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.
Pete Celi, the co-founder of Strymon, is responsible for creating some of the revolutionary and sought after modern sounds in the pedals industry. He also loves old ones too! If you are not familiar with Strymon 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. Vintage Mu-Tron Phasor II – Phaser
“This is the first effect that I actually plugged an electric guitar into. I think I was in the ninth grade and it was 1977 I believe. I was taking lessons from a guy down the street and he had this Phasor II And it’s funny because he wasn’t like a rock. It was just an amazing experience just to hear that the alteration of the sound and what this thing could do and it’s always kind of stayed with me.
It’s a six-stage phaser and it’s got a feedback control. You can get some kind of intense phasing back through it, but it’s just really good. It had a nice watery sweep to it and I can still remember to this day.
It’s a simple pedal and it’s tuned really nice. It does ever great warm sound to it and you can kind of dial back the feedback and turn the speed up and then you get this kind of watery sound. You can get a slow sweep and had the feedback and get kind of an intense phasing thing.”
Check out the Vintage Mu-Tron Phasor II – Phaser
2. Vintage MXR Phase 45 – Phaser
“This was given to me by a friend who had started playing electric guitar a couple of years before I did and he decided that he was gonna concentrate on Acoustic Guitar. So he just one day said, “hey, I’ve got this MXR Phase 45 pedal, do you want it because I’m going to start playing acoustic and I’m going to sell my electric,” so, I happily took it. It’s a two-stage phaser so It’s very subtle, but it’s just a nice gentle sweep to it. It only has one knob which is also liberating in some ways too, you just have speed. So do you want it slower or do you want it faster? The way the LFO works as you turn the speed up, it reduces the range automatically. So that’s the first effect I ever owned and I still have it.”
Check out the Vintage MXR Phase 45 – Phaser
3. Vintage MXR Distortion II – Distortion
“I don’t know if I’d say it’s obscure, but it’s definitely not as you know, common is the distortion plus, which is like the little yellow MXR Distortion box. So the Distortion II was also from the early eighties and it’s one that actually has the AC permanently built into the pedal. So you have to plug your pedal into a wall outlet, you know, there is no DC Jack or battery compartment and that one has meaning for a couple of reasons. One is that it was designed by Keith Barr who after founding MXR, he went onto found Alesis, which is where I worked when I moved out to California originally and I worked closely with Keith–he’s a brilliant guy.
One of the features of this MXR distortion to is it doesn’t have a bass control, it has a resonance control and it’s kinda like a bass control, but it’s actually a resonance filter. So what it does is replicates the sound of the resonance of a speaker cabinet, and for that to be built into a distortion pedal is pretty cool. And it’s like when you’re playing in front of an amp and when you turn it up it’s not like you hear like the low end come up. But it’s more like if you’re playing palm muted cords or whatever, you will actually hear kind of like the cabinet bounce at you. It’s a cool feature and it’s like kind of typical of how Keith approach things–even if it’s just a simple distortion pedal, he’s going to kind of bring something new to it. I still have that, I’ve had that for decades.”
Check out the Vintage MXR Distortion II – Distortion
4. Vintage Ibanez PDM 1 – Programmable Modulation Delay
“It was like in 1988, and Scott Henderson was playing one night with Chick Corea at the time and he played one and so I kinda got interested in it. It’s a small pedal, but it actually has a little LCD screen and you can program 20 presets and then it has a song mode where you can arrange those 20 presets in groups of up to 10 in any order you want to put your playlist together and every time you step on it’ll scroll through.
It’s just a clean digital delay that has a very wide range of delay range and modulation the options and stuff in them. That was really kind of almost like a learning tool for me to go through the menus. I think it’s got a little bit of caché now. I think on Reverb they’re going for a little bit more.”
Check out the Vintage Ibanez PDM 1 – Programmable Modulation Delay
Huge thanks to Pete for being a guest on our show and please check out Strymon. We wish them continued success!