guitar pedals Archives - Page 5 of 6

Ian Pritchard – Collector//Emitter

1. Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?

My favorite control is always the lag or delay time control on a chorus, vibrato, or flanger pedal. I think the Caroline Guitar Co Somersault specifically does it really well, but a lot of pedals have the control now. Changing the delay time makes a huge difference to the tone, and I’m really surprised that pedals only recently started giving this control.

2. Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

Maybe this is a non-answer, but I honestly can’t think of one. Sure, all my gear has some flaw or limitation, but rarely is it something that gets in the way of working with it. I usually see those limitations as a way of guiding how I work with it, which usually helps me break out of my routine. For example, Digitone could have an output per track, but see question 9 for how I work around that.

3. What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?

I’ve been searching for the right thing for a while. It’s a guitar when I can, but when I’m flying I bring something else. First it was an OP-1, then an OP-Z, and now I think the Model:Cycles is the perfect travel synth for me.

4. What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

I really wish the SoundToys plugins, specifically Primal Tap, Echoboy, and Little Plate were available as hardware. Those sound incredible, and I’d love to have them on my pedalboard (I’m aware these are modeled on hardwarem but I love their dsp, but I’d love a Prime Time 93).

There are tons of pedals I wish were software, but only if they 100% nailed the sound. For example, the Fairfield Circuitry Shallow Water is an amazing lofi vibrato that saturates in the perfect way, so having that to easily put on mix busses would be incredible.

5. Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I’m a bit of a hoarder, especially when it comes to gear, so I find it hard to sell something unless I really don’t need it. There are a few pedals I’ve sold and miss, but usually I have some pedal that can do something similar. My biggest “regret” would be selling my Sub 37 which I loved. I only sold it because I had no space for it, but I miss it a lot and can’t recreate some of those thick, distorted duophonic sounds.

[Editor: I just sold my Subsquent37 for the same reason. No space. I miss the sounds, but I also feel strangely free]

6. What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

I’ve recently discovered that what inspires me the most is actually minimal setups. I’ll usually pair one or two pedals with one synth and see what happens. That gets me out of my head thinking about perfect separation of each track or things like that, so I can jump into working on whatever ideas come to me.

7. If you had to start over, what would you get first?

A nice guitar. I’ve played cheap guitars for so long, so when I finally got a nice one (a Bilt Relevator LS) I was blown away. From there, I’d probably get a few pedals (probably Red Panda Tensor and Smallsound/Bigsound Mini), obviously some kind of amp, and an affordable groovebox like a Circuit or Model:Cycles

8. What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

The old Line 6 DL4 is the best looper I’ve ever used, but they’re also notorious for randomly breaking for no reason. And they don’t use the standard pedal power supply. But I truly love it.

9. Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of gear?

Not sure if this is really surprising, but I’ve recently started doing it – on any groovebox that lets you pan the tracks, you can pan the rhythmic tracks to one output and the melodic tracks to another, and run the melodic output through any effects that you don’t want messing up the rhythm. This helps me record videos with my Digitone or Model:Cycles into a pedal, live in one take with just a two-track interface.

Artist or Band name?

Collector//Emitter on youtube for all my pedal demos and synth videos, and Collector for my music releases.

Genre?

Kinda all over the place… ambient, glitchy, electronic and/or guitar-based

Selfie?

Where are you from?

Originally from Philadelphia, now based in Brooklyn.

How did you get into music?

When I was a kid I loved listening to music, so I wanted to play it. Then I wanted to learn how to record, so I did that and played in bands for a while. Now I am enjoying music as a creative outlet on my own time, with no real motives beyond making music.

What still drives you to make music?

Making youtube videos keeps the muscle memory there for when I want to be creative. Working full-time in a music-related field and then wanting to make music in my free time can be tough, but having an objective and deadline helps keep me going.

How do you most often start a new track?

Maybe once a week, it depends on the week. I usually focus my creative drive on making videos, so weeks when I have extra drive or inspiration I might start 3 or 4 tracks.

How do you know when a track is finished?

I’m really bad about that… I usually struggle with completing things. I guess when I can listen through multiple times and enjoy it, it’s done.

Show us your current studio

(This is unfortunately the best picture I have, and I can’t take one at the moment because I left Brooklyn to stay with my parents while NY is still bad with covid)

Best creative advice that you’ve ever heard?

“[The recording] was really noisy. I kind of liked it. That was the way it had to be. Then you stop worrying whether you should have made this decision or that about how things sounded, and just get down to the business of making songs” – Elliott Smith, Tape Op Winter 1997

Promote your latest thing… Go ahead, throw us a link.

My latest release will always be a pedal demo on youtube, since I post them once (or twice) weekly – https://youtube.com/c/collectoremitter

But my latest music release was an ambient thing with the Elektron Model:Cycles and Red Panda Particle V2 – https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/collector1/particles

[Editor: There are affiliate links to the relevant gear throughout the articles. It helps to support this blog. In fact, should you be needing some patch cables or guitar strings. Then clicking on one of the above links and buying any product that you prefer, will help the blog… doesn’t even have to be the ones in the link. Thx]

Andreas Hald – Playful Filmic Composer

1: Favourite knob/fader/switch on a piece of gear and why?

Ahh, that’s a tough one – there are so many! But – I like big knobs and I can not lie – so I’ll have to go with the Mode Selector on my Space Echo RE-201. It’s big and clicky, and it sits on one of my absolute favorite piece of gear. Sometimes I just turn it on so that I can hear the tape whistling around in there. So great.

[Editor: Possibly the greatest knob on the greatest fx ever]

2: Do you have an ‘almost’ perfect bit of kit? What would you change?

I don’t think so. What comes the closest, is my old trusty Juno-60. To me, it’s the most musical sounding synth I know of. It’s perfect with all its imperfections. Warm and noisy – “brown- and round-sounding” to be cliche, it so inspiring to turn on. Instant greatness. It would be fun to add some of the features from a modern synth like the Prophet 6, but again – the limitations that this (and others) instrument has, is what I like about it and keeps my fluids going. In my line of work I need limitations, so I welcome them.

3: What setup do you bring on holiday/tour/commute etc.?

Well, back in the days I always towed a guitar, amp and ALL of my pedals to any vacation, but ending up not really playing it. So I don’t bring that much anymore. It’s more than often an instrument or synth of a kind that I want to check out further and haven’t had the time to do so. On my last holiday I ended up bringing my cello and a drum machine. I have this weird sickness, that I can only do proper work in my studio, so I try to avoid working elsewhere and don’t bring computer or anything. I need too much hardware to do my work.

4: What software do you wish was hardware and vice versa?

In software to hardware – Xils 4, an “Analog Matrix Modular Synthesizer” from Xils Lab. Would love to have that as an enormous beast in the studio. I love that plugin, but mainly use my (hardware)modular synth now. But that plugin tickled me in all the right places. I’m really a big fan of hardware, so I wish that all software was hardware and that we from birth learned to write music on paper and record on tape ;-). That being said, I’m obviously a slave of the modern world.

5: Is there anything you regret selling… or regret buying?

I only think I’ve sold three pieces of gear actually, and I regret all three. A Fender Hot Rod Deville 4×10 amplifier. A Bogner Shiva head amplifier and a Custom made Fender Stratocaster. Especially selling the Fender amp is a regret. I’ve listened to some recordings from back in the days when I had that, and it sounded awesome. I sold it to buy the much more expensive Bogner, which I then also sold. So because of that, I’m never selling anything again. I still have a Bogner amp though, and I’ll post a picture of it – just because it’s so cool looking. Can’t think of any regrets in buying.

6: What gear has inspired you to produce the most music?

Pianos. There’s something incredibly satisfying in playing a real piano. Hard to beat. Instantly something sounds as proper music. I haven’t always had a piano at a studio, but I have now – and I would love to get a Grand Piano one day. But for now, I’m really digging the intimate and noisy sound from this upright. Just got it serviced, and it’s so good now.

7: If you had to start over, what would you get first?

Hmm. Good one. A cello or a pedal steel guitar. I want to be good at those and would (now) have loved to have played something else, that every kid on the block didn’t also play (guitar). I would also tell myself to buy the best equipment. Quality over quantity. I have a pedal steel with humbucker now and love the sound of it.

8: What’s the most annoying piece of gear you have, that you just can’t live without?

Maybe my Kemper Profiler. I use it all the time and love and adore it, even though I should record amps instead. I do both, but the Kemper is just so convenient. It just looks cheap – like it jumped out of the 90’s – and the menu scrolling is horrific. But sound and work-wise: Love it. I could add my computer to the list. Love/hate relationship – but I just can’t live without it.

9: Most surprising tip/trick/technique that you’ve discovered about a bit of kit?

Hardly a trick – but making my monophonic Korg MS-20 sound like an awesome stereo synth by using the headphone out in the external signal processor and then having two outputs from it, to plug into a mixer with panning possibilities and adding effects. Great revolution for me personally. I used that synth ALL THE TIME on a feature Netflix movie.