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. Paul makes some fantastic tone shaping pedals and he plays pretty heavy music but his choices don’t necessarily reflect that. If you are not familiar with PLX-FX 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. MXR – Phase 90
“I always go into a Phase 90 first. I’ve had a Phase 90 on pretty much every incarnation on my board ever since I started playing guitar almost, you know. So I just have the regular MXR phase 90. I read about a bunch of mods and stuff to do to them years ago, so I did the Script Mod and a resistor mod. I honestly kind of have lost track of the stuff that I’ve done to it. I’ve built and bought a ton of other phasers and I always end up going back to that one for one reason or another. I like the Phase 90 in a pre-dirt order on my board. It’s a little less intense that way. I like it to be a little bit more in the background, not super pronounced. With the phase 90, if you put it post-dirt you definitely get that perceived volume drop. Whereas every other phase or I’ve ever tried or built has always had a huge volume jump regardless of where it ends up. So if it’s pre-dirt, it ends up compressing and adding a bunch of gain, which I may not necessarily want. And then post it like has a huge volume jump, which I don’t really like either. So for some reason, I don’t know why but the Phase 90 sits just right for what I do. And like I said, a lot of those mods are really easy to do, they’re not really like intensive, so if you just want to try something new or to learn to do mods you can pick a Phase 90 up used for real cheap.“
Check out the MXR – Phase 90
2. Dunwich Amps – Volt Thrower Overdrive/Distortion
“It’s essentially a RAT that is insanely modded and it runs at 36 volts internally. So it’s like a super high headroom a ton of gain. It has an input cap selector so you can kind of make it really like fat and woolly or you can like tighten it up by dialing that back a little bit. It’s a fun pedal. The EQ is totally different than the RAT though. He does a treble, bass and clip control.”
Check out the Dunwich Amps – Volt Thrower Overdrive/Distortion
3. Earthquaker Devices – Dispatch Master
“I always have reverb and my the Dispatch Master is my go-to reverb for a long time now. I used a Boss RV-3 for a long time, but I got kind of paranoid about losing it or breaking it and the only replacement I found that I liked the Dispatch Master. I use that for kind of shorter subtle reverb stuff, nothing too crazy, but just kinda like an always-on reverb.”
Check out the Earthquaker Devices – Dispatch Master
4. Catalinbread – Echorec Tape Echo
“This is great when I want to get really crazy. I have that set to like a much more crazy, longer, bigger delay sound. Like if I’m ending a song on a big chord and I want it to just drown out for, you know, a minute, I’ll flip that on and then just mute everything else and let it, you know, go crazy for a little while.“
Check out the Catalinbread – Echorec Tape Echo
Huge thanks to Jer for being a guest on our show and please check out PLX-FX. We wish him continued success!