When you get right down to it, there’s no formula
or complex calculus for determining what makes
one particular axe-slinger stand out from the crowd. Is
it all in your technique, or is it all about that elusive
feel? Do you have rock-star swagger, or are you the more
cerebral type? Are you a badass riff machine, or can you
solo circles around so-and-so?
Whatever the defining mojo really is, one thing
we know for sure is that we know it when we hear
it. There’s an unmistakable signature to a gritty Keith
Richards riff or a kamikaze Jimi Hendrix solo. Strip it
down to its basics, and most of what makes it memorable
comes from the personal stamp of the guy doing
the playing. But there’s something else afoot here. The
magic isn’t just in what they’re playing or how they’re
playing it—it’s in how all that interacts and intertwines
with sonic signatures imparted by the gear they use.
Throughout the history of electric guitar, so much
of that magical mojo has been spun from the electric
innards of stompboxes—wah-wahs, phasers, flangers,
envelope filters, fuzz units, and more. Effects pedals are
the great democratizers: Get yourself a distortion box,
and you too can be a rock star! But, more importantly,
they’re portals to new worlds of tone. Anyone can
use them, and anyone, with the right combination of
devices, timing, and/or technique can get a sound out
of them that no one has ever heard before. Whether
that’s a sound worth hearing again is a matter of taste,
but when everything clicks, it can be legendary.
That sound can happen instantly, almost by accident,
or it can take years of exploration. As Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, guitarist for the Mars Volta, will tell you, curiosity
does have its payoffs. “I remember when I got my first
delay pedal,” he says. “I’ve always used pedals to hide my
playing, and now as I’ve been able to evolve as a player,
I can remember that the thing I loved most about the
delay pedal was that I could use a certain time setting,
and it sounded like I was playing way more than I was.
It made me want to learn how to play the way the delay
sounded. The pedal itself pushed me to learn more about
my instrument. I always liked this idea and this part of
the process. It’s about learning from your gear, and learning
from these little metal boxes that supposedly have no
life and no influence, you know?”
There are countless examples of inventive players
who’ve redefined how we hear music and guitar because
of the unique way they’ve absolutely owned a specific
effect pedal. It would be impossible to try to list them
all, but here we’ve chosen what we believe are the 10
most historically significant instances of intrepid players
who pushed a specific stompbox to its limits and
changed the world as we know it.