • that’s what you do?
• Boss V-Wah — got this the first time I was hired to play guitar in a production of The Wiz; I don’t do a lot of funk, but it does come in handy for non-Wiz related things sometimes
• Some weird-ass and tiny-ass no-name Octave Pedal that I bought on Prime Day last year for $15 and actually turned out all right
• Boss DF-2 Super Feedbacker & Distortion — this is one of those hand-me-downs from my Brother-in-Law, but it’s good for the hi-gain power chords. It also has a fascinating feature where if you hold the pedal down, it can create a really good harmonic feedback swell based on whatever notes you’re hitting. It’s kinda silly, but occasionally fun for ambient shit, and esp. great for recording. (It was very helpful on this song from our last EP)
• Earthquaker Special Cranker OD pedal — This is my newest buy; it literally just came out in May, I believe. I used to rely exclusively on the in-amp distortion, but we’ve been using rental rehearsal spaces, and this gives me more control. Reaaaaally clean overdrive that preserves all the tone of my clean channel, which works well with how I play.
• VSN Clean Boost — another $20-on-Prime-Day-so-why-the-fuck-not buy that turned out all right! It’s a solid boost pedal, that lets you flex the gain as well as the treble/bass just a little bit. Good for soloing, or for adding that extra overdriven oomph to push the clean into its breakup zone. There are a lot of surprisingly decent mini-pedals like this on Amazon (including some Amazon-branded ones, and some Donner-branded ones).
• DigiTech DigiDelay — bought this one in high school because I was trying to do a solo project thing and it has a 4-second looping feature. Now, I tend to use it for its Chorus-Delay setting, which I set pretty lightly so it adds just a slight shimmer to the guitar (you can hear that effect on the studio version of “This Town,” which I played in the video)
• Walrus Audio Fathom Reverb — I bought this last summer. I used to think reverb pedals were dumb; I kept the reverb on my amp around 3 just to give it a little dimension, but otherwise, I never understood the purpose of sounding like you’re an echo chamber unless you were doing a deliberate delay thing (in which case, use a delay pedal). I came around after a lot of messing around in Logic in the first year of pandemic life / parenthood, as I realized that oh, the IR/space features are actually robust, and you can accomplish a lot of different things. I bought this pedal in particular because, in addition to the standard hall/room reverbs, it also has some other cool features. You can add a live reverb swell and cut it off with your foot, and there’s also an up-or-down octave setting, so you can add some extra highs or lows to whatever reverb you’re holding out.
I usually run the “Tuner” out of the Volume Pedal directly into Boss VE-8 Acoustic Singer pedal, which I bought right before the pandemic started. The idea was that it would kind-of help turn my guitar amp into a PA system, so I didn’t have to lug around any more equipment when I did my St. Patrick’s Day Irish music gigs. The vocal part of this pedal is fucking incredible, with built-in options for reverb, speech enhancement, mic sensitivity, and even some impressive auto-tune and auto-harmony options (it’s what I sang through in the video, because it also works as a computer audio interface).
Then I also have, from my Brother-In-Law, a Boss Tremolo, Boss Compression, DigiTech Heavy Metal Distortion, and DigiTech SynthWah pedal, none of which I do much with. I do have one of those nice Boss loop station pedals, which I swear I’m going to use some day.
The most important detail here though is that I’m now officially old enough that I bought not only a Yellow Tweed guitar amp, but that I bought a Yellow Tweed pedalboard to match it.
