The Best Pedals You'll Ever Play

a lot of you in the comments section often will ask me about my pedal recommendations and how it might relate to your particular rig and where to maybe choose something that i think is a really good product to fit the sound that you're going for so today i thought we would do a video that outlines my favorite petals and all the different kind of common petal food groups let's say and go through all of them so you know the petals that i like what i recommend and i'll try to give us a couple of different levels of recommendations so i'll give maybe my pick for each one of the pedals one that maybe is a more budget friendly or a more available pedal that you could get pretty much anywhere and then maybe something that's an honorable mention that is worth saying but maybe it fits somewhere in between what my pick is and something that maybe is more ubiquitous or readily available so we'll go through all those the different pedals in sequence in terms of the pedal board order and just go through my favorite pedals of each one of those things so you maybe have a little bit of a buyer's guide if you're curious about what pedals i endorse i'm not being paid by any of these companies to say this i'm just going off of the things that i like and the things that i have experience with so let's get into it my favorite pedals let's do it all right so my favorite pedals these are often devices that i've had experience with for many many years a lot of the recommendations that i'm going to be putting forward today are things that have definitely withstood the test of time i know as a guitar player and as a musician it's always nice to be able to feel like you're getting the latest greatest stuff but my process for vetting pedals is a little bit different i'm looking for pedals that do a few different things the one thing i look for is things that have withstood the test of time and have been consistently used throughout time knowing that this is something that has been vetted across many generations in some cases of musician and is still the tried and true pedal is very very practical and works in the context of live music or studio applications the other thing i look for is how cooperative are these particular pedals as somebody that is a rig builder and started my career before i even manufactured any pedals at all i spent a lot of time pairing different devices together and the ability for pedals to work synergistically as a unit with just similar input and output impedances and having to work with 10 15 or even 20 other pedals is a requisite thing for me often we'll try pedals in a store a guitar center wherever it may be and we really love how that pedal sounds and then we get it back into our rig and it sounds completely dissimilar one of the benefits that i always thought about having started my career as a rig builder is i really understand what happens when we take pedals out of the context of just being an individual island and then pairing them with multiple other devices i really look for things that are able to work well and cooperatively with the other pedals on the pedalboard and are fairly impervious to what comes before and after them pending any sort of impedance sensitivity and that they work well across the board no matter what pedals are coming before them or after them and work well with other pedals in the system the other thing that i look for is reliability sometimes there can be pedals that sound really great but are notoriously unreliable or just have some things about the design that make them not very road-worthy often these pedals can sound great even sometimes superior to other things that are out there but i generally stay away from those because i really want stuff that's going to be predictable and reliable every single gig so the recommendations that i make today these are all reflective of those values as kind of overarching concepts so let's start first in the signal order and again if you're wondering more about signal path order and not so much about pedals we have a great video for that above that you can check out that lays out my recommended signal path in addition to a more advanced signal path for people that are into four cable method wet dry wet and other more complicated systems first in the signal path i want to cover all the impedance sensitive devices so these are pedals that need to be first in the chain and shouldn't have any sort of buffering going on before them because they are going to be impedance sensitive typically transistor based and have some sort of sensitivity to anything that's low impedance before and they want to see as close to the guitar pickups as possible so these are going to be things like fuzzes and walls there'll even be some cases where certain distortion pedals would fall into this treble boosters and things of that nature [Music] so i want to start first with fuzz because that's generally what i put right up in front so i like fuzz face style devices so most of the recommendations i'm going to make today are all based around fuzz faces now as far as a really easy to get tried and true fuzz that i really really love is i love the mini mxr bc 108 plus now this is a silicon fuzz but it is extremely budget friendly and the reason that i love it is that it works very well when you do have to use a buffer in front of it and still performs like you would expect on a fuzz face the really beautiful thing about this and i actually got to learn about this pedal through paul jackson jr is that it works great when you have a wireless system and still want that fuzz face sound or in a rack where you have a fully buffered input and output and you need to be able to have a fuzz that still sounds vintage i think that this is an absolute sleeper of a pedal sounds incredible works great whether you're going straight in off the guitar or if you have a system where you're using a wireless or some other buffer type system and you have to have a buffer up front because of the conditions of your rig this bc108 is great in either context and is an absolute dream super small easy and compact and incredibly budget friendly now the next fuzz that i really love is from chase tone and i believe it's called the 68 fuzz it might even be called the the velvet fuzz and it's a red fuzz face style and it sounds absolutely amazing and the price is so competitive i almost can't believe he can make it for that little money it's a fantastic pedal i highly recommend you check it out i was actually introduced to this first by my friend owen berry an amazing guitar player now located in nashville and this thing absolutely screams vintage tone sounds amazing again really really cost effective and if you love those fuzz face tones from the late 60s and mid 60s this is an absolute great pedal for that sounds amazing i think you should definitely check it out the price is well worth it now my pick though for my favorite fuzz out there currently is made by dustin francis and this is the ivor fuzz and they sound absolutely incredible and actually dustin restored my 1970s fuzz i had an original 1970s fuzz pcb and he made an enclosure that would match sort of the look and the feel of something from that generation because i didn't have the original enclosure anymore but dustin also makes great high quality replications they look amazing they sound amazing and that would be my pick they are a little pricey but i think definitely well worth it if you want to have that vintage look that vintage vibe and the sound to go along with it nobody's making better fuzzes than dustin i would definitely check out the ivor fuzz so those are my picks a few other honorable mentions that i think for high quality fuzz face style sounds certainly analog man has been one of the first names in fuzz faces for a very long time the sun face is an excellent product and would be another consideration and i also think on more of a budget friendly side the full tone 69 and 70s buzzes are also incredibly well made sound great you couldn't go wrong with any of those i think that those are also worth mentioning and if you want to check out any of the fuzzes we talked about here definitely check out my links below where all my recommendations will be placed [Music] next let's go to was now wahs are something again that typically can sound better before buffering especially if it's a vintage style or vintage voice was lots of great choices out there let's start first with just a nice high quality good value wah i think the cae the custom audio electronic squad that was made by dunlop is one of the best most versatile was out there you have a switchable inductor you have a boost that you can engage and it has all the high quality parts and assembly that dunlop is known for i think that this is an absolute great wall very versatile works in a lot of different contexts and gives you a couple of different sounds by way of that switchable inductor and has all those upgrades that robert bradshaw had been doing to dunlop was for years and years and years a few other great was in here that i think are worth talking about nice honorable mentions would be the full tone clyde deluxe now one thing that i think this does better than almost any other wall that's out is it's one of the most robust and well-built laws that exist in the world one thing that's always a problem with was i'm sure many of you can attest is because of the amount of weight and traction and stepping on and off it and the level of abuse that a walk gets comparatively to an overdrive or something that just gets stepped on once and then your foot comes off it and then stepped on again to turn it on or off was have our full body weight on them for the entire time that they're used and they often will break down much sooner than other types of pedals the pots often get dirty and can become scratchy and i would say full tone did about as good as any company can do to mitigate some of that stuff it doesn't have the exactly traditional wall look in terms of the enclosure but in terms of delivering on the vintage tone and giving you lots of different options i think it is one of the best choices out there the full tone clyde deluxe an absolute great pedal sounds great looks great and really will last you much longer than any of the other wahs that we talk about today another great honorable mention is also by dunlop crybaby which is their mccoy wall which is kind of a real arc back to a truly vintage hand-wired style wall this sounds absolutely great i put one on raphael sadiq's rig fairly recently and i was impressed on how great it sounded the vintage vibe of it was absolutely incredible i highly recommend this and for the price point it's really unbeatable as far as a hand wired style was concerned i highly recommend the mccoy wah absolutely great sounding from dunlop now lastly my pick now i couldn't get away from this and so i'm sorry that i'm recommending something that is no longer in production but you can still definitely get on reverb or ebay it is the buddha boudoir it's got the purple base the chrome top this was actually oem'd by dunlop originally when it was produced by buddha but it is actually one of the best sounding laws of all time it doesn't have any fancy controls or anything like that but absolutely sounds incredible paul jackson jr has been using one of these for years andy timmons has been using one of these for years they are absolutely insanely good i highly recommend that you check them out and a lot of times if you're watching on ebay or reverb you can sometimes find them for under 200 bucks they are well worth it i highly recommend the buddha boudoir is my favorite wall out there i always come back to it it feels like home i highly recommend that you check it out and if you want to check out some of the others that we talked about here in terms of watt pedals definitely check those out in the links below so the next in the signal path let's go to tuners now i'm going to give you a couple of different recommendations on tuners some of them have buffers some of them do not in a lot of cases these buffers could actually replace the input buffer instead of having a separate unit that does that because they already have high quality buffers built in one that fits the mold that i think is a great sort of budget friendly price point that does a lot in a small compact box is none other than the tc electronics polytune mini now this has a built-in buffer if you get the bonafide version it's small and compact and gives you all the options that you'll need for a tuner as well as keeping it again in a small box giving you that input buffer and allowing you all the abilities to be able to tune and of course has a mute right there on the footswitch on the front very reasonable easy to get available everywhere has a great buffer checks a lot of those boxes i also think another honorable mention here would definitely be the boss tu3w the wazakrap version and the reason why i really like this one is that it is available to be true bypass where the typical boss tuners always have a buffer running and although it's not the worst buffer in the world it's not as optimal as the ones that we have from tc electronic so i highly recommend this one i keep mine in the true bypass settings so the buffer is not active and i still really love the display of the old boss tuners it's what i grew up on i'm very used to that i definitely love the boss tu3 wazzacraft version another great pedal that we could add to this list now as far as other honorable mentions on here i really think the sonic research tuners are all really great extremely accurate for some a little bit difficult to be able to read in terms of that strobe tuner but very excellent tuners i think also the peterson tuners could be a good honorable mention here they also are strobe tuners very accurate a little bit bigger than the others that i mentioned but still great tuners nonetheless but i want to talk about my pick my favorite tuner and it's a little bit more unusual tuner that most of us probably are not aware of it's made by sonic nuance and it's a very cool tuner in that it solves three issues firstly it has a buffer in it that's very high quality meets the same specs and standards i always recommend one megan put impedance 100 ohm output impedance but the other thing that's great about it is it has a di that's off of the actual output now this is really cool because it allows you to do certain things it allows you to firstly to be able to reamp the guitar right off the tuner with a balanced output coming right off of it this is really great if you want to preserve the guitar tone you want to be able to reamp at a later time or you just want to do some different processing or have some version of a direct sound you can do that right off the tuner the other cool thing about this is if you just wanted to use it by itself or you were using it on base you can actually power it through phantom power by way of the xlr connection on the left side which is the output and you can power it there you don't even need to have any 9 volt or 18 volt input and it takes a range of different voltages from 9 to 18. it's also incredibly accurate now i know what some of you are saying when you see the front of the panel it only has a couple of different leds to show whether it's in tune or not and some people equate that with the accuracy but the way this has been programmed is showing you really the accuracy based on the color of the leds and as it gets closer to that middle the more accurate that it becomes i think it's very easy to use if you're used to kind of more of the boss style tuners like i am i think it's a very comparable sort of look but even more accurate and as accurate as the most accurate tuners that are out there that we spoke about plus it's got that high quality buffer plus it's got that great di out that you can always have a dry off the guitar that's a really really cool thing especially if you're going to do studio recordings and you always want to have that dry reference that you can then go and add processing or reamp with later sonic nuance is a total winner here and again if you want to check any of these out check out the links in the description below [Music] next let's talk about buffers now you know if you're on this channel in any amount of time that i always love talking about buffers and there's several that i recommend that i think are really great now the one that i've talked about for the longest time has been the mesa boogie high wire because it's one of the few pedals that has an input buffer and an output buffer so you get two buffers in one box plus you get a tuner out plus you get a boost this is an excellent high quality buffer it is a little bit on the pricier side but i still think that this is one of the best ones out there other honorable mentions that i think are always worth talking about are the buffers from true tone they're very inexpensive and although they're single buffers and you need to get two of them in order to complete a system that has an input and output buffer they're very reasonable also the bonafide buffer from tc electronic another high quality buffer that's also very reasonably priced but if i had to give one pick i'd say it's our vertex buffers and these are available in two different configurations they're available built into our pedal boards as a module that lives in kind of the sidewall of our boards or it'll also be available in the same exact circuit in a standalone version that's kind of more typical of what you'd see of something like a mesa boogie high wire the reason why i love this is that it takes care of pretty much every single routing capability that you could ever want it can do mono stereo four cable method five cable method wet dry wet wet dry pretty much anything that you'd wanna do is all in one box has an isolated output with a transformer so you're able to run stereo and not have any issue with any polarity or phase you can flip that up and down you have that galvanic isolation i think that that's definitely to me the most practical of what's out there based on what you do but if you want a simpler more direct way just individual boxes for input and output buffer of course you could go with something more like the tc electronic or the true tone but if you really want something that does all the different options in one i can't think of anything else that does it other than our vertex buffers so you should definitely check those out [Music] so after buffers let's move on to overdrive pedals now we're going to go through a couple of different categories i'm going to go through kind of a low gain overdrive i'm going to go into a mid gain overdrive and then i'm going to go into distortion and i'm going to kind of go between more of a classical vintage style distortion and then maybe a little bit more modern style distortion and by vintage i mean sort of stuff that maybe would have emulated amps and effect devices from maybe the 70s and 80s and then for the more modern that'll be kind of 90s to now type sounds so for low gain overdrives i think that there's so many to choose here and i don't know that i could really stamp any as being my preferred pick because it's so contextually based but i'm going to give you a couple here that i really like first off i really love any sort of blues breaker derivative that could be the analog man king of tone that could be the jhs morning glory those are great staples to always have on a rig because they can just add so much to what's there can give you a little bit more tubiness out of really any amp platform and really just give you just a little bit of an edge another one that's similar in kind of that same vein of just light overdrives very organic sounding is the greer light speed and the paulsy timmy there's also an mxr version of the policy timmy which is significantly cheaper than if you tried to get an original timmy which have gone up quite a bit especially on the used market those are all great ways to kind of start the signal path with just a little bit of gain it doesn't do too much in terms of transforming the actual core sound of the amp but just gives it some more of that natural breakup that i think is really really excellent another pedal that i really love in this low gain arena is the jay rocket archer i still think this is a wonderful quan clone they've done a lot of different versions of this there's a jeff beck version there's a gold version there's a silver version there's a rockaway version that's a steve stevens model that has a graphic eq all these are really great pedals pay great homage to the original klon centaur but really does sound great are very pedal board friendly and i really love having these on my rig i think that they sound great with all different types of guitars and really again sound very authentic to the original sound of the quan i think that it's an absolute winner now another one that i want to mention here is a low gain drive that i think has become a staple in many people's rigs and certainly by the numbers of them that we've sold they certainly have made their way into maybe some of the standards for people using low gain overdrives it's none other than the steel string pedal now our latest version the mark ii i think is great it improves upon our mark one by not only making it smaller but adding a little bit more control for bass response with the rock jazz switch this is something that i like to just kind of keep on all the time gives my amp just a little bit more tubiness a little bit more feel a little bit of compression not too much gain but really transforms the vibe of the amp and just makes it a little bit more of that d style that dumbbell style type clean i can't have a rig that doesn't have this on also for low gain overdrives i really love the voodoo one from roger mayer this is something that i've seen michael landau and scott henderson use and when i think of some of my favorite tones from those players like scott henderson's torn down house record and just like the bluesiness of that sound and how great it was the voodoo one was complicit and all those types of tones and i really love this as a low gain kind of driving other types of pedals giving them a little bit more saturation it is capable of a lot of gain if you really go crazy on the gain but it's kind of sweet spot is actually in a lower gain setting and kind of using it almost like as a driver or a boost into other distortion and overdrive pedals just makes the strat a little extra throaty a little extra fat and i really love what that does to the overall tone that brings me to mid gain overdrive pedals now i know a lot of people are going to say that they don't like these pedals retchel i know that you're a person that famously hates this pedal but i think that i can't do a rig without a tube screamer even if it's a standard ts9 or something that's fancy and now very high brow like a ts10 they all sound great i think that almost every tube screamer derivative that's out there whether it's a full tone full drive whether it's an original ibanez or a reissue ibanez or a mini tube screamer they all sound really great and are very useful in a rig and if i had to pick one that i would say is my favorite i probably would say the ts10 and maybe that's my bias as somebody who's a fan of john mayer but i also just as well love my vintage ts9s i also love my vintage ts808s i think all of them are pretty much the same pedal they may have maybe have slightly different exaggerations but really sound great and i think are really necessary in any rig especially if you're using fender style amplifiers or single coil guitars another one that i would put in here and i know this is another shameless plug is the ultraphonics mark ii i think there are some similarities as far as where tone wise it fits versus a tube screamer but this is definitely more of that dumbbell overdrive special type sound i really love this for kind of those singing leads that more kind of santana s that larry carlton robin ford style tones and again this was based on an original dumbbell in fact several original dumbbells so it really captures that vibe that feel and with our new mark ii versions it's consolidated smaller it even offers you more controls beyond the original where you can separate the output gain versus the input gain so very cool pedal for that mid gain type sound lastly another great pedal in here and again i can't really choose an honorable mention because they're all great i really still love the full tone ocd i think this is a great pedal that kind of blends between a distortion and an overdrive very amp-like can get you kind of some of those jtm 45 100 type sounds but can also get you a little bit more in that fire breathing kind of getting into jc m800 or that jmp era style marshall i think that they sound great they're still a tried and true pedal and one of the best boutique selling pedals of all time so now let's go to distortion these are going to be higher gain more asymmetrical clipping definitely more aggressive i think for vintage you can't get away from the proco rat and i think just like with the tube screamers of course there's different variations of rats but they still do the inherent same thing i love my old white face rats those are great but also the new jhs rat pack looks absolutely incredible and gives you all the different rats you could want under one roof that could be a really cool way to go if you didn't want to invest in a vintage rat and certainly the price point is very alluring versus what it would cost to get a vintage wrap they can often be very expensive and hard to get in another pedal that i love that could also fall into the distortion realm potentially is the marshall governor the original units that gary moore used absolutely great sounding very marshally style distortion pedals has a full tone snack with a treble middle base as well as a volume and a gain control i think these sound absolutely wonderful but if you wanted to get something that really pays homage to that but it's definitely an honorable mention in kind of the governor realm would be things like the mi audio crunch box a very similar style circuit or the jhs angry charlie or andy timmons model these are all kind of governor-ish style pedals that absolutely sound great really nail the marshall vibe and really kind of maintain that maybe higher gain kind of getting not quite vintage but not quite modern era version of marshalls now i would say my favorite pedal for this kind of distortion style sound is probably the karl martin plexi tone and i'm talking about the original one that had an ac cord and had two different channels and a boost built in this was an absolute amazing sounding distortion pedal we have all the things you love about a vintage marshall especially kind of that more jmp or hot rodded marshall sound absolutely sounded incredible and in fact we did a run of modded versions of these which you can still find every once in a while in reverb where i added a treble middle bass control still had the two channels and the boost control and i modified it so it no longer required an ac cord that you could use an ordinary power supply on it those are really cool pedals and i still love that and there's a smaller version that's just a single channel that carl martin released although i don't find it to be exactly the same as the big box version if you can find those big box versions or any of the modded ones on reverb or ebay you should absolutely grab them they're really great pedals also as far as vintage distortion i don't think you can go wrong with a max on sd9 now this could for some maybe go more into the more modern type of distortion sound but they sound so great i once heard wayne krantz describe the sd9 as a combination between a flood space and a tube screamer and i do think that that is kind of an apropos sort of analogy of what it does it sounds absolutely great i love the max on sd9 and certainly there's plenty of players that have used this scott henderson michael landau two amazing players that have been huge sd9 proponents and if you want to get something that's like an sd9 but maybe a little bit more improved in my opinion you could go for something like our dynamic distortion which is basically taking the essence of the sd9 and some of the modifications that we did for some of its most popular players and integrated that into a new pedal should definitely check out the dynamic distortion if you're interested in that another great clone also worth mentioning is the exact tone tonic distortion which is a really great sonic distortion replica which also offers a full tone stack of treble middle bass which is also worth checking out now let's get into modern distortion pedals so these are things that maybe are kind of going from 90s to now now i know that for some of you 90s is still maybe considered vintage but i think in terms of the guitar tone arc this is kind of the most modern iteration of kind of modern higher gain guitar tone one that i think is an absolute great pedal definitely kind of has some of those custom audio you know three plus type pre-amp sounds is the sur eclipse it's a great high gain pedal has multiple channels has full tone stacks for treble metal bass on both channels an absolute wonderful pedal very high quality made by sir i highly recommend you check that out if you kind of want that marshall plexi to soldano slo type overdrive sounds you can put a boost in front or behind it if you want to add sort of an extra channel that you could go along with that just like it would be on some of the custom audio amplifiers that were kind of bored out from the three plus era of preamps this is a really great pedal very worth checking out another great one that's similar in terms of the kind of tonal aspects of it although it's only single channel but don't let that be a deterrent for you it's an amazing pedal it's none other than the cinvertec n5 plus this is a very sort of soldano slo dual rectifier-ish sounding distortion pedal very very amp-like very touch-sensitive i think it absolutely sounds amazing and the times that i've used it i was completely blown away it's one of the newer pedals in my mentions in this particular video and i think this was an absolutely great pedal very very reminiscent of those high gain amps even through a bone clean standard platform like a hot rod deluxe or hot rod deville lastly a little more common and easy to get but i still think really great is the evh 5150 overdrive and although it's considered an overdrive i struggled to find anything but distortion tones out of it that were pretty high gain i think it sounds great it feels like eddie van halen type zones i actually have an original pv50 150 and it really matches up well there and we actually did a cool video where we compared them side by side the pedal into a standard clean amp versus my actual 5150 and you can see from that video that it's almost unintelligible the difference especially recorded i was very impressed with how great it sounded another one that's also an honorable mention that's very similar to the 5150 but a little bit smaller is the dookie pedal which is the mxr kind of green day collaboration which is a very similar sound to the 5150 but a smaller box has a lot of the same characters maybe a slightly different voicing in the mid-range but i think you can kind of dial them almost the same but a little bit different positions as far as where that mid-range knob sits but both really great pedals excellent high gain distortion pedals that are also very amp-like [Music] next let's move on to filters and in particular envelope filters i know this has become more popular as the grateful dead have kind of got a new resurgence with a younger audience by way of john mayer and also just the work that john mayer has been doing incorporating filter sounds into pop music i think right along the lines with what john mayer actually uses on his pedal board i still think the q-tron from electro harmonix is a great device it's very easy to use there's not a lot of bad tones in it and a lot of the vintage style envelope filters it's very easy to get into tones that are not very pleasing i find the qtron is actually very user friendly and hard actually to find a bad sound in it i think that this is a great version whether you get the plus version that has an effects loop or just a standard version that doesn't they both sound great same basic circuit the other one that i would say is amazing and has very much of a similar character to what i like about the q-tron and again very easy to use is the kili neutrino especially the version two gives you a few more new features and it absolutely sounds the part and in fact my friend mark karen who formerly played with rat dog and bob weir this is one of his favorites for one of the more smaller compact versions of a filter pedal i think it's a great device sounds great looks great nice and small and fairly reasonably priced although maybe not quite as reasonable as those qtrons i don't know how they can make a cutron so inexpensive but they are really great as is this kiwi i recommend you check both those out my last recommendation on this one and it's really just more of a toss up about what the vibe is that you're going for is one that paul jackson jr has stood behind for a long time which is the af9 now ibanez made the early versions of course but there's a new version from max on which is also really great when i say new i mean probably in the last 10 or 15 years it's wonderful it's true bypass if you get the max on version it has all the sliders and all the things you would recognize from the original af9 but this to me kind of has a little bit more of a funk vibe for people that are kind of more into the type of stylings of music that paul jackson jr would play or prince or some of these other kind of more funk oriented guitar players even oznoy had used one of these for a time it's a very versatile pedal sounds great looks super vintage and also with that true bypass option doesn't add an extra buffer to your system but also the keely and the electro harmonix are also true bypass so you know they're on level playing field in that regard definitely for funk tones as opposed to jerry garcia tones which i feel like the q-tron and neutrino are more known for the af9 is definitely my pick for that let's go next to compressors lots of great ones out there i know that there are some people that go wild over compressors and just want all the cool vintage ones and all the cool latest stuff but my picks here are a little bit more tempered not quite as as maybe sexy or elusive as some people might choose now just full disclosure on compressors i feel like a lot of people that are going for studio grade compressors often are maybe misplacing the value of the compressor on their pedal board so we're thinking about traditional studio compressors 1176s la2as those are typically things that are found after the amplifier even after the microphone in most places so if we put a compressor up front in our system it's not really emulating what those classic compressors would do because we would rarely ever unless you were going direct with those compressors ever run a guitar directly into them they would almost always be at the mixing board side and wouldn't be up front before any sorts of distortion in overdrive devices so this is a little bit different than what we would ordinarily think about and i like to think of compressor pedals as separate from any sort of studio compression because realistically if we're going to be using a pedal board with a compressor in the studio any sort of studio compression would be added on top of that after the fact in post and it wouldn't be happening going into the actual pedal board so i'm going to make my recommendations based on this in mind my first compression that i really love a great optical compressor that's been around for a long time is the demeter opto compilator it's two knobs and the truth very easy to use hard to get into trouble it's very quiet for a compressor very well built if you know anything about demeter you know that he's been building some of the greatest amps and effects for decades this is an absolute winner sounds great clean sounds great even if you're running some dirt after it i really love this compressor easy to use sounds great and can be dialed to be very transparent or can be dialed to be a little bit more over the top have plenty of snap i really love this compressor the other compressor that i really love is from wampler and wampler has been making also compressors for decades and has an absolute winner with the ego compressor i think it's a great compressor takes a lot of those classic ross tones and just improves upon it is incredibly musical i think this thing sounds great very versatile if you're looking at some of the great players that are using a lot of compression these days whether it's brad paisley or somebody like corey wong they're relying on this compressor as their go-to and i agree that it is absolutely wonderful now this isn't going to be a sexy recommendation on this one i know everybody has probably owned one of these of course throughout their lifetime but i think that the dynacomp for me is still a tried and true compressor sounds great has two really signature settings with both knobs either facing each other or both knobs away from each other i think are kind of the two core settings that i always like to set at depending whether i want more compression or maybe a little bit more boost i love the reissues i think that the script versions are absolutely great they sound very close to the original ones and another sleeper that you could get if you want more of a vintage dynacomp is if you find one of the 70s versions with block lettering not the script because the scripts are very expensive but still has a script logo that's actually imprinted into the back of the pedal and if you look on the back of the of the bud box that it came in it'll have like a stamped mxr logo that's still in kind of that cursive script writing if you can find one of those they're significantly cheaper but are the same exact circuit as the earlier script versions so sometimes you can get a bargain on an original dynacomp it still has that block logo which is a little less desirable but has that imprinted script logo on the back of the enclosure if you can find one of those often they can be a lot better deal and still the exact same circuit as the originals that are so coveted [Music] next let's get into eqs now there's a lot of different ways to do this depending on whether you're more of a parametric person versus having a graphic eq for the purposes of this i'm pretty much going to stick to graphic eq recommendations but i'll throw in a parametric eq in here as well just in case you want to get into more of that kind of studio grade equalization now as far as equalization is concerned the ge7 is a tried and true graphic eq however exact tone has done a great job improving upon that and making it really more specific to the guitar frequencies as far as graphic eqs are concerned i don't think you can go wrong with an exact tone modified ge7 it's quieter more specific to the guitar frequencies and is an absolute great pedal even though it's a boss they really transform this thing and make it amazing my next recommendation for people that really want to go wild with eq have presets and midi the source audio eq2 is amazing and that you can have oh practically an infinite number of presets you can adjust all different sorts of frequency bands can work great on guitar can work great on bass really any instrument that it can work great for and just the fact that it is made by source audio they have great designers great engineers it is quiet works great it is digital but if you are going to be using this to cover a lot of ground eq wise i think it's a wonderful pedal extremely compact and an honorable mention if you wanted something a little bit bigger vos also has a programmable version as well that's slightly larger than the eq2 but is also a very versatile and great sounding unit and does a lot of stuff now for those of you that want to get into parametric eq territory you want to be able to adjust everything not just the sliders but you want to be able to adjust the queue something like the peri eq from empress is an absolute great pedal i really got acquainted with this when it first came out it was a wonderful device and then i got reacquainted with it more recently when i was working with tosan abassi and this is something that he used on his rig this is a great eq very very flexible gives you really surgical control over all the frequencies i definitely think that this is a winner if you want parametric eq you want the most control even more than what the sliders can can give you because again those sliders also have some interaction with each other this helps you isolate those frequencies a little bit better with the parametric eq the empress is definitely a winner pricey definitely on reverb but definitely well worth it i think it's quiet sounds great very well built very useful and functional tool next is boost pedals now i'm totally biased here but i really do feel like our vertex boost is the most linear transparent clean boost that is out there this is why i made it this is why it's still one of the most popular pedals that we've ever made and still one of the most popular selling boost pedals in the last decade as reported to us from our dealerships and just borne out by the numbers of how many units that have been sold out there now this is a great pedal very linear gives you that expression option so you can put in a volume pedal or expression pedal so you can control the volume remotely without any tone suck as the impedance is totally isolated by way of the vertex boost anything connected into the expression is completely isolated impedance wise if you want to know more about that you can check out this video above that tells you a little bit more about what the vertex boost does and all of its functions but some other boost that i really love out there for different applications are things like the rc booster this is a tried and true boost that has been out since i think i was in high school it is an incredible pedal i really love using this for a little bit more tone shaping i often like to put rc boosters as a boost early in the chain before overdrive to shape the distortion sound so i can add a little bit more saturation going into certain devices it's incredibly useful for that i think the rc booster is still a staple on pedal boards and definitely is worth mentioning here another one that's an honorable mention here that's definitely well made and incredibly reasonably priced is the custom audio electronics booster line driver this is a great pedal has a great spec one meg input impedance 100 ohm output impedance can actually even be used as a buffer if you just leave it on all the time and turn the gain down to unity it's very transparent very linear i think it sounds great designed by robert bradshaw can't go wrong with this if you really want a nice transparent boost this could be great at the end of the chain just to add some level to everything without changing the overall tone or you could put it earlier before their devices if you just want to hit it harder but not change the overall color [Music] next let's go to volume pedals now this is something that everybody struggles with they all have some version of tone suck again if you use something like the vertex boost that makes all this invisible but i really want to focus on volume pedals that are really reliable really robust and in the context of a pedal board like i'm talking about here that has high quality buffers and high quality pedals i typically stick with passive volume pedals so my recommendations are going to reflect that if you have the high quality buffering you can get away with passive volume pedals without any tone suck so firstly my favorite volume pedal of all time because of the taper the feel although the size is a little bit big is the boss fv500l i think that this is one of the best feeling volume pedals it is huge but i have a size 12 foot it seems to work really well for me i love the taper i love just everything about it is absolutely amazing and it is a little bit more reliable than some of the newer versions it uses a slider pot more similar to what you saw on maybe some of those boss eq pedals like the graphic eq is really really a great device i love the fv300l now if i can't get an fv300l i usually go to the newest version which is the boss fv500l and typically i'm getting the l versions which stand for low impedance because i already have high quality buffering on the input and output of my system so my signal is already converted to low impedance you'd only get the high impedance one if you were plugging in the guitar directly into the volume pedal without any sort of buffering fv500 has a little bit different taper some people find it to be a little bit more abrupt however i feel like i adjust to it very fast and i still love the feel of the volume pedal you can of course adjust the tension underneath the volume pedal if you want to get a little bit more or less tension under the foot the last recommendation as far as volume pedals is what i think is actually the most reliable in terms of the mechanics of the pedal and it uses a magnetic pot and slider which is the dunlop volume x and there's several different versions with different lengths to mini sizes to eight inch to i think an 11 inch version these are really great pedals they're very well designed it is a high impedance volume pedal so it's a 250k pot but again in a buffered system you can still make this work however a low impedance would be preferable but dunlop doesn't make that version i still think it sounds really great though feels really great and i think it's incredibly reliable also an honorable mention here would be the ernie ball vp junior i love the 25k active version and it's just called active not because it's powered but because it's designed for active pickups that already provide the buffering in this situation it's similar to the l designation on what boss does for low impedance i love the feel of ernie ball volume pedals i love the taper however reliability wise these are the least reliable of the versions out there and the newer upgraded versions with the kevlar strings do not offer a low impedance version so it's not as preferable to me as just the standard active 25k version of the ernieball volume pedal but i still love it in spite of its reliability i always keep a few on standby just because i like the feel of them [Music] next up is phaser now i like to go tried and true on this my favorite phasers are still the classic i love the mxr phase 90 the reissue scripts are very good of course if you can get original you should go for it and just like i talked about with the vintage dynacomp you can often find block logo versions that have the stamp of the script logo on the back of it and those are just the exact same circuits excellent ones to get another one that i really love is the mad professor tiny orange phaser this is a wonderful reinterpretation of the classic phaser from mxr a few more different options on a few more new controls but very very excellent sounding all analog great device i also for a new compact version that really pays homage to the old versions as the mxr phase 95 gives you a few different selections so you can select different versions of the phaser like the phase 45 super compact version also very very budget friendly i absolutely am in love with these phasers [Music] for flangers there's not a ton of different options out there honestly and i like to go with all of the traditional versions all analog of course you got to go mxr 117 there's of course the van halen versions of these which are also great still all analog i still love the ada flangers and in fact the reissue mini version is also a wonderful device sounds great looks like the original if you don't want the size of the original and some of the power restrictions of the original depending on which version you have you might have one with a hardwired ac cord or one that takes 18 volts again this mini one is very pedal board friendly offers some of the same exact things and i think sounds absolutely incredible david tarnowski was a genius when he made this thing also i really love the heart and flanger these aren't around any longer they've been discontinued for several years and in fact i think theo hartman is no longer making pedals but this was a replica of the electric mistress the original version it absolutely sounds great if you want to do that andy summers thing i absolutely love this thing and they can still be found on reverb fairly reasonably fully analog all using the original reticon chips like what was used in the ada flangers very excellent excellent excellent flangers [Music] now let's move on to chorus definitely my wheelhouse now if you've seen any of our recent pedal boards you've seen that we used the red seven little wave i think for a fully analog tri stereo course emulating pedal the little wave is an absolute dream sounds great looks great gives you very much of that vibe but other ones that i really love are the jocks meistersinger an absolutely wonderful chorus it's only mono but it does sound incredibly wide and of course if you needed to have true stereo you could always get two and of course i love the arion sch1 now we did a modified version of the schz as a signature pedal many years ago and those are absolutely wonderful if you can find them on reverb or ebay but even if you can just find a japanese made sch1 they're great stereo choruses they sound incredible fully analog bucket brigade takes distortion really well which is something that's kind of unusual for chorus this really takes distortion grade and if michael landau is any indication of how great these can sound in context they are really really wonderful devices i highly recommend you check on arion sch1 and another honorable mention along these lines i think is the new wazzacraft version of choruses with the dc2 and the ce2 i also think along these lines if you want to go digital the new neighbor choruses are also very good and emulate some of those tri stereo chorus sounds [Music] tremolo now i don't have a lot of recommendations here because there aren't a lot of analog tremolos anymore my favorite one of them all is the boss tr2 with any sort of modification for a volume control robert keeley did a version of this exact tone does a version of this as does analog man this is a great tremolo and the only thing that it's missing is a little bit of volume compensation especially when you add a little bit more depth sometimes you lose a little bit of output and this output control this allows you have a little bit more flexibility depending on your settings i still think that this tremolo is king among all of them out there now another one that's great from a similar generation is the dunlop tremolo the stereo tremolo the big purple unit tom bucca vac used to use this many years ago this is an absolute wonderful tremolo as well a little bit big a little bit unusual to power but very good sounding another tried and true analog classic that i absolutely love is the demeter tremulator you heard me mention james demeter earlier with the opto compilator this tremolo is absolutely amazing it's used by oz noi rai cooter a bunch of different artists sounds absolutely incredible really reminds you of those old black face style fender tremolo units an absolute must have you should definitely check these out next is univibe now we just did a big univibe shootout and a lot of my picks are from that list the funky vibe is one of my favorites from sabadias sounds absolutely unreal a little bit darker than some of the other ones really has that beautiful three-dimensional sound to it that double pulse i absolutely love this i love the sir henry another great one designed after jimi hendrix's original univibe this is used by kenny lane shepard and it's actually designed by the guy that's the tech for kenny wayne shepard and eric johnson the tinsley audio sir henry is an absolute winner and then if you want to go small i think the vibe machine from dry bell is an absolutely great pedal it's compact gives you a lot of the same tones as the bigger classic univibe style pedals but much more pedalboard friendly i highly recommend all those uni vibes [Music] next let's go to pitch now i'm thinking mostly in terms of octave type pedals especially octave down maybe some octave up so i'll go through a few different options of course the classic boss oc2 is amazing i know they have newer versions with the oc5 etc but i really still love the oc 2 as a classic octave pedal i also love the pog especially the pog 2 you can outfit this with midi which gives it even more flexibility i'll put some links below to midi mods so that you can add a midi capability to a pod two which just makes it so handy especially on a switcher board also i really love the sleeper pedal the offtron from fox rocks as an octave up and an octave down version all analog sounds absolutely incredible i think that this pedal is slept on way too much and if you're interested in something that really tracks well and really has that vintage kind of oc2 sound also gives you options for octave up and octave down and a dry control with all individual foot switches this is an absolute winner and then if i had to go with a true vintage octave fuzz i definitely think that those old dunlop cheese wedge ones were some of the best ones also the chicago iron if you're going for more of that jimi hendrix tycho bray octavia thing [Music] now let's get into delays in reverbs now i'm a simple man when it comes to delays i love a lot of the classic vintage sounds the dd500 if you need an all-in-one swiss army knife i think is the most true accurate vintage sounding delay that can meld old analog and tape echo type sounds with rack style delays that boss had made in addition to things like ducking delays and other types of tape delays i think that the dd500 is my absolute favorite swiss army knife delay out there also for digital delays i love the nova delay from tc electronics as well as the providence chrono delay two amazing digital delays that absolutely sound great very versatile you can get them to be very subtle or very present depending on how you mix them now in terms of analog delays i'm also a simple man tried and true classics here the deluxe memory man is my absolute favorite analog delay that's followed by a more simple delay with the boss dm2 if you want something that emulates that boss dm2 of course there's the wazacraft versions also the aquapus from way huge is a very similar style analog delay and also a new delay that sounds absolutely incredible fully analog is made by supro has very much the same vibe as some of those classic kind of dm2 boss delays as well as the ibanez style equivalent to that dm2 [Music] now for reverb if you've watched this channel you know that i'm a huge fan of the digitech hardwire series the rv7 is one of the best reverbs ever made it has a lexicon chip inside of it and sounds amazing if you can't find that one a close equivalent also a similar chip is the digitech polaris both amazing reverbs both stereo sound absolutely incredible two of the best sounding reverbs out there if you need individual control of just one sound you don't need to have it do any sort of midi programming if you do need the midi programming however there is one pedal that i really love that i think is a cut above them all which is the source audio ventress it's designed by the same guy that did a lot of the old vintage kurzweil stuff is very familiar with the classic rack effects this is definitely one of the best reverb pedals that i've ever heard really nails a lot of those vintage tones of some of my favorite rack reverbs like the pcm series lexicon units absolutely kills wonderful midi control all the things that you could ever want the source audioventress is one of the best ones out there [Music] now let's go into some of the more fringe things that maybe not all of us use things like noise gates i really love the fort and zul for a high gain amplifier that has an effects loop this is a great unit to put after the send coming out of the effects loop it has a key input which basically requires a split out off of the input from the guitar this just helps with its tracking and sensing of when to have the gate trigger but also if you want a more traditional sort of four cable method version that has an input and output and ascending return of course the decimator is one of the classic ones that has been around for years and years and years it has only improved with age i really think that they sound great they're very effective of course there's rack mount versions of them but even the pedal versions are very effective in gating out the sound and doing the least amount of harm to the overall tone and another honorable mention in here would be the mxr smart gate i think that this is still one of the simplest ones to use doesn't have a whole lot of bells and whistles but what it does it does great i think this could be another alternative depending on what you need and whether you're trying to gate out the preamp of your amplifier or gate out the preamp plus pedals some of those four cable method versions with the senate return might be more appropriate for that application just so you can better isolate the overdrive pedals and the pre-amp section of your amplifier separately from the effects loop going back into the power amp for line out boxes for those of you that are running wet dry wet there's really only two options that i see out there there's the sur version which has an isolation transformer polarity control and ground lift this is a great unit they typically run between 100 150 only available used at this point and another great one that's a little less expensive doesn't have that galvanic isolation but still has a ground lift option is made by bray and those can be got all day long on reverb for 50 bucks if you're gonna do a line out those are pretty much the only two ways that you can go both very good units so i would look for one of those if you want to do wet dry wet and you need to get a line out from your amplifier so you can perform that function next is parallel mixers now there's not a lot of options out there for this especially for the wet dry wet i think the best one out there that i've talked about regularly on the channel is going with the musicom lab parallelizer it's the best one out there it allows you to have three stereo devices as well as a dry mix you can have an individual mix for each one of those pedals it's midi controllable so you can sync that with any sort of switcher i think that's the best one out there if you want to do a true wet dry wet system in the fashion of the old rack rigs from the 80s and 90s now if you want to do something a little simpler than that and maybe just have one or two devices either mono or stereo you could get something like the wetter box from gig rig you can get something from old blood noise endeavors with their signal blender or you could get something from exotic like the x blender or stereo x blender depending on the type of devices that you wanted to synchronize all these of course are great it just depends on the number of pedals that you have and what exactly you want to do with them next is cabinet simulators things that are going to either put some sort of impulse response and have some sort of power amp simulation maybe even preamp simulation in some of these examples i really love the gfi cab juice i use this for wet dry wet all the time to simulate the power amp and speaker section in a wet dry wet context they have a stereo version and a mono version that are absolutely incredible also i really love the cab m from our friends over it two notes a very very good high quality unit which also has an option for a dedicated power amp simulation changing the different tube complements as well as a preamp simulation as well if you want that and you can bypass that if you want you can mess around with different room sounds mic complements also another great unit it is only available in mono however if you want to do stereo you could always get two of them and you could assign them whatever presets you wanted based on that lastly let's go to amp sims this is a new thing that a lot of people have gotten into and people are asking me about this all the time now my favorite all the amsterdams out there is the walrus and the main reason why i prefer to the other ones is that you can create dedicated channels with different amplifiers on each side of the stereo image so i could have a vox emulation on the left and a fender on the right or a marshall on the right and a box on the left i can change that up and i don't believe that the other simulators allow you to do that they only allow you to keep one sound on both channels so for that reason i really love the walrus i also think the tone and the feel to me was just as good as the other ones if not better so for that reason even though i'm strictly a tube amp guy if i had to go with one i would definitely say it was the walrus but i also think that the iridium sounds very good is certainly easy to use and strymon always builds high quality devices with high quality input and output buffers on it so you don't need to have any sort of additional buffering if you're going out of the iridium or the walrus for that matter they have very nice quality low output impedances now if you wanted to go fully analog there's of course the simplifier which has become a very popular unit i've tried one of these once and was quite impressed with the sound that it had in terms of the marshall emulating sound the fender the kind of more the vox sound although i wouldn't say that it was really necessarily superior to some of the digital emulations i would just say for anybody that's a true analog purist you want to have an effects loop which it does have which these other two digital devices don't the simplifier is certainly a benefit it also has those balanced outputs that are xlr that allows you to have a nice low impedance output to go back to your mixing board a very creative solution to give you a lot of different options all in one there's even a version now with reverb which i haven't tried but i would presume is the same basic circuit as the fully analog version without reverb so those were my pedal picks across the board i try to go through everything roughly in the sequence that it would be found in the pedalboard signal path and gave you some of my favorites i hope this is something that is useful for you if you're considering which pedals to try out or maybe you just want to take some of these recommendations and start experimenting over the next year and see what you like what you don't like and where we might line up if you have any other pics that you think that should be included in this or things that maybe i've mentioned before that you said yourself well why didn't i say this because i said it in another video please do put that in the comments i would always love to hear from you and if you want to support what we're doing you can always do that by heading over to our patreon page you can head over the rig doctor website you can purchase pedal boards all the accessory kits cables all the things that you see us using all of our pedalboard builds or head over to vertexfx.com and purchase one of our pedals that goes a long way in supporting the channel and allows us to continue coming out with high quality content every week just like we do now if you want to support us for free you can always go to our podcast and listen to us there thank you so much for watching i'm mason maringella aka the rig doctor see you later [Music]

Channel: Vertex Effects

Views: 81,639

Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, guitar pedals, pedalboards, my favorite pedals, the best pedals ever made, which guitar pedals should i buy, Guitar Pedals 2021, Guitar PEdals 2022, Best Cab Simulators, Best Amp Simulator Pedals, Best overdrive pedals, best fuzz pedals, best fuzz face clones, best chorus pedals, best distortion pedals, best wah pedals, best volume pedals, best compressor pedals, best univibe pedal, best delay pedals, best reverb pedals

Id: WrpJi6gtHoA

Length: 56min 15sec (3375 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 01 2021