
One of the industry’s most esteemed builders shows us 5 easy (and practically free) mods to hot-rod your electric.
Some guitarists consider the notion of modifying an electric guitar from its stock configuration distasteful, while others consider it mandatory. As a custom builder with a decidedly vintage background, I fall somewhere in between. Generally, I’m most in favor of maximizing an instrument’s usability without jeopardizing the ability to return it to original condition.
However, when I’m building a guitar, there’s a myriad of small adjustments I can make to steer the instrument on a desired trajectory. These micro mods are interactive with each other and, depending upon the combination, offer a wide variety of sonic outcomes. But these little mods can also be applied to existing guitars—your guitars—in any number of permutations and to great affect. Let’s take a look at five mods that are easy enough for most players to try.
1. Foaming Pickup Cavities
The first and easiest adjustment that most electric guitars can benefit from is stuffing soft foam into the cavity behind the pickups in order to stop microphonic squealing. The first time I used this was when I was repairing a Gibson Firebird for Johnny Winter—the foam stopped the pickup’s back plate from vibrating like a microphone diaphragm. I have since learned that reducing the space (the cubic volume) behind a pickup modifies its sound at higher sound levels. Discovering this resonating-chamber effect has altered my approach to routing a body for pickups on new guitars, too.
It’s easy to remove your pickup or pickguard and slide some foam rubber behind the unit. Start with soft foam first, and then increase the density to find the difference you like. Conveniently, the gray foam used in aftermarket pickup packaging makes great damping material: It’s soft enough that you can double it up (see Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) to create more pressure on the pickup’s back plate, too. This is a relatively no-frills mod that requires minimal materials and tools.
2. Pickup Magnet Tricks
As we all know, sometimes a pickup isn’t a perfect match for a guitar. I always approach pickup selection like a vocalist would choose a microphone—finding the one that best brings out the guitar’s character rather than attempting to change that innate character with a new pickup.
With this in mind, try swapping your existing pickups’ magnets instead of replacing the whole thing. Magnet type and strength are big contributors to a pickup’s tonality, so it stands to reason that tweaking them will affect your sound.
Swapping magnets is easiest to do with humbuckers. In fact, it can actually be done without completely disassembling the pickup—and sometimes without even unsoldering it.
The first step is to determine what’s in your pickup already. The most common magnets for humbuckers are (roughly in order of strength): alnico 2, alnico 4, alnico 5, and then various types of ceramic magnets. In simple terms, the stronger the magnet, the greater the potential output. But you can’t just look at magnetic strength alone, because stronger magnets also affect the string’s ability to sustain.
By moving up or down one level, in terms of magnetic strength, you can usually add or subtract a little edge from a pickup. If your guitar is too tangy, moving down one pickup level (e.g., from alnico 4 to alnico 2) may smooth it out. If you want to add bite, go with a slightly stronger magnet—like, alnico 5 to a ceramic magnet. The good part is that magnets are both easy to find and inexpensive in comparison to buying a whole new pickup.
Here’s how to swap magnets in a humbucker:
1. Before you begin, determine the magnet’s polarity orientation (north/south). You can use a simple magnetic compass to do this (Fig. 3).
2. Desolder the main leads and remove the pickup from your guitar.
3. Remove the protective outer tape (Fig. 4). This gives you a clear view of the internal parts. (Note: Be careful not to pull out the hookup wires underneath.) You should be able to see the magnet in the center, underneath the two coils.
4. Loosen the four small coil-mount screws on the underside of the pickup (Fig. 5).
5. Raise each of the adjustable pole pieces about four turns to release the coil from the back plate (Fig. 6).
6. Gently pry the coils from the plate to provide a little gap (Fig. 7).
7. Place a screwdriver in the gap at one end of the pickup and slowly tap the magnet out (Fig. 8). Once enough of the magnet is exposed outside the housing, you’ll be able to pull the magnet out with your fingers. (Note: If your pickup is wax-potted, you may encounter some initial resistance as the wax breaks free.)
8. Slide in your new magnet, being careful to match the same magnetic orientation you observed in step 1 (Fig. 9).
9. Return the adjustable pole pieces to their prior position, replace the coil-mount screws and tape, and re-install the pickup in your guitar.
3. Modern vs. Vintage Wiring
Another relatively drastic but easy and cheap way to hot-rod your guitar’s sound with its current components is to alter how and where its volume and tone pots are connected to each other. The difference can be subtle—and it’s more a matter of preference than what’s “correct”—but it can make the difference between a guitar that is just OK and one that really is a joy to play.
With this mod, what you’re essentially doing is changing the way the tone and volume control interact, based upon how they “load” each other. I’ve mocked up a control setup here showing one volume and the corresponding tone control.
Fig. 10 Vintage wiring—which has pickups wired to the volume pot alone, and the tone control’s capacitor being attached to the output—yields minimal high-end roll-off when you turn the volume down. Fig. 11 Modern pickup circuits often have the tone control affecting the pickup’s tone before it gets to the volume knob, yielding a decrease in treble response as volume is reduced.
In the vintage setup, the pickup is wired to the pot lug alone, with the tone control capacitor being attached to the output side. This tends to allow the volume to be rolled off without losing too much high end. This is great for those who play clean rhythm by just lowering their guitar volume as opposed to switching amp channels or turning off a boost pedal. It’s old-school, and it works. The downside is that the tone control sometimes has to be rotated a bit more before its effects are heard.
In our so-called modern configuration, the tone cap is attached to the pickup before the volume pot. This presents the volume control with a totally different signal, resulting in a more colored sound as you reduce the volume. This can be useful if you like to turn up the guitar to cut through more. For me, the downside is the way it makes the tone control a bit of a hair-trigger affair. If you’re the type who avoids the tone control, this won’t be a factor for you.
If you have two sets of volume and tone controls (e.g., on a standard Les Paul), you may or may not decide to wire them differently, which can potentially open the door to even more tonal variations.
4. Add Steely Twang to Your Strat
There are times when a single-coil just doesn’t have enough twang. I’ve encountered Strat neck pickups that are just too wooly to provide me with that saucy, SRV/Hendrix-style rhythm juice. Or, sometimes an anemic bridge pickup just needs an extra dose of snap to push it into Tele-like territory. If so, this simple mod could be just what you’re looking for.
When Leo and the boys at the big “F” ranch developed the Tele, they put a big slab of steel under the bridge-pickup coil. This reflected the magnetic field up and toward the strings. In the words of Seymour Duncan’s Evan Skopp, this gives it more “crack”—which, if you’re addicted to twang, is a good thing. The better news is that you can attach a plate (sometimes called an elevator plate, because of how it elevates the magnetic field toward the strings) to any single coil whose pole-piece magnets are exposed at the back.
To do so, purchase a small piece of .047"(18-gauge) sheet steel from your local hardware store. Then:
1. Trim it to a manageable size and shape—about the same dimension as the pickup bobbin (Fig. 12). Then trim it so that it fits within the perimeter of the base plate without touching the lead wire contacts (Fig. 13). 2. Using a small piece of thin, double-sided tape, fit the plate over the bottom of the pickup, and then secure it with dabs of adhesive (Fig. 14). I prefer hot glue, because it’s easy to remove, but you can use epoxy or super glue, too.
This mod works great for Strat-type pickups or aftermarket Tele-style reproduction pickups that don’t already have a plate. Some pickup companies make P-90s that don’t have a metal base plate, and these can be twang-ified in this way, too. The best part is that, if you don’t like the sound, you can just peel the plate off and be right back where you started.
5. Fine-Tuning Your Tuners
This mod is a little different—and definitely not as affordable as the ones we’ve been talking about up to this point. When players think about modifications that involve tuning machines, the subject revolves around tuning stability. That’s all well and good, but I’ve rarely encountered a quality machine that slips—because the mechanical torque required to turn the tuner’s capstan is pretty stout. Problems of pitch are usually more related to capstan wobble or a bad nut-slotting job.
However, there’s another aspect of machine-head selection that I contemplate when building a custom guitar: weight. But this is more about sustain and tone than a question of neck-heaviness.
I’ve written in previous issues of Premier Guitar about how the size and shape of a guitar’s headstock affect its sustain and tone. Clearly, the mass of the tuning machines is a factor in this, as well. Having overseen the building of tens of thousands of custom guitars over the course of my career has given me cause to consider machine-head weight as a fine-tuning tool in and of itself. This kind of mod is more complex than the others I’ve presented here because it is harder to predict, and obviously more costly to dabble in because it involves replacing the existing tuners. Nevertheless, I put it out there for those of you who are willing to go to the limit of sanity in the search for a responsive instrument.
This mod revolves around the concept that adding mass to the headstock lowers its resonant frequency, while reducing mass will raise that frequency. The theory at work here is that vibration is absorbed or reflected back into the strings and body based upon this frequency. Depending upon the harmonic makeup of your particular instrument, changing this can enhance or degrade sustain and accentuate or attenuate certain harmonics. All of this is dependent not only on your guitar’s construction, but also on how large your headstock is to begin with. If all of this seems a bit hazy, that’s because it is. I don’t have a handy-dandy answer like “more mass equals more sustain” because it isn’t always true. Suffice it to say that you can make a difference in a guitar’s character by following this path. I usually go through this exercise with my builds because I have the luxury of time and the resources at hand. It’s like fine tuning a race car’s suspension settings to your liking.
Most of the better machine heads on the market these days use a standard .375" headstock hole, so swapping tuners isn’t that hard to do. The problem comes with the mounting at the rear of the peghead. Luckily, if you use the type that screw down from the front side with a nut and washer, you can swap and test before you drill additional mounting-screw holes.
To illustrate the potential variances in weight that one can expect with different tuners, I rounded up three of the most common choices and threw them on my shop scale. You can weigh your current machines to compare. Be sure to weigh all the hardware— screws, nuts, and washers—because it all comes into play. (All weights are in grams.)
The lightest of the bunch are minimalist Sperzel tuners, which look pretty sci-fi. They clocked in at 138 grams (Fig. 15). Well-made and beautifully finished, the Sperzels use a pin-mount on the back instead of wood screws—further reducing weight. This can be a game-changer if you have a substantial headstock.
Next up are the wonderful vintage Kluson reproductions by TonePros (Fig. 16). These are some of my favorites, and they weigh in at a moderate 186 grams with all hardware included. For many of my builds, the characteristics of these tuners are ideal. I enjoy the modern engineering these tuners hide within their vintage-styled exteriors, and the weight is almost perfect.
Unabashedly brute class, with typical German overbuilding, the Schallers shown here are the Incredible Hulk of the bunch (Fig. 17). At a hefty 272 grams, they have the might to get noticed when you fasten them to your axe. If you have a guitar with a tiny headstock, you’ll hear and feel a difference with the Schallers. Whether or not you like the change is subjective, and it depends on the makeup of the rest of your guitar.
Sweat the Small Stuff
As we’ve shown here, a lot of relatively small—and inexpensive (many are practically free)—tweaks can hot-rod your tone and maneuver it to an array of differing ports of call. In some ways, it’s like tossing a handful of dice instead of just two—because the way small tweaks interact can lead to exponential changes in sound. For that reason, my advice is to take it slow and only make a single change at a time to understand what it delivers. Besides, it’s more fun (and less stressful) that way, anyway!
[Updated 12/30/21]
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The Sunset is a fully analog, zero latency bass amplifier simulator. It features a ¼” input, XLR and ¼” outputs, gain and volume controls and extensive equalization. It’s intended to replace your bass amp both live and in the studio.
If you need a full sounding amp simulator with a lot of EQ, the Sunset is for you. It features a five band equalizer with Treble, Bass, Parametric Midrange (with frequency and level controls), Resonance (for ultra lows), and Presence (for ultra highs). All are carefully tuned for bass guitar. But don’t let that hold you back if you’re a keyboard player. Pianos and synthesizers sound great with the Sunset!
The Sunset includes Gain and master Volume controls which allow you to add compression and classic tube amp growl. It has both ¼” phone and balanced XLR outputs - which lets you use it as a high quality active direct box. Finally, the Sunset features zero latency all analog circuitry – important for the instrument most responsible for the band’s groove.
Introducing the Sunset Bass Amp Simulator
- Zero Latency bass amp simulator.
- Go direct into the PA or DAW.
- Five Band EQ:
- Treble and Bass controls.
- Parametric midrange with level and frequency controls.
- Presence control for extreme highs.
- Resonance control for extreme lows.
- Gain control to add compression and harmonics.
- Master Volume.
- XLR and 1/4" outputs.
- Full bypass.
- 9VDC, 200mA.
Artwork by Aaron Cheney
MAP price: $210 USD ($299 CAD).
Belltone Guitars has partnered Brickhouse Toneworks to create a one-of-a-kind, truly noiseless Strat/Tele-tone pickup in a standard Filter’Tron size format: the Single-Bell pickup.
The Single-Bell by Brickhouse Toneworks delivers bonafide single-coil Strat and Tele tones with the power of a P-90 and no 60-cycle hum. Unlike typical stacked hum-cancelling designs, Brickhouse Toneworks uses a proprietary ‘sidewind’ approach that cancels the 60-cycle hum without sacrificing any of the dynamics or top-end sparkle of a Fender-style single coil.
Get the best of both worlds with clear bell-like tones on the neck pickup, signature quack when combining the neck and bridge pickups, and pristine twang in the bridge position backed with the fullness and power of a P-90. Push these into overdrive and experience the hallmark blues tone with plenty of grit and harmonic sustain — all with completely noiseless performance.
Key Features of the Single-Bell:
- Cast Alnico 5 Magnet, designed to be used with 500k pots
- Voiced to capture that signature Fender-style single coil tone without the 60-cycle hum
- Lightly potted to minimize squeal
- Made in the USA with premium quality materials
The retail price for a Bridge and Neck matching set is $340.00 and they’re available directly and exclusively through Belltone® Guitars / Brickhouse Toneworks at belltoneguitars.com.
Making a quiet, contemplative album allows Isbell to reflect on the material in a new way and to really explore the relationship between his guitar and voice, which he’d recently lost and reclaimed.
With his new album, the Americana hero faces the microphone alone—save for a 1940 Martin 0-17—and emerges with an album full of nuanced emotional touchstones framed by the gentle side of his virtuosic musicianship.
Imagine, just for a moment, that you’re a successful, internationally recognized singer, songwriter, and guitarist. (Nice dream, right?) You’ve been in the public eye nearly a quarter-century, and for all that time you’ve either been a band member or a band leader. Then one day you decide the time is right to step out on your own, for real. You write a bunch of new songs with the express intent of recording them solo—one voice and one acoustic guitar, performed simultaneously—and releasing the best of those recordings as your next album. No overdubs. No hiding behind other musicians. No hiding behind technology. For the first time, it’s all you and only you.
Would you be excited? Would you be petrified?
This is the challenge that Jason Isbell voluntarily took on for his 10th and latest album, Foxes in the Snow. There were some extenuating circumstances. He was sorting through the aftermath of a very public breakup with his longtime partner in life and music, singer/violinist Amanda Shires, and the new songs reflected that situation, sometimes uncomfortably. Music this personal needed a personal approach. And so, when Isbell entered Electric Lady Studios in New York City for five days of recording last October, none of the members of his regular band the 400 Unit were there. He was accompanied only by co-producer/engineer Gena Johnson, who’s worked with him regularly for the past eight years.
Soundstream
“It was difficult to pull off,” Isbell acknowledges via Zoom from his Nashville homebase, “but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird. And that’s important to me, because what I don’t want to do is write a bunch of songs and then go in the studio and intentionally try to make them sound strange, just so they don’t sound like things I’ve done in the past. It made sense to me to just walk into a studio with a guitar and a notebook and make a record that way. First of all, because I can, and I’m grateful for the fact that I can. And I also thought that it would be really hard. And it was.”
Although Foxes in the Snow is Jason Isbell’s first solo acoustic album, acoustic guitars have long been a part of his onstage 6-string regimen.
Photo by Tim Bugbee/Tinnitus Photography
Making it especially hard was Isbell’s insistence on not overdubbing his vocals. “I didn’t want [the album] to sound like anything that could have been replicated or fabricated,” he explains. “I wanted it to sound like somebody playing a guitar and singing. To me, the only way to do that was just to go in there, sit down, and play it. And it’s hardto play the guitar and sing at the same time in the studio. Normally, that’s something you wouldn’t do; you’d be in a really controlled environment with mics on the guitar, everything would be isolated, and you’d have to play very carefully, not the way you play live. The idea of doing that while singing master vocal takes … well, it was tough, because if you screw up, well, you just screwed up. But the good news is you don’t have to make everybody else start over, and I liked that. I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
“I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big.”
Being aware of the difficulties and doing it anyway—that can’t help but be a vote of confidence in one’s own ability as a musician. And it should come as no great surprise that Isbell’s confidence was well-founded. Foxes in the Snow shines a bright spotlight on his guitar playing, and the playing proves eminently worthy of such a showcase. From the bluegrass-tinged solo on “Bury Me” to the Richard Thompson-esque fingerpicking at the end of “Ride to Robert’s” and the bouncy, almost Irish-reel-like hook of “Open and Close,” Isbell always gets the job done, coming up with tasty parts and executing them with panache. It’s been easy to forget in recent years amid all the critical accolades and Grammy wins that when Drive-By Truckers brought Isbell into their fold in 2001—his first major-league gig—they didn’t do it because of his singing or songwriting, which were still unknown quantities at the time; they did it because of his considerable skills as a guitarist. By putting those skills on display, Foxes in the Snow helps rebalance the Isbell equation.
Isbell says his new album was “difficult to pull off, but it didn’t require me to look for ways to make the record sound weird.”
Jason Isbell’s Gear
Acoustic Guitars
- 1940 Martin 0-17
- Martin Custom Shop 000-18 1937
- Two Martin OM-28 Modern Deluxes
- Martin D-35
- 1940s Gibson J-45
- Fishman Aura pickup systems
Electric Guitars
Amps
- 1964 Fender Vibroverb
- Dumble Overdrive Special
- Tweed Fender Twin
Strings, Picks, & Capos
- Martin Marquis phosphor bronze acoustic lights (.012–.054)
- Ernie Ball Regular Slinkys (.010–.046)
- Dunlop Tortex 1.14 mm picks
- McKinney-Elliott capos
And it does so while employing one guitar and one guitar only: an all-mahogany 1940 Martin 0-17, purchased within the past couple of years at Retrofret Vintage Guitars in Brooklyn. “My girlfriend [artist Anna Weyant] lives in New York,” Isbell notes, “and I didn’t want to keep bringing acoustics back and forth. I’ve got a lot of old Martins and Gibsons, and I don’t love to travel with them and subject them to air pressure and humidity changes. So I needed a guitar that could just stay in New York. As far as pre-war Martins go, it’s about the least special model that you could possibly find. But it sat perfectly in the mix. I brought an old D-18 into the studio, like a ’36 or ’37, and it sounded beautiful, but it didn’t sit in the right spot. It ate up so much space, and it was so big. The sonic range of that guitar was overpowering for what I was trying to do, and with the little single-0 I could control where it was in relation to my vocal.”
“There’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.”
That control was important, because Isbell’s voice is spotlighted even more brightly on the new album than his guitar work. If you hear more strength in his singing these days, it’s not your imagination; he hired himself a vocal coach last year—out of necessity. “My voice failed,” he says simply. “I didn’t have any nodules or anything, but for some reason, anything above the middle of my range was gone. It was painful and embarrassing. I was doing the MusiCares tribute to Bon Jovi [in February 2024] and my voice was gone and I knew it. I was singing ‘Wanted Dead or Alive’ on stage, and I looked down and there’s Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney all staring at me, and I knew that I had to sing in front of them with a busted voice.” He pauses and sighs. The sense of humiliation is palpable.
“You know, I did it,” he continues after a few seconds. “I did my best, and it was not good. And then after that I started working with this coach, and it made a huge difference. I figured out that I hadn’t been singing in a way that was anatomically correct. I’d been squeezing and pushing all these notes out, and [the coach] was good enough to manage to keep my vocal quality the same; I didn’t have to change the way I sounded, I just gained a wider range and a lot more stability. Now I’m able to sing more shows in a row without having vocal trouble. It’s been really, really nice.” He pauses again, this time to laugh. “And I made fun of people for so many years for blowing bubbles and, you know, doing all the lip trills and everything backstage … but here I am doing it myself.”
While recording sans band, Isbell said, “I liked the fact that if I messed up, I could just stop and immediately try another take.”
Isbell’s voice has made gains in both upper and lower range, as the Foxes in the Snow ballad “Eileen” demonstrates. In a clever touch, he pairs an unusually deep vocal part with a high, chimey guitar line, produced by placing a capo on the 0-17’s 5th fret. “Now that I’ve learned how to sing after just hollering for my whole career, I’ve got the ability to support a vocal in that low a key,” he says. “Having a vocal coach made it possible for me to sing a song like that. And the 5th-fret capo is a little tricky sonically, too. People usually go between two and four [the 2nd and 4th frets]. At least I do. Matter of fact, when I was a kid, my grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar. I’ve never found a way that it would damage the guitar,” he adds with a grin. “I think it just irritated him.”
“My grandfather didn’t like for me to capo up over the third fret. I remember he’d tell me that would damage the guitar.”
Growing up in northern Alabama in the 1980s, Isbell took to music in large part because of his multi-instrumentalist grandfather. “He was a Pentecostal preacher, and he played every day. When I’d stay over with him, he’d play mandolin or banjo, fiddle sometimes, and I would have to play rhythm guitar. And then my dad’s brother, who’s a lot closer to my age, had a rock band. He taught me to play the electric guitar and rock ’n’ roll songs. I feel like I just got lucky that I loved it so much. That’s really at the heart of it—the fact that I’ve never had to sit down and practice because I just think about it all the time.”
Isbell is typically found onstage with his fleet of electric guitars, including vintage Telecasters, Les Pauls, Stratocasters, and his ’59 Gretsch Jet Firebird with a Bigsby.
Photo by Matt Condon
This is not to say that Isbell doesn’t practice; quite the contrary. Indeed, one of the most moving segments of Sam Jones’ excellent 2023 documentary on Isbell for HBO, Running With Our Eyes Closed, is when he recalls just how crucial practicing became to him as a child. The guitar was a refuge, a way to literally drown out his parents’ vicious arguments in the next room. (Another poignant aspect of Jones’ film, shot mostly in 2019 and 2020, is the delicacy with which it captures the often tenuous state of the Isbell/Shires relationship, prefiguring their breakup.)
When asked what exactly it is about the guitar that makes it so special to him, Isbell doesn’t hesitate. “The guitar is the best instrument,” he says. “It’s the smallest, most portable instrument that you can make full chords on. You can’t take a piano to a dinner party, you can’t accompany yourself on a clarinet, and you need something that’s big enough to where the volume of it can fill a room. In the days when everyone had acoustic instruments, like in the 1920s, there was nothing else like the guitar that you could carry on your back and travel from place to place and entertain people with."
“I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way.”
With that question answered, all that remains is to inquire, now that Isbell’s done the solo acoustic thing once—both in the studio for Foxes in the Snow and live for his tour to promote the album—whether he’d ever consider doing it again. “I don’t see why not,” he responds. “It’s not in any kind of plan right now, but I enjoyed the challenge of it. And I think anything that makes me turn off the ‘Don’t fuck this up’ switch is good for me, because if you sit there and spend the whole time thinking, ‘Don’t fuck this up,’ you’re not ever gonna get into that zone where you’re communicating with the work, and you’re not ever gonna get to a point where you can deliver it comfortably. This has been a really good opportunity for me to just practice letting all of that go.
“Obviously I miss the horsepower of the band,” he adds. “I miss the people individually, being on stage and communicating musically with them. But I realized pretty early on in the solo experiment that when you’re playing with the band, you don’t have a chance to work with tempo or volume in the same way. Usually you’re just trying to count a song off at the same tempo you recorded it in or the way you’ve been playing it lately, but when it’s just me, I can intentionally speed up and slow down within a song. And with respect to the volume, I can drop the bottom out soquickly, whereas it’s more like steering a ship when I’ve got the whole band up there—it happens more slowly, no matter how good they are. I would not enjoy this as much if I had to do it all the time,” he concludes. “But it’s nice to have both sides.”YouTube It
In this version of “Ride to Robert’s,” Jason Isbell demonstrates the flexibility of playing solo by picking up the tempo of this song from Foxes in the Snow.
Designed for players who demand flexibility without sacrificing tone, the Aquanaut fuses the rich warmth of classic analog delay with the extended range and clarity of modern digital designs. Featuring up to 600 milliseconds of delay time, the Aquanaut easily covers everything from tight slapback echoes to lush, ambient textures and rhythmic soundscapes – all with a simple, intuitive control layout.
Unlike many digital delays that can sound sterile and detached, the Aquanaut retains an organic, analog-inspired voice. Repeats are smooth and musical, gently fading into the mix to create depth and dimension without overwhelming your dry signal. Whether you’re chasing vintage tape echo, adding subtle space to your solos, or building massive atmospheric layers, the Aquanaut keeps your tone clear, present, and inspiring.
Berserker Electronics Aquanaut Delay/Echo
Key features include:
- Up to 600ms of delay time for expanded creative possibilities
- Analog-voiced digital architecture for warm, natural-sounding repeats
- Ambient-style echo that enhances, not distracts from, your core tone
- Simple, intuitive controls for delay time, feedback, and blend
The Aquanaut is available direct at www.berserkerpedals.com and Reverb at a $149 street price.