Quest for Tone
I started playing guitar around 2003, plucking out Green Day songs on a Takamine acoustic. My first electric was a Fender Stratocaster in sunburst I got a year later. Electric guitar was my weapon against reality, early on I began taking my meager skills to play in bands. My friend’s dad played guitar and loved when we cranked up our solid state combos in their house. He had a bunch of gear, an old Gibson Les Paul special, a tube Peavy amp, and a handful of overdrive and distrotion pedals. Trying out new gear was a relvelation to me, as swapping one guitar for another or combining pedals in some strange pattern could transform the sound of the nickel wound strings in drastically different ways.
In high school I played mostly in worship bands affiliated with a local Pentecostal outfit. This introduced me to a new type of guitar playing, one that relayed on well timed delay pedals and dreamy choruses to create a sound rather than the drive dependent riffs of my childhood. The older guys in these bands guided my contemporaries and I through a sea of Boss stompboxes and obscure boutique pedals that powered their sound. It was here I realized the power and wonderful tone found in simple tube amps, mostly of the Fender variety.
DIY Music
After walking away from the church scene, for various reasons unrelated to guitar, I started playing in DIY bands. After spending some time behind the drum kit, I started playing guitar in Drawback. I desperately wanted to combine my tonal history in this band using heavy distorted sounds along side crisp modulation to create a textured wall of sound. I achieved this by gain staging an Ol’ Yeller overdrive and a Jekyll & Hyde OD/Distortion combo pedal. The drives ran into a MXR Analog Chorus, a DD-7 delay, and a Hall of Fame reverb. This was amplified by a Music Man HD-1, and an Orange Dark 4 x 12.
Mottled Moth
Today, I write and record guitar for Mottled Moth. My goal here tone wise is similar to Drawback, but the focus is overall less on the guitar and more about song writing as a whole. I’m following Adam Granduciel and Kurt Vile’s footsteps here, while pushing it towards the more distorted sounds I love from Green Day and Descendents.
Since these songs are mostly limited to recordings rather than live performances, I treat it as a moment of exploration. Every choice is made in context of the song. So I’ll mix and match pedals from my arsenal, try signal chains to see what works. I run pedals into a UAD Arrow interface, which has a handful of preamps that sound great. Amplitube is my amp sim of choice and I rarely venture away from the Twin Reverb.
For post processing, I keep it simple. Loading a bad sound up with a bunch of effects is not going to make it sound any better, so if it’s not working at this stage then it needs to be completely revisited. I stick to tasteful EQ and Compression, alongside a plug-in to provide some saturation. My current favorite is the Gorilla Drive from Safari Pedals.
Cosmic Strain
In addition to Mottled Moth, I play in Cosmic Strain, a shoegaze combo started by my friend Matt Cole. The tone of this band is ideally heavy, with different layers of distortion available to create different stages of impact throughout songs. The dreamy hallmarks of shoegaze are ever present, with chorus and reverb rarely toggled off. To achieve this sound, I run my Fender Mustang or Stratocaster through a pedalboard and into a Fender Deville 4x10.
My pedal board starts with a volume pedal, currently an Ernie Ball VP JR with a built-in tuner. From there I run my drive pedals through the fx loop. I stage the drives so that they can layer with each other to create a myriad of different tones. First there’s a light overdrive (Soul Food or Old Yeller), a mid range distrotion (SL Drive), and a thick fuzz with a lot of bottom end (Big Muff Pi.) At the end of my drives, I add a compressor with a quick attack and cranked sustain. Typically people will put this before other drives, but I choose to have it at the end so that my distortion is squashed together with my guitar, so it comes out sounding somewhat like a synth for lead lines. The volume pedal can control the drives completely in this setup, so pulling back on the volume pedal keeps any hum from buzzing through a live set. It also allows the delays to keep going, which offer some lush texture for the rest of the band to rock over.
After the volume comes modulation, an MXR chorus and then two delay pedals. The first delay is typically a mid effect level and lower feedback with a tap tempo, I use the DD-7 for this. The second delay is a Japanese DD-5, with long timing, high feedback and low effect level. This allows it to act somewhat like a freeze pedal, it can be turned on when holding a tone to extend it for as long as the pedal is on. I combine this with volume swells to create a cloud of harmonized tones.
Final Thoughts
The number one pedal I want to replace right now is the Ernie Ball Volume Pedal. It’s insanely unreliable, I’ve gone through at least 3 since having it on my board. I’m likely to opt for the Lehle Mono volume pedal if it needs to be replaced again. I would recommend anyone looking at using the EB VP to consider rolling their guitar’s volume knob instead. To improve my consistency between home recordings and live performances, I’m thinking of adding an amp sim pedal to the end of my chain. The Strymon Iridium and newer contender UA Dream seem like they’d be great fits.
Pedals are an incredibly fun part of crafting a guitar’s tone. For anyone looking into creating a pedalboard, I’d recommend starting a with a tuner and a good drive. Study the boards of the greats, such as Dinosaur Jr and Swervedriver. Learn the rules and follow them, unless it sounds better to break them :^)