Tonefiend Forum

What pedals do you NEED to have in your rig? The ones you can't live without. Most of us will swap out effects here and there, but everybody has a few pedals that never leave the board. What are yours, what do you use them for, and why?

Personally, I run my guitar through a bass booster (I use the Electro-Harmonix Mole), into any one of a dozen fuzz pedals (I can never find one that gives me exactly what I'm looking for), and the last part of my chain- besides the amp- is the Danelectro spring reverb pedal, it's just so over the top and quirky, it's great for that "What the hell is that?" reverb sound.

What about you guys?

I've used some ridiculously big pedalboards, and sometimes it's fun to pay with no pedals, or just a gain pedal that lets you go from clean to crud via guitar volume. I guess the next step up for me would be drive + delay + trem.

Zoom Ultra Fuzz, not unbelievable but very useable and incredibly flexible. Although it'll do theremin-like self oscillation, it's very, very, good at subtle textures.

Early 90's "Vintage Rat" big box reissue, used for everything from cleanish overdrive to full nuke, but mainly parked with distortion at half or less and the filter pretty open.

Roger Linn Designs Adrenalinn, the Swiss army knife of modulation effects, heavily leaned on for trem, mostly square wave, until I get a hard chopping DIY trem project going. Once that happens I imagine I'll do much more special effecty stuff more of the time.

Yamaha Magic Stomp, with the SPX reverse gate and early reflections reverbs, as well as all the neato multitap delay stuff. Ridiculous flexibility, absurdly discontinued without a replacement model.

Akai Headrush 2 delay/looper. Nice simple looper and the tape echo setting isn't bad at catching enough of the vibe of my real Space Echo in a practical unit.

I'm with Jeff_H Always need an overdrive around to give me that extra level of push for the amp, as the music I'm performing requires such a wide variety of gain, from clean to saturated. A delay, reverb, and chorus can usually be found at my feet, as well, most often to add texture to clean passages.

Quote from bear on August 8, 2012, 19:50
Zoom Ultra Fuzz, not unbelievable but very useable and incredibly flexible. Although it'll do theremin-like self oscillation, it's very, very, good at subtle textures.

Early 90's "Vintage Rat" big box reissue, used for everything from cleanish overdrive to full nuke, but mainly parked with distortion at half or less and the filter pretty open.

Roger Linn Designs Adrenalinn, the Swiss army knife of modulation effects, heavily leaned on for trem, mostly square wave, until I get a hard chopping DIY trem project going. Once that happens I imagine I'll do much more special effecty stuff more of the time.

Yamaha Magic Stomp, with the SPX reverse gate and early reflections reverbs, as well as all the neato multitap delay stuff. Ridiculous flexibility, absurdly discontinued without a replacement model.

Akai Headrush 2 delay/looper. Nice simple looper and the tape echo setting isn't bad at catching enough of the vibe of my real Space Echo in a practical unit.

Those are all super-cool. I heard [ur=https://www.audreyhoward.net/l]Audrey Howard[/url] play just last night, and she did lovely, lovely things with her Headrush 2. I used to have a Zoom Ultra Fuzz, but I gave it to Polly Harvey, who gave it to Josh Klinghofer, I think. Anyway, it's long gone.

BTW, a good "hard chop" tremolo is the Kay — you can find DIY versions online pretty easily.