What are your four ‘must-have’ pedals? That is what we ask our guests to share with you in our Four On the Floor podcast segment. Despite the looks of Occults Effects, you don’t have to be summoning the powers of darkness to sound awesome with his pedals. Al Benitez loves classic hard rock and metal and his pedal choices are perfect for that. If you are not familiar with Occult Effects do yourself a favor and check them out. He gave us a fantastic interview too! You can hear the episode for yourself right here. Check out these choices for his Four On The Floor.
1. EarthQuaker Devices – Bellows Fuzz Driver
“First of all, anything that Earthquaker does is so good. I think everyone can probably agree on that, but this thing is super simple. I don’t like tons of knobs on my stuff because I get lost and confused easily and this only has volume and drive controls. Super simple. It sounds warm and has a great range in the drive control. The way I use it is I just use it as like a light overdrive, just a little bit of breakup as my first overdrive and then all of the other distortions and fuzzes on top of it.“
Check out the EarthQuaker Devices – Bellows Fuzz Driver
2. Catalinbread – Sabbra Cadabra Overdrive
“This thing is great. It’s supposed to be like a Range Master going into a Laney Supergroup Amplifier like kind of a Tony Iommi sort of sound, which I mean… Sabbath? C’Mon! Basically has two kinds of filter and tone controls that allow you to really shape the sound of the pedal and also lots and lots of gain, which, you know, I like. I kind of use it subtly, like the minimum amount of gain possible. That’s totally enough for me especially with the bellows going into it.“
Check out the Catalinbread – Sabbra Cadabra Overdrive
3. EarthQuaker Devices – Grand Orbiter Phase Machine
“For me, this is the be all and end all phaser. It does everything that a phaser should do and way more, which is really cool. It has a phase vibrato switch on it so you can select between phaser and vibrato. It also has a three-way rate switch—one is slower, one is faster and then in the middle is it freezes the sweep so you can dial in these crazy, sort of in-between tones. It’s great for leads in that setting. It’s incredibly versatile and it’s one of my favorites. You can dial in some pretty classic phaser tones, like a Phase 90 kind of stuff or whatever, but you can also do all kinds of other really weird stuff with it.”
Check out the EarthQuaker Devices – Grand Orbiter Phase Machine
4. Caroline Guitar Company – Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay Pedal
“It’s so good. Everything about it’s great. I don’t even know what else to say about. I use it with the modulation off. I like to keep it sort of crispy in that sense, but it also has that drive control. I’ll dial the drive up on the delay a little bit just to give it some warmth. It has that chaos momentary switch so you can just hold that down and let it go crazy and all over the place. Several years ago I was looking for a delay that I could use for the crazy self-oscillation stuff, and I didn’t really know much about this pedal at the time or the company or anything. The guy at the store is like, hey man, just try this. I was like, okay! One thing I’ve accidentally found out about this was when you hold your foot down on the momentary switch, at least with my foot, it kind of would always touch the feedback knob. You can hold that switch down and then twist your foot and change the feedback it in real time. So yeah, it’s pretty cool.“
Check out the Caroline Guitar Company – Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay Pedal
Huge thanks to Al Benitez for being a guest on our show and please check out Occult Effects We wish him continued success!