Is anyone attending the 2017 NAMM thing next week in Anaheim? I’ll be there demoing my pedals and checking out the latest guitars and gizmos. If you’re there, stop by and say hi! I’ll be at booth #6820 in Hall A (that is, the pro audio room where guitarists fear to tread) with M1, my distributor (and sister company of my partners, Vintage King). I’ll be playing and talking about my stuff, and there will also be headphone stations where you can try them out for yourself.
The headphone rigs are newfangled Valvulators from Fryette Amplification. These are cool 1-watt tube amps for direct recording, with amp-style controls plus speaker emulations. There will also be a set of my pedals at Fryette’s booth, #4844 in guitar-intensive Hall C.
After writing about other people’s gear for so many years, it’s still difficult for me to wrap my head around the notion that I’m attending the show as a manufacturer, not a “journalist.” But I just completed a key manufacturer’s rite of passage: I order a 24″ x 80″ retractable sign hyping my boxes, just so I can stand in its shadow. It feels so … grown-up.
I’m not officially announcing our 2017 releases ’cause we’re not 100% what they’ll be yet. But I will be bringing a box full of experiments and prototypes, which should be amusing, assuming my sketchy demo builds survive the road trip. I’m also bringing a couple of new DIY guitars that I haven’t shared here yet.
I’m not really up to speed yet on what new gear to expect, so I haven’t yet put together a must-see list. Is there anything you are particularly eager to check out? Anything I should know about? Thanks in advance for your tips!
Here’s an overview video that my pals at Premier Guitar shot at the NAMM show last January.
As always, I’m grateful to the friends who helped make this happen, especially Miko Mader from M1, my distributor, and Tony Lott, who oversaw production at the Cusack Music facility in Michigan. In addition to displaying superhuman patience during the long development period, Miko and Tony made many suggestions that improved my original designs. Thanks also to my pal Tom Menrath, who introduced me to Miko and Tony. (Tom used to work at Vintage King, but now he’s with pro audio champs Cutting Edge Audio and Video.)
I’ve posted demo videos for each pedal here before. But I’m reposting them after the jump in case you need a memory refresher. (I certainly do!) And I couldn’t resist including a couple of brag-worthy quotes from some of my early adopters. Thank you all!
Sorry for even more solipsistic stompbox stuff, but I couldn’t resist. David Torn, one of the players I admire most on earth, just posted an unsolicited demo of my Filth Fuzz on Soundcloud. I love his post-apocalyptic soundscape.
For the uninitiated, David is one of those rare players who deploys staggering technical skill in a bold, unique style utterly unpolluted by cheesy guitar heroics. He’s recorded with Bowie, Tori Amos, John Legend, Madonna, and k.d. lang and created many brilliant solo albums. Last year’s Only Sky is particularly magnificent. It makes a great introduction to this singular guitarist/composer.
Lookit! My pals and colleagues at Premier Guitar just posted a video demo of my pedals shot at NAMM last month.
It was a trip being on the business end of that gear-review microphone! Shooting this clip was surprisingly nerve-racking. You have to make the gear sound good … try not to play too terribly … speak coherently … and not come off as a dick. It’s a tall order, at least for me.
Thanks to the gang at Voodoo Lab for letting me shoot this in their booth. (Which they did because they’re just plain cool.) Thanks also to Shabat Guitars for letting me borrow this pretty guitar, and to Fryette for letting me plug it into one of their spectacular Aether combo amps. Man, am I a freeloader, or what?
If you’d like to learn more about Gore Pedals, please visit my Gore Pedals page for studio-quality recordings with multiple guitars, more pedal settings, and lots of geeky tech info.
How to tell holiday season is officially over: It’s time for NAMM 2016! And this will be the first time I attend not as a music magazine writer, but as a guy trying to sell guitar pedals. Or as Ray Liotta put it in Goodfellas: “Just another schnook.”
Not like I can afford a proper booth or anything. I’ll just be wandering around with a sack of goods like some frickin’ crack dealer. I’ll have a pedalboard with new four new releases (plus a couple of surprises) on display at the Vintage King booth in Hall A. But sadly, it won’t be hooked up to anything — there just isn’t enough room for live pedal demos. However, my awesome friends at Voodoo Lab will have my new Filth Fuzz in the demo pedalboard at their booth. (No business connection there — they’re just doing me a favor ’cause they’re cool.) So you can stop by and try it out while sampling Voodoo Lab’s latest and greatest.
If you’re attending NAMM and would like to check out my stuff — or just meet and say hi — drop me a note. I’ll be at the show Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. (Sorry, I can’t help obtain passes. I had to scuffle for my own like … a regular schnook.)
But I’m skipping the show on Friday. Friday night I’ve got a gig at Taix restaurant in Los Angeles, performing my solo looping material and sharing the bill with my longtime pals, Double Naught Spy Car. I haven’t played L.A. in several years, and this is the first time playing solo. I’ll be stoked if folks stop by.
And during the day, I’m teaching a master class at LACM, where my dear pal Adam Levy oversees the guitar department. The focus is modes — or rather, my irreverent crackpot theories about the most musically profitable ways to regard and use modes. I’ve been kicking around these notions for many years, and I’ll probably adopt them into a tonefiend post soon.
I hope to see some old friends and make some new ones. So don’t be a stranger!
My Filth Fuzz pedal is finally in production and will be shipping within a few weeks. It’s one of three new pedals I’ll be showing at this week’s NAMM show in Anaheim, California. I just finished the demo video, and I’m stoked about how it’s sounding.
I’ll also be debuting three other new pedals: Gross Distortion, Cult Germanium Overdrive, and Boring Boost & Buff. Filth, Gross, Cult, and are finalized and in production, and should be available from my partner, Vintage King, sometime in February. (Vintage King is also currently the sole vendor of my Duh Remedial Fuzz, released last year.) We’re still working out a minor bug in Boring, but it should arrive soon after.
Now, it’s not like I can afford a proper booth or anything, so when I say “I’ll be showing these at NAMM,” I mean I’ll be walking around with a bag of merchandise. I’ll have a pedalboard with all my products on display at the Vintage King booth in Hall A, but sadly, it won’t be set up for demoing — there just isn’t enough space. However, my super-cool friends at Voodoo Labs will have a Filth Fuzz on their demo pedalboard, so you can take it for a spin in their booth while checking out the new stuff from that ever-innovative company. (I have no business connection to Voodoo Labs — they’re just helping me out because they’re nice.)
If you’re going to the show and would like to meet up, contact me and we’ll work something out. 🙂
Here’s what I wrote about Filth on its product page. (If you’re allergic to marketing copy, skip ahead, where I share some interesting backstory on how we arrived at the interface design.)
Man, I love those mad scientist fuzzes with too many knobs! I’ve collected them for decades and used them on a zillion sessions. It got to the point were people were hiring me specifically to make those sort of farting, fried-circuit tones.
But the downside of those complex fuzzes is that they’re a little too wide-ranging, with many settings you’ll probably never use. It’s easy to spend 20 minutes dicking around with the dials without nailing the perfect tone. I’ve always wished for a wild, highly variable fuzz that was a bit more “curated,” with easier access to the tones you’re likeliest to use.
That’s what inspired the Filth Fuzz. It’s only got four controls, but it’s a cornucopia of cool, quirky, and usable fuzz flavors.
The drive and level controls do what you’d expect. But unlike many fuzz drive controls, this one sounds great throughout its range. Extreme settings are molten-lava thick. Lower settings are like…slightly cooled lava, maybe?
But the real action is in the two sliders. They’re tone controls of a sort, but not in the usual way. Most fuzz tone controls are tone-sucking passive circuits situated downstream from the fuzz effect. But here, the sliders alter the voltages at the transistors, radically changing not only the tone, but also the timbre, response, attack, sustain, and compression. In other words, the sliders radically alter the fuzz’s core character, as opposed to simply EQing a single core tone.
TO USE: Set desired gain and output levels. Move the sliders till it sounds awesome.
CAUTIONS: Filth sounds best before any buffered effects. It usually works best at or near the front of your effect chain.
Filth Fuzz was created in San Francisco and is built in Michigan by skilled craftspeople earning a fair wage.
Filth’s sound hasn’t changed since I concocted the circuit on breadboard a few years ago. but the interface has gone through many iterations. It kept changing even after I sent schematics and prototypes to Tony Lott at Cusack Music (my manufacturer). Here’s a pic of three production prototypes:
Three incarnations of Filth Fuzz (in order of appearance).
To dial in tones on Filth, you adjust two highly interactive pots (let’s call them x and y), which tweak the voltages going in and out of the transistors, providing many tone variations. The original version used two standard pots for these x/y controls. It worked okay, but the ergonomics weren’t ideal. I’ve found that the fastest way to refine sounds is to move both pots at once over a sustained note or chord, and it was just a bit awkward having to take both hands off the guitar to turn the controls simultaneously.
So I decided to employ a joystick, which lets you adjust x and y with one hand (and it looks pretty bitchin’). The ergonomics were great, and I thought we’d finalized the format.
But then I showed a joystick prototype at the L.A. Amp Show in October, and for the first time I had a chance to sit back and watch other guitarists interact with the device. Players seemed to have a blast with it, but I kept noticing how often a heavy stompbox foot would land perilously close to the joystick’s none-too-sturdy shaft.
Meanwhile, we discovered that the the only compatible joystick option cost about $25 per unit — enough to jack the retail cost way up. Also, it was tricky to replicate exact setting via the joystick, which would suck if, say, you were trying to get identical tones night after night on tour. (I knew that when I first opted for the joystick, but I’d figured the fun factor would more than compensate.)
Then Miko Mader, a clever guitarist who works for my distributor, M1, came up with the perfect solution: Why not use two sliders instead of pots? Tony at Cusack sourced the perfect part, and we prototyped a third version.
Bingo!The ergonomics were great (check out the demo video to see how quickly you can change sounds with one hand). You can mark exact settings with tape if you need to, easily repeating specific sounds. The two sliders are a fraction of the cost of a single joystick, so we can sell the pedal for far less. (We’re still nailing down the retail price as I write.) There’s no fragile shaft to break. And while I miss the goofy fun of the joystick, the sliders are still pretty darn entertaining. (So thanks, Miko, for your brilliant idea.)
I’m really stoked about this pedal. I hope you enjoy it as well.
UPDATE: I just posted detailed pedal descriptions at gorepedals.com
Anyone going to the big LA Amp Show this weekend? I’ve never been, though I’ve heard it’s a blast. (Literally: Unlike at NAMM, exhibitors set up in separate hotel suites, reportedly without noise restrictions.) I always like geeking out at musical instrument trade shows, but this one is special for me: It’s my pedal premiere, the public debut of my next four stompboxes. They’re not shipping quite yet (except Duh, available here), though they’ll be out in time for a crunchy-as-hell Kwanzaa.
The pedals pictured may look like my usual sketchy handmade stuff, but they’re actually slick factory-made versions, painstakingly styled to look like sketchy handmade stuff. (Michigan’s Cusack Effects is my manufacturer.) They sound like my handmade prototypes, but are less likely to break every 15 minutes.
I’ll be showing them off in the Vintage King suite. (They’re my production partners, and for now, my sole retailer, though the pedals will eventually make their way to hip guitar shops.) Magnatone, Jackson Ampworks, and Moog pedals will also share the VK suite, so my pedals will be in lofty company.
I’ve already written about Filth, Cult, and Cult Germanium Channel, though I haven’t yet finished their demo videos. (If you’ve spent any time on this site or my YouTube channel, you’ve heard them.) But I think this is the first time I’ve mentioned Gross Distortion, a twisted new take on a cool old crunch circuit. Here’s a demo I just made:
… and here’s how I describe it on the upcoming product page:
There’s never been a distortion pedal quite like Gross—so it needs an explanation.
At its heart, Gross is a simple, one-transistor distortion from the same family tree as the Electra circuit. This simple yet powerful effect was built into Electra guitars in the late ’70s, and was later adopted by many boutique stompbox builders. For good reason: It’s a lively, dynamically responsive circuit with less compression than most modern IC-based distortion pedals. The transistor boosts the level, and then the signal hits a pair of clipping diodes, which provide the signature distortion.
Every diode combination sounds slightly different. In fact, several boutique pedal companies have based their businesses on creating Electra derivatives with slightly varied diode choices. (Just Google “Electra distortion clone.”)
Gross isn’t an Electra clone. I’ve changed parts and values for a fatter sound and even greater dynamic response. I also added an active 2-band tone control—something seldom, if ever combined with primitive distortion like this. The distortion isn’t too “gainy.” It’s more about definition than sheer power—one reason it pairs well with other gain pedals. The character of your guitar and fingers always comes through.
The oddest feature is the diode section. Instead of a fixed diode pair, two 12-position rotary switches select from 24 diodes for 78 possible diode combinations! An additional switch adds a third diode for asymmetric distortion, which makes156 possible shades. My target number was 144—that’s why I called it Gross, though that may have happened the other way around.
Some combinations are as different as night and day. Others are only as different as noon and 12:05. But this network of germanium, silicon, and LED diodes provides many crunch colors.
With its labeled and detented selector knobs, you can call up favorite settings onstage. But for me, Gross’s forte is as a studio tool. It’s great for “texturizing” guitar overdubs—just spin the dials till you find a tone that sits perfectly in the track. It’s especially useful for doubling.
Gross Distortion was created in San Francisco and is built in Michigan by skilled craftspeople earning a fair wage. Available soon from Vintage King!
TO USE: Set the desired gain and level. Grab the big knobs and start spinning. Toggle the +1 switch frequently for asymmetric distortion—the changes can be dramatic! When you hear a cool tone, refine it with the bass and treble knobs. (Note: the higher the gain setting, the more dramatic the diode-tone contrast.)
Awesome! I just received production prototypes for my next three stompbox releases, in the wake of last month’s launch of my Duh Remedial Fuzz. I’m still making minor tweaks, but these should be available in just a few weeks. Whee!
Filth is a freaky joystick fuzz. Cult is my oddball take on Rangemaster-style single-transistor overdrive. It’s my absolute favorite distortion device, and the same one heard in many of my videos and gear reviews. The Cult Germanium Channel supplements this simple but deadly circuit with extra controls and an active EQ stage. (Baby skunk sold separately.)
Filth. I love whack-job fuzz boxes like the Z. Vex Fuzz Factory and the countless “sick fuzz” pedals it’s inspired over the last two decades. But here my goal was to create one with a higher percentage of “likely to use” settings — I wanted to make it easier to find the good stuff. Topologically, the circuit’s nothing tricky — basically a Fuzz Face descendent coupled with an extra JFET boost stage (though it doesn’t sound remotely like any Fuzz Face you’ve ever heard). The main innovation is the x/y control, which jiggers the transistor biasing, producing a broad array of timbres. It’s not a conventional tone control, though it’s arranged so that it’s easy to summon smooth, chubby tones or angry, brittle ones.
There was a lot of interest in this a couple of years ago when Fuzz Box Girl posted a demo (apparently no longer online) of one of my handmade ones. She focused on the pedal’s maximum-gain, My Bloody Valentine side, which was fine — Filth can definitely make your amp melt like a Salvador Dali timepiece. But now it’s easier to dial in crisp, lower-gain tones.
I’m making two Filth versions: the joystick model [pictured], and one with three conventional knobs. They sound identical — only the interfaces differ. The three-knob is good if you want to mark an exact setting for use onstage, while the joystick is more fun when concocting new sounds. (I don’t know the exact pricing yet, but the joystick model will cost more, because that’s an expensive part!)
I’m far from the first builder to create a joystick stompbox, but you usually encounter them on crazy noisemaker effects, or deployed as conventional EQ controls. I’m not aware of another pedal where it regulates the fuzz’s fundamental timbre this way. But then, I don’t get out as much as I should.
Cult. If you’ve seen my videos or heard my audio demos, you’ve probably heard Cult. I’ve built it into several guitars (while others have a built-in Duh fuzz). It’s a one-germanium-transisor boost descended from the Dallas Rangemaster of the 1960s, though the apple has rolled far from the tree: All part values differ, the EQ profile is modernized, and the gain control works in an unconventional way. But like a Rangemaster, it boasts spectacular dynamic response and electrifying tones that crackle with presence.
To my (admittedly odd) ear, no other distortion sounds as bitchin’ as a single-transistor boost between a good guitar and a great amp. The weird thing is, while most players know the countless ’60s rock tracks produced with such primitive boosters, many have never tried this sort of circuit. I love faithful Rangemaster clones, and I love many of the variations I’ve explored over the last five years. But Cult is my very favorite recipe.
Cult Germanium Channel. This one pairs the Cult circuit with relatively modern active EQ/boost stage, with proper tone controls that don’t suck tone. The added circuitry sacrifices a touch of Cult’s explosive presence, but it provides a greater range of tones. There’s also more gain on tap, so it’s better for those high-testosterone rawk tones that I’m far too much of an prissy, effete San Franciscan to use myself.
Thanks a Lott. As mentioned, these are manufactured by Cusack Music in Michigan, under the expert eye of engineer Tony Lott. Cusack builds pedals for numerous boutique brands you know, many of whom prefer to keep the fact a secret. But I’m proud of the relationship, because Tony and his team improve everything I submit. (More about the collaborative process below. It’s fascinating stuff, assuming you’re a geek — which I do assume, since you’re here.)
This photo was digitally altered to make it look even dirtier — but not by much.
This photo was digitally altered to make the guitar look even dirtier than it was — but not by much.
Sometimes only the threat of public exposure can inspire a proper clean-up job. Case in point: I hadn’t groomed my battered ’63 Strat in years, and when I pupped it from the wall for my recent post on the instrument, the fact that I was about to show it to the world you guys made me finally admit how gross it had become.
Now, it’s not like I wanted it to sparkle or anything — seems to me that an old guitar should look old, and removing 100% of the grime would be a little too much like those octogenarians with preternaturally white teeth. I mainly just wanted to remove the sticky crud that had accu
How to tell holiday season is officially over: It’s time for NAMM 2016! And this will be the first time I attend not as a music magazine writer, but as a guy trying to sell guitar pedals. Or as Ray Liotta put it in Goodfellas: “Just another schnook.”
