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. John shares his picks with us again, and again does not disappoint. If you are not familiar with Electronic Audio Experiments 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. Death By Audio – Audio Apocalypse
“I became friends with the DBA crew and I helped them debug a new project they’re working on. As a thank you, they sent me an apocalypse and it absolutely lives up to its name. Aside from the like obscene amount of gain that it has, I dig the tone control. I thought that it was like a Big Muff tone control where it’s sort of a super wooly on one side, super piercing on one side and then scooped everywhere else. But it sort of morphs from a bass boost to a mid-scoop to a mid-boost to a trouble boost. And it sounds good no matter where you set it. I got to fire it up at band practice for the first time last weekend and was just floored. It handles low tunings really well too, which is something I appreciate. Just an all-around good time.“
Check out the Death By Audio – Audio Apocolypse
2. Boss – RV-3 Reverb/Delay
“I had had one of these around 2010, 2011 and I loved it, but I sold it chasing some other stuff and I’ve always kind of regretted it. Prices have gone down on them because there are just so many options for reverb on the market these days. I finally picked one up again for like ninety-five bucks shipped. I think for what it does it’s just perfect. It’s this very cold unapologetically digital sort of sound– it’s dense, but it sits in a mix really well. So if you’re playing in a band with a lot of guitar stuff going on with a lot of gain, the RV three is still going to cut through and give you the atmosphere that you need, especially at like really aggressive settings with a lot of decay and stuff like that. I just love it. I think it’s super underrated.”
Check out the Boss – RV-3 Reverb/Delay
3. Lastgasp Art Laboratories – Misty Cave Reverb
“This guy makes a lot of really weird stuff. He’s probably best known for some of his fuzzes. But the Misty cave is best described as a parked flanger—so instead of washing up and down, it sort of sits at one static comb filter frequency. You can tune it to a note that you’re playing either with the knob on the pedal or with an expression pedal. It kind of rings and resonates against your guitar sound. It’s a very haunting texture. I love it, I think it’s just such a cool effect. It’s also gorgeous looking. It’s got a really nice color scheme, a really nice design, knobs that I’ve never seen on any other piece of equipment. I love it.”
Check out the Lastgasp Art Laboratories – Misty Cave Reverb
4. DigiTech – PDS 20/20 Multi-Play Delay
“It’s from the mid 80’s, so this is like the dawn of digital delays in pedal form. Despite it being a digital delay, it’s not, it doesn’t have a microcontroller or a DSP chip in it. It’s just got mimicry and a bunch of logic chips that all they do is they cut the signal up into little pieces and they stick them in memory and read it out later on. The beauty of this is that you can adjust the sample rate directly. There’s a trim pot in there that you can go in and mess with. If you’re content with really nasty audio quality, you can get like 15 seconds of delay out of this thing which is awesome, but to make it even more awesome it’s got a hold function like what you see on the Boss DD-3 or the DSD to where it takes a little snippet of sound and it just keeps on playing it back. It’s not like oscillating, it just keeps playing it. You can manipulate the time knob and you can change the pitch of the loop. So it’s just a really, it’s a really expressive and weird sort of looper and because you can’t punch in and punch out like you can with a regular looper, you have to fight it a little bit. But it’s a really rewarding tool for more soundscape type stuff, more abstract things in a band setting. It’s a killer delay on its own. The weird sampling looping, signal destroying stuff I think it’s where it’s at.“
Check out the DigiTech – PDS 20/20 Multi-Play Delay
Huge thanks to John Snyder for being a guest on our show and please check out Electronic Audio Experiments We wish him continued success!