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. Matt loves pedals and for a guy at the early forefront of the boutique pedal wave, some of his choices are foundational. If you are not familiar with Wren And Cuff 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. Boss – DS-1 Distortion (Vintage Japanese)
“My DS-1 is from 1979 and it’s just always there on my board. It makes me feel good when I have it on there and I feel weird if it’s not. I like to crank it up, roll back the gain and then hit the front of my Fender Vibroverb Reissue with a 15 inch speaker and roll the volume off. And a lot of people are really surprised that I’m able to get these really cool sounds with it.“
Check out the Boss – DS-1 Distortion (Vintage Japanese)
2. Boss – DD-2 Digital Delay (Vintage)
“This was the first digital delay that Boss made and but I think it was the first digital pedal. Everyone was like, “Whoa, I can get this much delay out of it!” and Whoa, I don’t have to have all the noise of an analog!”, even though they’re still noisy as hell. So I love this one. It sounds kinda halfway between digital and analog— It’s got this weird grainy thing to it. A lot of people are surprised that my favorite delay is not all analog and stuff, but I’m actually not a huge analog delay guy. I found analog is a little squishy on me sometimes, which is what people love about them, you know, and they get that squishy sort of like delay and that liquidy kind of thing underneath when you really get them going.”
Check out the Boss – DD-2 Digital Delay (Vintage)
3. Keeley – Compressor
“This is the first boutique battle I ever got maybe between 10 and 15 years ago. Even though we make a compressor now that I love, I’ll have both of them on the board sometimes part of it’s just because I’m a weirdo and there’s like that DS-1 — there are certain pedals I just have to have on my board you know, they’re like my little buddies. It’s also the first pedal that kind of taught me to like compressors. I didn’t really get them before that, but I just kinda decided I wanted one and at the time my wife and I were broke but I had a birthday coming in and I was like, this is all I want. It was like $200 which seemed like an ungodly amount of money at the time. “
Check out the Keeley – Compressor
4. Electro-Harmonix – Tall Font Big Muff
“This is the one that our Wren And Cuff Tall Font Russian was based on. There are a few different versions of that with the same enclosure. Some of them use these 150K pots that I think they just had laying around, but you know, you can’t really find those now. And then some of them use other pots and some of them have more gain or less gain. Mine has the outputs really low, the amount of distortion it has is pretty low, the mid scoops pretty low. You have to turn it three-quarters of the way up just to get it to line level, but it just sounds fantastic when you do. It really accommodates bass really well too.“
Check out the Electro-Harmonix – Tall Font Big Muff
Huge thanks to Matt Holl for being a guest on our show and please check out Wren And Cuff. We wish him continued success!