
Yves Jarvis’ methods for simulating effects include using a whammy bar while riding his guitar’s volume for reversed guitar sounds. But many are done the old-fashioned way: manipulating tape on his TEAC reel-to-reel as it passes from one head to another.
Embracing battered 6-strings, lo-fi tech, tunings du jour, and his own restless muse, the singer-songwriter does whatever he can to make his guitar-playing life difficult.
Yves Jarvis—born Jean-Sébastien Yves Audet—is allergic to being complacent. “I don’t like to tune my guitar live,” the Canadian-born singer-songwriter says about his almost irrational fear of creative ennui. “I don’t even have a tuner. I like to make my entire set in the same tuning—that’ll be an alternate tuning, it’ll be something random. I force myself to find a way to reinterpret all my songs in the same tuning.”
In fact, Jarvis chooses one tuning for an entire tour. He does that although each of his songs first comes to life—as it is being written and recorded—in an original song-specific tuning. But tunings, at that early stage, are just compositional devices. Once a song is recorded, its tuning is forgotten, and when it’s time to hit the road, he relearns each song in the new tuning chosen for that tour. If he decides to reprise an older song, he learns it up yet again in that new tuning as well.
All that learning and tuning keeps Jarvis on his toes, which he finds exciting. “I get stuck in too many patterns, too many shapes, so I throw myself off,” he says. “I love being thrown off.”
Yves Jarvis - "Bootstrap Jubilee"
What was the tuning Jarvis used on his recent summer tour? Good question.
“I’m in D–A–D-something, that’s for sure,” he says. To figure out the rest, he brought his laptop—we spoke via Zoom—into another room with a piano. “Someone once asked me about my tuning at a show, and people think I’m being coy, but I actually don’t know what it is. I know how to get there with a guitar, but I don’t know what the notes are.”
He tuned up his guitar by ear, sat at the piano, and figured it out. It didn’t take long. His summer 2022 tuning was D–A–D–E–A–C#. It won’t be that again.
That type of unpredictable spontaneity is how Jarvis does everything. That explains his addiction to cheap gear, his aversion to pedals—which he never uses—and why he didn’t even bother with an amp on The Zug, his latest release, which he recorded at ArtScape, the artist-friendly place he was living in at the time. “It’s a subsidized-for-artists condo in Toronto [where rents are sky high] and the building is full of artists,” he says.
Yves Jarvis recorded his fourth album, The Zug, at Toronto’s ArtScape, a subsidized living space for artists. The Zug is a masterclass in lo-fi guitar orchestration on a limited budget.
The Zug is Jarvis’ fourth release since 2016 under the moniker Yves Jarvis (Jarvis is his mother’s maiden name), and prior to that he released the critically acclaimed Tenet under the name Un Blonde. In 2019, he was longlisted for a Polaris Music Prize. The Zug is an intimate collection of songs, and that means intimate, as in up close and personal. The vocals sound as if he’s whispering in your ear and letting you in on a joke. Jarvis plays all the instruments himself, and that includes an array of alternative timbres and sounds. “Noise was an issue,” he says about the challenges of recording in a condominium. “Nevertheless, I was playing the drums with chopsticks, but that was for feel, not for noise suppression.”
Chopsticks aside, most of the effects on The Zug were done with guitar. On songs like “At the Whims” and “Enemy,” Jarvis employs dramatic swells and backwards-sounding leads, which complement the more subtle fingerpicking and gentle warbles on “Prism Through Which I Perceive” and “You Offer a Mile.” The album is also a masterclass in lo-fi orchestration. Check out “Why” and, especially, “Stitchwork,” with its string-sounding pulses and layered effects that are, in a simple way, almost Beatle-esque. All done with guitar, and on a very limited budget.
But lo-fi also has its share of challenges. “I need to invest in a vocal mic because it would be nice to not have to do 100 takes of the same thing,” Jarvis says about his idiosyncratic multi-layered vocal sound. “It started out as an aesthetic thing, being that I wanted to create this texture that was inspired by D’Angelo—many voices at once, perfectly stacked. But then, layering became a necessity because I was not pleased with the single takes. In order for all the nuances of my voice to translate to the recording, I have to have multiple layers.”
“But I’m not averse, at all, to effects. I have just always gotten off on forcing myself to simulate my own effects.”
That labor-intensive effort is how Jarvis gets his guitar tones as well. As mentioned, he doesn’t use pedals. “I can’t imagine looking down at a pedalboard, frankly,” he says. “I think I’m getting there in my growth as an artist where I see the potential of using pedals. But that’s precisely the problem—too much potential. Although I see where I could benefit with experimenting with new tech.”
The distortion sounds were created by running his guitar into an old TEAC reel-to-reel machine—and a single, loved, beaten reel of tape—and then into the open-source DAW Audacity, which is ultimately where everything ends up. “It’s nice to manipulate sound with such an analog piece,” he says about his tape machine. “I also like stretching and distorting the tape. I’ve never really used a different reel of tape. It’s been the same reel on there for years and years and years, and the degradation of that reel has really played into the sound of the guitar. I think the best example of it on the record is at the end of ‘What?’ That electric guitar solo is the most quintessential sound of my TEAC, for sure.”
But Jarvis’ aversion to pedals doesn’t come from some purist notion of tone craft. Rather, similar to choosing a new tuning for each tour, he sees limitations as a creative tool, albeit with ideological strings attached. “Constraints are very helpful for me,” he says. “I don’t like options—especially in our culture today where everything is custom. You go into a restaurant, and you can customize your order, I hate that. Tell me what to get, or don’t tell me what to get, but constrain me. Two options are all I need. That’s where the experimentation comes from—from some sort of physical parameter like playing percussion backwards, for example, so that the feel is different—just little things like that. But I’m not averse, at all, to effects. I have just always gotten off on forcing myself to simulate my own effects.”
Yves Jarvis’ Gear
Yves Jarvis plays solo acoustic at the Colony in Woodstock, New York, in February 2022. His acoustic is a Fender he bought for $50 in Gravenhurst, Ontario.
Photo by Michael O’Neal
Guitars
- Fender acoustic
- Hondo Formula I
- Yellow S-style
Recording/Sound Manipulation
- Tascam Portastudio 424 MkIII
- TEAC Reel to Reel
Strings
- Any brand, heavy gauge, usually starting with a .012 for the high E
Jarvis’ methods for simulating effects aren’t completely outlandish. His reversed guitar sounds—which you can hear on The Zug’s “Enemy”—are done with a whammy bar and riding his guitar’s volume knob. Some of his delay-like effects are done the old-fashioned way: manipulating tape as it passes from one head to another.
Yet despite his embrace of the reel-to-reel, his first love is a Tascam Portastudio 424 MkIII multitrack cassette recorder. “I’ve gone through maybe a dozen Tascam 424 MkIIIs,” he says. “That’s the only piece of gear that I know about, which is crazy. Ten years ago, I got them for $100 bucks a pop every time. Now they’re $1,000 bucks.”
Another outgrowth of his quest for unpredictability is how Jarvis uses a capo, which he often places high up on the neck at around the 8th or 10th fret. He prefers it like that, with the strings taut, similar to a smaller-scale instrument like a ukulele or mandolin. It opens up a very different world of harmonics and other sonic possibilities, although he has more pedestrian reasons for using a capo, too, which is the difference in how he sings live versus the studio.
Once Jarvis records a song, its tuning is forgotten. When it’s time to hit the road, he relearns each song in a new tuning chosen for that tour. His 2022 tuning was D–A–D–E–A–C#.
Photo by Michael O’Neal
“I like my voice to be like a whisper on recordings, but live I like to really sing,” he says. “That’s the thing: The textural qualities that I’m looking to lay down on the record are not at all similar to what I’m trying to do live. Live, I like to be clear-eyed vocally, and with recordings I want it to be more of a whisper. That’s the main impetus for the capo, too. I usually perform the song much higher than the recording—although I also use a capo because I usually use pretty shitty gear—and I like the guitar to have that twang, that sharpness of a mandolin or something very taut.”
In Jarvis’ telling, that sharpness can take on a somewhat mystical feel as well. He’s searching for a certain synchronized resonance between his voice and the instrument’s natural vibrations. “I’m definitely making an effort to match those resonances,” he says. “The guitar on the chest, the guitar on the belly, and amplifying that, and amplifying each other. I feel that is a very deconstructive process in the studio, and then live it’s something that I’m trying to have as a unit, a package of songwriting.”
And just in case you think Jarvis doesn’t do enough to avoid becoming complacent, his instruments of choice are usually low-budget starter guitars, which, obviously, come with their own issues and quirks.
“I’m excited to plug in a cool guitar that I just got back. It’s a guitar I’ve had since I was a little kid: an electric Hondo. It’s an Explorer shape. It’s red and it’s got all these stripes on it.”
And his electric?
“I’m excited to plug in a cool guitar that I just got back,” he says. “It’s a guitar I’ve had since I was a little kid: an electric Hondo. It’s an Explorer shape. It’s red and it’s got all these stripes on it. I left it at my buddy’s when I lived in Calgary as a kid, and then he had it for 10-plus years. He fixed it up for me. He just gave it back and it sounds amazing. That’s a guitar that I’m really excited to have back because it’s just so dirty and gritty and sounds just straight off Neil Young’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, which is a beacon for me in terms of electric guitar tone.”
It’s not a gimmick. Jarvis is a unique, forward-thinking artist, and, ultimately, the tricks he employs make for engaging, compelling music—music that takes on new life with every retelling. “Because of the improvisational nature of the production, relearning my music and restructuring it in a more traditional format is really an exciting thing for me,” he says.
It’s exciting for his listeners, too.
Yves Jarvis - Full Performance (Live on KEXP at Home)
In this intimate acoustic performance recorded for Seattle’s KEXP radio, Yves Jarvis plays five songs with assistance from his faithful capo.
The two-in-one “sonic refractor” takes tremolo and wavefolding to radical new depths.
Pros: Huge range of usable sounds. Delicious distortion tones. Broadens your conception of what guitar can be.
Build quirks will turn some users off.
$279
Cosmodio Gravity Well
cosmod.io
Know what a wavefolder does to your guitar signal? If you don’t, that’s okay. I didn’t either until I started messing around with the all-analog Cosmodio Instruments Gravity Well. It’s a dual-effect pedal with a tremolo and wavefolder, the latter more widely used in synthesis that , at a certain threshold, shifts or inverts the direction the wave is traveling—in essence, folding it upon itself. Used together here, they make up what Cosmodio calls a sonic refractor.
Two Plus One
Gravity Well’s design and control set make it a charm to use. Two footswitches engage tremolo and wavefolder independently, and one of three toggle switches swaps the order of the effects. The two 3-way switches toggle different tone and voice options, from darker and thicker to brighter and more aggressive. (Mixing and matching with these two toggles yields great results.)
The wavefolder, which has an all-analog signal path bit a digitally controlled LFO, is controlled by knobs for both gain and volume, which provide enormous dynamic range. The LFO tremolo gets three knobs: speed, depth, and waveform. The first two are self-explanatory, but the latter offers switching between eight different tremolo waveforms. You’ll find standard sawtooth, triangle, square, and sine waves, but Cosmodio also included some wacko shapes: asymmetric swoop, ramp, sample and hold, and random. These weirder forms force truly weird relationships with the pedal, forcing your playing into increasingly unpredictable and bizarre territories.
This is all housed in a trippy, beautifully decorated Hammond 1590BB-sized enclosure, with in/out, expression pedal, and power jacks. I had concerns about the durability of the expression jack because it’s not sealed to its opening with an outer nut and washer, making it feel more susceptible to damage if a cable gets stepped on or jostled near the connection, as well as from moisture. After a look at the interior, though, the build seems sturdy as any I’ve seen.
Splatterhouse Audio
Cosmodio’s claim that the refractor is a “first-of-its-kind” modulation effect is pretty grand, but they have a point in that the wavefolder is rare-ish in the guitar domain and pairing it with tremolo creates some pretty foreign sounds. Barton McGuire, the Massachusetts-based builder behind Cosmodio, released a few videos that demonstrate, visually, how a wavefolder impacts your guitar’s signal—I highly suggest checking them out to understand some of the principles behind the effect (and to see an ’80s Muppet Babies-branded keyboard in action.)
By folding a waveform back on itself, rather than clipping it as a conventional distortion would, the wavefolder section produces colliding, reflecting overtones and harmonics. The resulting distortion is unique: It can sound lo-fi and broken in the low- to mid-gain range, or synthy and extraterrestrial when the gain is dimed. Add in the tremolo, and you’ve got a lot of sonic variables to play with.
Used independently, the tremolo effect is great, but the wavefolder is where the real fun is. With the gain at 12 o’clock, it mimics a vintage 1x10 tube amp cranked to the breaking point by a splatty germanium OD. A soft touch cleans up the signal really nicely, while maintaining the weirdness the wavefolder imparts to its signal. With forceful pick strokes at high gain, it functions like a unique fuzz-distortion hybrid with bizarre alien artifacts punching through the synthy goop.
One forum commenter suggested that the Gravity Well effect is often in charge as much the guitar itself, and that’s spot on at the pedal's extremes. Whatever you expect from your usual playing techniques tends to go out the window —generating instead crumbling, sputtering bursts of blubbering sound. Learning to respond to the pedal in these environments can redefine the guitar as an instrument, and that’s a big part of Gravity Well’s magic.
The Verdict
Gravity Well is the most fun I’ve had with a modulation pedal in a while. It strikes a brilliant balance between adventurous and useful, with a broad range of LFO modulations and a totally excellent oddball distortion. The combination of the two effects yields some of the coolest sounds I’ve heard from an electric guitar, and at $279, it’s a very reasonably priced journey to deeply inspiring corners you probably never expected your 6-string (or bass, or drums, or Muppet Babies Casio EP-10) to lead you to.
The author in the spray booth.
Does the type of finish on an electric guitar—whether nitro, poly, or oil and wax—really affect its tone?
There’s an allure to the sound and feel of a great electric guitar. Many of us believe those instruments have something special that speaks not just to the ear but to the soul, where every note, every nuance feels personal. As much as we obsess over the pickups, wood, and hardware, there’s a subtler, more controversial character at play: the role of the finish. It’s the shimmering outer skin of the guitar, which some think exists solely for protection and aesthetics, and others insist has a role influencing the voice of the instrument. Builders pontificate about how their choice of finishing material may enhance tone by allowing the guitar to “breathe,” or resonate unfettered. They throw around terms like plasticizers, solids percentages, and “thin skin” to lend support to their claims. Are these people tripping? Say what you will, but I believe there is another truth behind the smoke.
It’s the shimmering outer skin of the guitar, which some think exists solely for protection and aesthetics, and others insist has a role influencing the voice of the instrument. Builders pontificate about how their choice of finishing material may enhance tone by allowing the guitar to “breathe,” or resonate unfettered. They throw around terms like plasticizers, solids percentages, and “thin skin” to lend support to their claims. Are these people tripping? Say what you will, but I believe there is another truth behind the smoke.
Nitrocellulose lacquer, or “nitro,” has long been the finish of choice for vintage guitar buffs, and it’s easy to see why. Used by Fender, Gibson, and other legendary manufacturers from the 1950s through the 1970s, nitro has a history as storied as the instruments it’s adorned. Its appeal lies not just in its beauty but in its delicate nature. Nitro, unlike some modern finishes, can be fragile. It wears and cracks over time, creating a visual patina that tells the story of every song, every stage, every late-night jam session. The sonic argument goes like this: Nitro is thin, almost imperceptible. It wraps the wood like silk. The sound is unhindered, alive, warm, and dynamic. It’s as if the guitar has a more intimate connection between its wood and the player's touch. Of course, some call bullscheiße.
In my estimation, nitro is not just about tonal gratification. Just like any finish, it can be laid on thick or thin. Some have added flexibility agents (those plasticizers) that help resist damage. But as it ages, old-school nitro can begin to wear and “check,” as subtle lines weave across the body of the guitar. And with those changes comes a mellowing, as if the guitar itself is growing wiser with age. Whether a tonal shift is real or imagined is part of the mystique, but it’s undeniable that a nitro-finished guitar has a feel that harkens back to a romantic time in music, and for some that’s enough.
Enter the modern era, and we find a shift toward practicality—polyurethane and polyester finishes, commonly known as “poly.” These finishes, while not as romantic as nitro, serve a different kind of beauty. They are durable, resilient, and protective. If nitro is like a delicate silk scarf, poly is armor—sometimes thicker, shinier, and built to last. The fact that they reduce production times is a bonus that rarely gets mentioned. For the player who prizes consistency and durability, poly is a guardian. But in that protection, some say, comes a price. Some argue that the sound becomes more controlled, more focused—but less alive. Still, poly finishes have their own kind of charm. They certainly maintain that showroom-fresh look, and to someone who likes to polish and detail their prized possessions, that can be a big plus.
“With those changes comes a mellowing, as if the guitar itself is growing wiser with age.”
For those seeking an even more natural experience, oil and wax finishes offer something primal. These finishes, often applied by hand, mostly penetrate the wood as much as coating it, leaving the guitar’s surface nearly bare. Proponents of oil and/or wax finishes say these materials allow the wood to vibrate freely, unencumbered by “heavy” coatings. The theory is there’s nothing getting in the way—sort of like a nudist colony mantra. Without the protection of nitro or poly, these guitars may wear more quickly, bearing the scars of its life more openly. This can be seen as a plus or minus, I imagine.
My take is that finishes matter because they are part of the bond we have with our instruments. I can’t say that I can hear a difference, and I think a myth has sprouted from the acoustic guitar world where maybe you can. Those who remove their instrument’s finish and claim to notice a difference are going on memory for the comparison. Who is to say every component (including strings) went back together exactly the same? So when we think about finishes, we’re not just talking about tone—we’re thinking about the total connection between musician and instrument. It’s that perception that makes a guitar more than just wood and wire. The vibe makes it a living, breathing part of the music—and you.
Featuring a preamp and Dynamic Expansion circuit for punch and attack, plus switchable amp simulations.
"Like a missile seeking its target, Heatseeker will give you the explosive sound of rock! Inspired directly from the gear setup used by Angus Young,it features the most important sonic elements to match the tone of the short-pants-rock-God.
It’s no secret that a major role to his sound, along with the Marshall-brick walls, played one of the first wireless systems for guitar that quickly became a classic among guitar greats, the Schaffer Vega Diversity System."
The preamp along with the Dynamic Expansion circuit found in the wireless transmitter/receiver gave it its distinct sound. Besides boosting the signal, the preamp tightens up lower frequencies and slightly accentuates mid frequencies while the Dynamic Expansion circuit enhances the dynamic response and harmonics of the signal giving punch and attack to ensure that it will cut through the mix. Instead of opting for a prefix setting for the Dynamic Expansion circuit as found in the original unit, we have re-imagined our version with the enhanced knob on the Heatseeker to have more control over the guitar tone’s dynamic response. Setting it around 10 o‘clock is a good starting point to add some extra sparkle. Max it out to bring back to life even the most dull and colorless sounds.
Utilizing an all-analog JFET circuit, running on 27 volts via an internal voltage boost (DO NOT plug higher than 9V DC power supply), we have captured the tone and feel of three British tube amplifiers, synonymous with the sound of rock and roll, with an excellent clean-to-mean dynamic response. With the flip of a toggle switch, you can capture the sound and feel of a JTM45, 1959 Super Lead, or JMP 2203. A smart switching circuit follows the signal path and respective gain stages tuned for each amp and combines them with an actual Marshall style EQ and power amp simula-tion circuit for thundering rock tones. Angus Young usually plugs into Channel 1 or High Treble input of his JTM45s and Super Leads so we opted for that sound when we started visualizing Heatseeker on the drawing board. We have also extended the range of the presence control beyond the original so that the user will be able to match the pedal to any amp or gear setup. The master volume offers plenty of output so that you can also use the pedal as a preamp and plug it into a clean power amp or straight to your DAW. Note that the pedal doesn’t feature any speaker simulation circuit so we recommend using a separate hardware or software guitar speaker simulation when going direct to DAW or a full-range speaker.
A new feature to our booster/drive + amp-in-a-box line of pedals, recreating legendary sounds, is the switchable WoS (Wall of Sound) circuit. We have carefully tuned this circuit at the output of the AMP section of the Heatseeker to open up the soundstage by increasing the output, adding thundering lows, and thickening high mid frequencies. Imagine standing in front of a wall loaded with Marshall amp heads and 4x12 speaker cabinets, grabbing your SG, and hitting a chord. You will be blown away by the sound projection! In combination with the tube power amp simulation and the enhanced circuit of the right section, we’ve made sure that the pick attack will be as dynamic as it gets, so¥er picking will produce clean and slightly crunchy sounds, and hard picking will give explosive distorted sounds! While primarily designed for Angus Young sounds, Heatseeker will definitely open the door to countless other guitar-great tones that use these Marshall amps and/or the Schaffer Vega Diversity System. Think of KISS, Peter Frampton, and Van Halen to name a few.
Like our other dual overdrive/amp-in-a-box designs, Heatseeker features a passive effects loop to give you the option to connect your beloved pedals between the preamp/enhancer and amp-in-a-box circuit or use the two sections as separate and independent effects when using an external bypass switcher/looper. SND is the output of the BOOST/ENHANCE section, RTN is the input of the AMP section. SND is connected to RTN when no instrument jacks are inserted in the effects loop. Note that all pedals inserted in the passive effects loop are still in the signal chain when any or both sections of the Heatseeker are in bypass mode.
Heatseeker features a power-up bypass/engage pre-set function for the footswitches. You can change the default function by holding down the footswitch(es) during power-up. That way you can select which state your pedal will go to when you plug the power supply. This function comes in especially handy to people who use remote pedal switchers/loopers as they only set the state of the pedal once and then operate from the controller.
Street/MAP Price: $279
For more information, please visit crazytubecircuits.com.
A thick, varied take on the silicon Fuzz Face that spans punky, sparkling, and full-spectrum heavy.
Dimensional, thick variations on the silicon Fuzz Face voice. Surprisingly responsive to dynamics at most tube amp’s natural clean/dirty divide. Bass control lends range.
Thins out considerably at lower amp volumes.
$185
McGregor Pedals Classic Fuzz
mcgregorpedals.com
Compared to the dynamic germanium Fuzz Face, silicon versions sometimes come off as brutish. And even though they can be sonorously vicious, if dirty-to-clean range and sensitivity to guitar volume attenuation are top priorities, germanium is probably the way to go. The McGregor Classic Fuzz, however, offers ample reminders about the many ways silicon Fuzz Faces can be beastly, sensitive, and sound supreme.
Even though the two BC107B top hat transistors will look familiar to many who have poked around other SFF-style circuits, the Classic Fuzz is not precisely a silicon Fuzz Face clone. It’s distinguished by a low-pass filter “bass” control that true SFFs lack, but which widens its vocabulary extensively. In an A/B test with a solid, archetypal-sounding BC108 Fuzz Face clone, the Classic Fuzz sounded roughly equivalent at the 60-percent mark of the bass control’s range. But the Classic Fuzz was more dimensional, and on either side of the bass control I heard many intriguing tone variations spanning garage-punk snot and corpulent, almost triangle-Big Muff thickness.
Like most SFFs, the Classic Fuzz sounds best with a generous spoonful of amp volume. I ran it with a Fender Vibrolux just on the clean side of breakup. At amp volumes much lower than that, the fuzz voice thinned, the nuanced responsiveness to guitar volume attenuation dropped off, and the range of clean tones became much narrower. In its happy places, though, the Classic Fuzz rips—lending sparkling overdrive colors and banshee-scream aggression to Stratocasters and sounding especially sweet and terrifyingly mammoth with humbuckers