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. Death by Audio’s Oliver Ackermann has designed some of the most sought after big-noise machines in the pedal world. If you are not familiar with Death By Audio do yourself a favor and check him 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. Tech 21 – Sansamp Bass Driver D.I.
“I don’t really ever put this pedal on my board or anything like that, but it’s kind of the ultimate pedal to have in your guitar case. If you need a D.I. (Direct In), is a D.I. If let’s say your whole board, someone throws a beer on it or do you just can’t get it to work, like you’ve got a distortion pedal right there, you know, it happens. So, sometimes you need all that stuff. Maybe you need to equalize something it can kind of do all of that all in one pedal. At this point, I don’t even know how many I have mean I have like four or five of them just because you just need one at different times, or I’ll run it with different rigs or put it on a board to use as a D.I. somewhere. And then if you want to turn on the distortion, you got distortion to distort the D.I. and I’m the kind of guy who likes that do that kind of thing. But yeah, it’s good and useful. Sort of like a life preserver. It’s Kinda good to have one and just keep it into a guitar case, I think.“
Check out the Tech 21 – Sansamp Bass Driver D.I.
2. Colorsound – Supa Tone Bender Fuzz
“One of the best pedals ever made. It’s fantastic. I got it a long time ago when you used to be able to order those pedals online and you’d even get like an email from the guy who made them, which I guess was the guy who ended up dying. But the pedal just sounds absolutely incredible. Must’ve been like carefully comb through to match like the transistors and everything. Cause even if you kind of try to like build it yourself with the same components, it just never really quite sounds that doggone good. That’s what the rough idea for our Fuzz War was. I wanted to make a pedal that I thought was like better than the Super Tone Bender without taking any of the direction from the actual schematic itself. At the time when I designed the Fuzz War, I was playing through a lot of twin reverb’s and stuff and I think that that really kind of blew the color sound out of the water at that time. But you know, I still, every once in a while I’ll grab the color sound off the shelf and it still sounds great.“
Check out the Colorsound – Supa Tone Bender Fuzz
3. Zoom – MS-100T Multi-Effect
““This is probably an unpopular choice for a lot of people, ’cause it’s kind of a stupid pedal in a way where you’ve got a lot of menus and you have to scroll through and really feel on this stuff. But, you know, I always kind of find myself buying these multi-effects pedals just to kind of inspire myself to like scroll through and write songs and quickly just have different sounds that you can just kind of access. And this one just has some like really cool effects that I haven’t really heard anywhere else. There was like this freeze sound where you strum the note and it freezes, delaying it until you hit another note to re-trigger the freeze. And uh, I dunno, some other kind of cool wacky stuff. It’s awesome to just have all of those effects at your fingertips. Like for someone who’s just starting out or something, or even if you could only bring so much stuff with you, it’s pretty cool to just, you know.””
Check out the Zoom – MS-100T Multi-Effect
4. Dunlop – Cry Baby Wah
“There’s a lot of other Wah pedals that I’ve used that maybe have a better sound or something, but it can always find a Cry Baby at a guitar store. I would just use it as like either a fixed point or like a slower sweeping filter. You can just kind of do so many effects, sort of simulate the sound of a phase or whatever you want with a Wah pedal. It could be just a treble boost or kind of make the guitar sort of disappear on the dark or regions and I just find it very, very useful.“
Check out the Dunlop – Cry Baby Wah
Huge thanks to Oliver for being a guest on our show and please check out Death by Audio. We wish him continued success!