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. Alec loves huge sound has an infectious energy that extends to his pedal line and of course, his choices below. If you are not familiar with Mask Audio Electronics 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. Electronic Audio Experiments – MU Blaster Boost
“Pronounced “Mu” (myoo) This was one of John Snyder’s early pedals and I don’t think it is made anymore. It’s just the loudest boost on the face of the planet. I run single channel amps and this thing, it does have a little bit of grit to it, um, but it’s mainly just louder than anything else and it just slams the front end of the amp effectively becoming a second channel. Um, mine’s one of the older ones with a big red rotary knob, which I enjoy a lot. It just has massive amounts of headroom.“
Check out the Electronic Audio Experiments – µ Blaster Boost
2. Digitech – PDS1700 Digital Stereo Chorus/Flanger
“It’s a very early digital chorus flanger so it was taking advantage of what they can do. Unlike a lot of analog pedals, you can adjust the delay time of the chorusing and the flanging independently so it’s like two pedals in one. You can switch between coursing and flanging. The chorus sounds like how a chorus should sound to me. It’s almost like a little bit of a slap back with some motion. My buddy Dan at ADD pedals goes in and rips out the guts and turn some of the trim pots on the outside so you can actually adjust the master clock control and just turn it the most low-fi delay you’ve ever heard.”
Check out the Digitech – PDS1700 Digital Stereo Chorus / Flanger
3. Old Blood Noise Endeavors – Dweller Phase Repeater
“It’s a hard pedal to describe the It’s taking a normal phaser, like an MXR phase 90 which is a four-stage phaser and it’s putting a delay in between each of the stages and you have a knob that controls how much delays between each stage. So not only do you have the phasing going on, but you have this slowly or quickly moving delay and it just, it creates an otherworldly sound. It has a sample and hold waveform in it and I just set the delay time to max and the sample and hold rate to the max and just sounds like this ever-shifting reverb. It sounds almost like if you took an eighties rack reverb and it ran out of RAM and it’s just glitching.”
Check out the Old Blood Noise Endeavors – Dweller Phase Repeater
4. Catrina Engineering – Coahuila
“It’s made by my buddy David Rodriguez. On the surface, it is a tape machine fuzz. He tracked down the same quad op-amp that is in the Tascam Porta Studio and replicated the front end input so it distorts the same way as if you just plugged directly into a Porta Studio and recorded to tape. That’s how we would sound. But then he just took it to other extremes and as you crank up the gain knob, which is labeled flare, it just sounds like your amp is exploding as it enters the atmosphere of the sun. It is the most saturated pedal I’ve ever played.“
Check out the Catrina Engineering – Coahuila
Huge thanks to Alec for being a guest on our show and please check out Mask Audio Electronics We wish him continued success!