My Guitar Gear

I’ve been playing guitar for a couple years now. Electric guitar. Mainly this involves just playing songs I really like, although I’m slowly trying to get into theory and actually jamming/creating/playing music, rather than “copying” other artists.

Amp and Guitar

My current guitar is a 2015 Les Paul Classic, in Fireburst, played through a Marshall DSL40c, a full-valve combo.

To complement this, I’ve built up a moderately large collection of pedals.

Pedals

My pedals effectively start top right, then run right-left. The flashback (top-left) is run through the effects loop of the amp.

Should I wish to do some quiet practice, I purchased the Vox headphone amp, which is somewhat noisy but does the job.

Boosts/drives/distortions

The chain starts with the ElectroHarmonix Fuzz, which is a thick fuzz that works well with gain-heavy amps (can sound pretty nasty on something like a Fender Super Reverb due to massive headroom), and gives lovely tones like Satisfaction.

To continue, I also have a clean boost, the TC Electronic Spark Boost, which is a very flexible boost with a decent amount of gain, and either Fat, Clean, or Mid toggle switch selections to give a bit more EQ. This is really nice to just drive the amp a little more.

This leads into my 2nd newest pedal, and my third drive pedal, the Fulltone OCD. This is a beautiful drive/distortion pedal, which can run at either 9v or 18v (for extra headroom), with a massive amount of volume and gain (from super clean all the way up to fuzz) and a High-peak (mid push) and low-peak (flatter response) toggle switch.

The Fulltone OCD is followed in the chain by a Boss CS-3 compressor, which I’ve modded with the Monte Allum opto-fine mod, which reduces the noise and generally gives an almost-studio-quality compressor for a £20 mod.

‘Effects’

Now into the ’effects’, and utility pedals. I follow the compressor with a TC ELectronics Corona chorus pedal, which is a lovely digital chorus pedal. I’ve started to use this more and more, set to a subtle level, to just give a slight bit of flavour to my guitar.

Previously (before today), I had my TC Electronic Flashback digital delay after the chorus. This is a lovely pedal and is pretty much always-on. It has options such as tape and analogue, but I’ve started to use dynamic, which varies the delay length based on your playing speed, so you can go between slower and faster sections with the delay matching. This has now been moved into the effects loop, to give a cleaner delay with more head room. Previously this got a bit sloppy, due to distortion and amp gain, but placing it in the effects loop after the pre-amp gives a crystal-clear delay.

A pedal that I haven’t played with too often, but see great value in, is my MXR Sixband EQ, which sits as the last effect pedal in my chain. This is useful for just giving a little presence push, or cutting a section of the spectrum if your guitar&amp combo is not quite to your taste, with the more broad-EQ of the amp.

Utility

Finally, a pedal I bought today, the Ditto Looper. This is a pedal I’ve thought of getting for a while, and its a fantastic little looper. I’ve been trying to get into jamming, and doing more improv work, so got the Ditto as a means to lay down some chords to play over, rather than playing from a few backing tracks or just playing along to some favourite songs.

This is all my pedals! Hopefully I’ll follow in a later blog post with a few sound clips for each of these pedals, and I would like to do some signal procesing/analysis to show the effect each pedal has on the raw signal, and let the geekiness flow.