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. Alex is the maker of a highly revered line of guitar amplifiers. If you are not familiar with Science Amplification 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. Xotic – AC Booster
“To my knowledge, it’s some kind of variation of a tube screamer. Typical tube screamers and clones have that mid hump that you can get really used to and they have a nice kind of like, it’s kind of softer attack to them, they also cut treble and bass, which can be really good for certain things like boosting a high gain amp or if you have a really scooped kind of Fender style amp like a bright bassy clean sound. I like the, the AC booster. I switched from a tube screen between an AC booster because it has this really nice treble and bass control that’s just tuned to really musical frequencies I guess you could say. They have a really wide range and it has a little bit more gain and volume on top. So to me it’s just kind of like a perfect tube screamer– and it’s not.“
Check out the Xotic – AC Booster
2. Boss – DD-6 Digital Delay
“The DD-6 has this special feature called warp–when you hold down the switch it oscillates, which a lot of boutique pedals do. But I’ve tried a lot of them and they don’t ramp up the same way this one does. So basically when you hold it, it’s like turning the feedback all the way up. This one ramps in a really kind of quick aggressive way. And when you let go of it, it tapers off in a really cool way. I don’t particularly love the delay sound on it. It’s just a really clean digital delay. I pretty much just use it for this warp effect for like noise stuff and to kinda like create drew drones and things like that. I’ve just been using it for years.”
Check out the Boss – DD-6 Digital Delay
3. Caroline Guitar Company – Shigeharu Fuzz
“It is a really cool fuzz. I was using a rat for a long time and I really liked the mid-range of it and I kept trying to find a distortion pedal that was equally as mid rangy but maybe a little, um, a little less like compressed in a little more on the fuzz side of it. Like a little more screwed up sounding the way that I like it. It has a really cool octave function on it as well. I’m kind of more interested in like more fuzz sounds, I guess, or real extreme sounds that you couldn’t get out of an amp.”
Check out the Caroline Guitar Company – Shigeharu Fuzz
4. Radial – Headbone VT Tube Amp Head Switcher
“This one allows you to switch two heads through the same cabinet which can be cool if for live use—If you’re like you want to use two different amp heads, one for your clean and one for your distorted sound, for example. You could use two single-channel amps through the same cabinet. So you don’t have to have two cabinets. And it’s safe to use too. I use this thing constantly. I do it when to when I show people amps of mine in the shop to compare different amps to each other. So you can hear them in real-time so you don’t have to unplug everything. It’s been really cool for me because I use it in the shop all the time to compare my amps with vintage amps or different amps to each other, so I can really hear the differences between things. So that’s a pedal that I could not live without, probably more than any of the other pedals.“
Check out the Radial – Headbone VT Tube Amp Head Switcher
Huge thanks to Alex for being a guest on our show and please check out Science Amplification. We wish him continued success!