"Singer's calls his isolated style of photography ""portraits"" of guitars. This White Falcon is a pristine example of the 1962 model, which was the first year the double-cutaway was introduced. It's also stereo, an addition Gretsch made in 1958. Guitar courtesy Golden Age Guitars."
Any effect can color a guitar’s personality and language. But Boss’ new XS-1 Poly Shifter literally stretches the instrument’s vocal range. With the ability to shift input by +/-3 octaves or semitones, it can turn your guitar into a bass, a synth, or a baritone, or function as a capo. It also seamlessly generates harmonies for single note leads and keeps up with quick picking without any apparent latency. Furthermore, the pedal is capable of stranger fare that stokes many out-of-the-box ideas. But if you’re a guitarist that plays more than one role in your band—or musical life in general—the XS-1 can be a utilitarian multitool, too. It’s a pedal that can live many lives.
- YouTube
The XS-1, which was released alongside its bigger, more intricate sibling, the XS-100, is an accessible route to exploring pitch shifting’s potential. Housed in a standard Boss enclosure, it doesn’t consume a lot of floor space like the XS-100 or DigiTech’s Whammy. And while it achieves this spatial economy in part by forgoing a built-in expression pedal (which could be a deal breaker for some potential customers) it’s still capable of +/- seven semitones and a +/- three-octave range that can be utilized in momentary or latching applications.
Slipping, Sliding, and Twitching
Though digital pitch shifters have always been capable of amazing things, early ones sounded very inorganic at times. High-octave sounds in particular could come across as artificial, like the yip of a robot chihuahua plagued by metal fleas. Some very creative players use these colors—as well as the most sonorous pitch shift tones—to great effect (Nels Cline and Johnny Greenwood’s alien tonalities come to mind). In other settings, though, these older pitch devices can be downright cringey.
“The pedal clearly represents several leaps forward from first-generation pitch shifters.”
The XS-1 belies digitalness in some octave-up situations. But the pedal clearly represents several leaps forward from first-generation pitch shifters. Tracking is excellent and shines in string bending situations. Semitone shifts can provide focused harmony or provocative dissonance depending on the wet/dry mix and which semitones clash or sing against the dry signal. At many settings the XS-1 feels alive and organic, too, with legato lines taking on many of the touch characteristics of a violin-family instrument. You get far less of a note-to-note “hiccup,” and glissandos take on a beautifully fluid feel—with or without a slide—letting the XS-1 deliver convincing pedal- and lap-steel-style textures when you add a single octave up. (Such applications sound especially convincing when you kick back on guitar tone and restrict your fretwork to the 3rd through 5th strings, which keeps digital artifacts at bay.)
Mixmaster Required
The most crucial XS-1 control is the mix. For the most convincing bass, baritone, and 12-string tones, you’ll want a fully wet signal. But composite sounds can be awesome, too. You can use the control’s excellent sensitivity and range to highlight or fine tune the prominence of a consonant harmony. But it’s sensitive enough to make blends with dissonant harmonies sound a lot more intentional and integrated. And many of these eerie, wonky, off-balance textures are extra effective when introduced in quick bursts via the momentary switch. (That switch can also deliver great flashes of drama with more consonant harmonies—like dropping in a 3rd or 5th above a resolving chord in a verse.)
You can get creative in other ways using dissonant blends. Droney open tunings can yield fields of overtones that sound extra fascinating with delay, reverb, or 12-string guitar… or all of them! Dialing in blends that really work takes some trial and error, and you’ll definitely hit a few awkward moments if you’re navigating by instinct alone. But those same experiments often uncover real gems—especially in the pitch-down modes, which tend to produce more mysteriously atmospheric textures than their pitch-up counterparts.
The Verdict
Boss’ most straightforward pitch shifter covers a lot of ground. If you play in a duo, trio, or small band, it can expand that collective’s stylistic and harmonic range. It’s small, at least relative to treadle-equipped pitch shifters, so if you’re not a pitch shift power user, you don’t sacrifice a lot of room for an effect you might only employ occasionally, and you can still use the expression pedal jack to hook up a pedal for dynamic pitch control. The $199 price puts it in line with competitors of similar size and feature sets, but the XS-1 is a great value compared to more elaborate, treadle-equipped pitch shifters. If you’re taking your first forays into pitch shifting, or know that you need only the most straightforward functions here, it will ably return the investment. And along the way, it might even unlock a whole cache of unexpected tonal discoveries.
Most people think of samplers as drum machines with delusions of grandeur—four-bar loops, predictable patterns, and neatly sliced bits living forever in the prison of the grid. But for me, samplers and loopers are something completely different. They’re instruments of disruption. They’re creative accelerants. They’re circuit breakers designed to shock me out of my comfort zone and force my compositions, productions, and performances into strange, exhilarating new shapes.
One of my favorite studio practices—and something I encourage my Recording Dojo readers to experiment with—is to sample your performances. Not a preset library, not a pack from somebody else, but use your own melodic lines, motifs, rhythms, textures, and half-formed ideas. There’s something magical about hearing your own musical DNA come back to you in an unfamiliar, mutated form. It’s like collaborating with a version of yourself from an alternate timeline.
The real thrill isn’t about capturing pristine performances. In fact, it’s often the opposite: I’ll grab a phrase that’s imperfect, or mid-gesture, or harmonically unresolved, and drop it into a sampler purely to see what it becomes. When you do this, your musical habits—your well-worn licks, default rhythms, and predictable choices—don’t stand a chance. The sampler shreds them, recontextualizes them, and hands them back as raw material for re-writing, re-arranging, or composing something that never would have emerged in a linear workflow.
Sometimes the transformation is subtle—a lick becomes a rhythmic ostinato, a sustain becomes a pad, a passing tone becomes a focal point. Other times the sampler just mangles it, spits it out sideways, and you think, ‘Oh… now that’s interesting.’ Either way, it becomes a tool for breaking patterns, both musically and psychologically.
My Process: Mutations, Not Replications
My approach to sampling isn’t any more complicated than anyone else’s. I’m not using some secret, elite technique. I’m simply collecting fragments—little melodic cells, rhythmic quirks, harmonic gestures—and giving them permission to misbehave.
I’ll chop up key licks into uneven slices, or isolate just the back half of a phrase, or extract a rhythmic hiccup that wouldn’t survive in a normal editing session. Then I reassemble these bits with the expectation that they won’t behave. I want mutations. I want the musical equivalent of genetic drift. I’m not trying to color within the lines; I’m trying to see what happens when I throw the coloring book across the room.
Once the sampler gives me something intriguing, I run these new creatures through chains of further processing: glitch delays that stutter and fold the sound into origami-like shapes, micro-loopers feeding into overdrives or fuzz pedals, shimmering reverbs that stretch a 200-millisecond blip into a widescreen texture. The result can be anything from a ghostly sustained pad to a snarling, percussive accent, to a completely alien harmonic bed.
You can use these elements as alternate melodic lines, counterpoint, ambient beds, transitions, ear candy, or even structural material for entire songs. And because the source is you, the end result stays connected to your musical identity—just bent, twisted, and refracted into something fresh.
Outcome Independence: The Spirit Behind the Process
If there’s one thing that makes this approach powerful, it’s letting go of the expectation that what you sample must “work.” This is pure experimentation, not product-driven crafting.
I’m outcome-independent when I do this. I’m not looking for a result so much as engaging in the joy of the unknown. Some days nothing meaningful emerges. Other days I strike gold. But either way, the process sharpens my creative instincts. It keeps me curious.
“There's something magical about hearing your own musical DNA come back to you in an unfamiliar, mutated form.”
I use this same strategy when producing artists or working on film and soundtrack material. Recently, I applied it to pedal steel—an instrument known for its lyrical beauty—and the resulting textures were … well, not beautiful in the traditional sense. They were fractured, shadowy, almost Jekyll-and-Hyde. Perfect for a track built around the duality of personality. The clients absolutely loved the unpredictable, emotive soundscape those mutated pedal steel lines created.
Some Favorite Tools for Sonic Mutation
You don’t need a million pieces of gear to do this. A single sampler and a single effects chain can take you far. But here are a few of my favorite “chaos engines,” all of which I own and use regularly:
• Teenage Engineering OP-1 Field – A sampler, synth, tape machine, and chaos generator disguised as a minimalist art object. Its sampling engine and tape modes are perfect for tonal mutations.
• Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O. II – A quick, dirty, wonderfully immediate sampler for slicing, punching, and recombining your ideas without overthinking.
• Omnisphere 3 – The granular engine alone is a goldmine for turning simple samples into cinematic, evolving textures.
• NI Maschine – Still one of the fastest environments for grabbing a sound, flipping it, and building an idea around the unexpected.
• …and whatever else you have lying around. The point is exploration, not allegiance to any one workflow.
Final Thoughts
Sampling your own voice as an instrumentalist—and then breaking it—reminds you that creativity doesn’t live in the safe, predictable spaces. It lives in the moments where you lose control just enough to discover something new. Give your sampler permission to surprise you, confuse you, and sometimes even challenge your sense of what you sound like. That’s where the good stuff begins.
After a devastating theft in 2021, the metal band’s guitarist rebuilt his tone empire around some life-changing loans.
Chicago post-metal band Russian Circles had to battle their way back to gear heaven. In 2021, the bulk of the band’s gear was stolen while on tour, leading to a years-long rebuild. As a result, many of the items you might’ve seen in guitarist Mike Sullivan’s Rig Rundown back in 2017 are long gone.
PG’s Chris Kies recently met up with Sullivan at the band’s Chicago practice space, where they’ve resided for nearly 20 years. Check out some highlights from Sullivan’s new, resurrected rig below.
Sullivan has been favoring Dunable guitars of late, borrowing one from tourmate Chelsea Wolfe after his other guitar was nabbed. The green one is based on the Dunable Narwhal, with a more Gibson-like scale—comparable to Sullivan’s old Les Paul. This Narwhal has a mahogany body and neck, maple top, and a coil-tap function for the two humbuckers: a DiMarzio PAF 26th Anniversary and a DiMarzio Joe Duplantier Fortitude signature. Vibrating atop those pickups are D’Addario strings—a set of .011–.056, with the low E swapped for a .058. Sullivan uses a number of different down tunings, all with D-A-D-G-A-D as a starting point.
The white Dunable has a maple neck, a 25.5” scale, and is tuned lower, with a .062 for the low E string. It’s used for drop-A tunings, and has the same DiMarzio pickups.
Gettin’ Hi
Sullivan was turned onto Hiwatts after acquiring some on loan in the wake of the gear theft, and he hasn’t turned back since. The cabinets are loaded with Hiwatt Octapulse speakers.
Mike Sullivan’s Pedalboard
Sullivan runs two pedalboards. The first includes a Peterson tuner, Shure P9HW, Dunlop CBM95 Cry Baby Mini, DigiTech Drop and Whammy Ricochet, and MXR Phase 95.
The motherboard carries a Dunlop DVP3 volume pedal, a Friedman BE-OD Deluxe, Strymon Dig, TimeLine, and Flint, a T-Rex Image Looper, DigiTech JamMan Stereo, MXR CAE Boost/Line Driver, Foxrox Octron3, Electric Eye Cannibal Unicorn, Maxon Apex808, Fortin-Modded Ibanez Tube Screamer, and a Radial Shotgun Guitar Splitter and Buffer.
An all-analog flange and chorus with a lot of character.
Way back in the 2010s, before starting Mr. Black as his pedal-building outlet, when Jack DeVille was releasing effects under his own name, he created the Mod Zero. This multi-modulation unit covered flanging, chorus, rotary effects, and vibrato, and, with a limited run of 250 units, gained a reputation and is long sold out.
Although Mr. Black’s Mod.One is not that pedal, this all-original unit designed by DeVille follows a similar mission, and its reverential name is surely no accident. The Mod.One is a 100-percent-analog modulator that spans chorus, flange, and high-band flange with a unique control set designed for flexibility, sonic excitement, options and a lot of character.
Controls for the Curious
If you come to the Mod.One a little fuzzy on the differences between chorus and flange, here’s a brief explanation: Chorus is created using a slower set of delay times on a secondary, parallel signal. Flange uses shorter delay times, and high-band flange the shortest. On the Mod.One, a pair of knobs—one for lower limit and one for upper limit—allow users to set that range of delay times. The lower limit knob has a max delay of 31 mS and a minimum delay of 1.9 ms. The upper limit knob ranges from 1.9 ms to .5 ms. Within those ranges, you’ll find the difference between chorus and flanging, and the position of the two knobs, rather than a switch, determines which effect you’re using. Ultimately, I’m a firm believer that we should use our ears and not get hung up on definitions when listening to an effect. The Mod.One is a great example. Determining exact delay times and whether you’re chorusing or flanging is inexact but ultimately it doesn’t matter. What matters is what sounds good.
The lower limit/upper limit controls might frustrate purists that want to toggle between a clearly defined chorus and flange tone. But Mod.One’s controls, and its central premise, are all about sound sculpting and opening up creative options. And options abound: LFO speed, for example, reaches up to 20 seconds long when using the tap-tempo switch. Six waveform options also widen the sonic lane.
Let’s Get Exponential
The Mod.One is powerful in a literal sense. The active volume control provides plenty of juice, and is capable of really pushing whatever comes next in your chain. That lends a gooey vibe to everything that passes through the pedal. Whether you use that power to drive your amp or not, the combo of gain and all-analog circuitry give the Mod.One a warm, thick voice. This is not just another metallic-sounding flange device.
I found myself stomping on the Mod.One to add space and texture to rhythms, riffs, and leads that cover a lot of range. Sometimes, I was looking for subtlety—Andy Summers on “Walking on the Moon,” for example. For that, I kept the enhance knob, which determines the intensity of the effect, toward lower settings, and kept the speed on the slowest part of its range, which generates molasses-like movement. For more obvious results, I nudged the speed and enhance knobs. There’s a lot of play in each control, so it doesn’t take much to get things moving in a different direction. The enhance control can even self-oscillate at the top of its range, where more extreme sounds live.
Each of these controls interacts differently with alternate waveform settings, making the possibilities exponential. If there’s one complaint I have about the Mod.One—and I do think it’s just one—it’s that it’s hard to tell which waveform is selected. When experimenting by ear, that’s not the worst thing, but when searching for specific settings, it can be hard to tell if the single LED lights up in a sine, triangle, or other pattern. Eventually I got better at telling the difference, but I didn’t always nail it.
To get some ’70s pseudo-cosmiche tones for a recording project, I rocked the triangle, sine, and hypertriangle waveforms at varying levels of excess. And all three were useful for thickening up high-fretted chordage rather than just the crystalline kind of flange I tend to associate with Prince. I found true excess with the step wave selected and the enhance cranked to its fullest, and there are many experimental sounds to be heard in these wilder places. With so many variables at play, I know there is a lot to be discovered still, which makes the Mod.One compelling.
The Verdict
The Mod.One is a powerful flange and chorus with a strong, recognizable character and wide range. It’s not a do-it-all kind of modulator meant to compete with digital units. But this all-analog device can deliver texture to your sound at dosages that are easily controlled. The unique sculpting possibilities make it exciting and refreshing, and in my time with the pedal, I was impressed with how much I hadn’t yet discovered. It strikes a difficult balance between a quick learning curve and the kind of depth that’ll keep it in heavy rotation for a long time to come. It simply sounds excellent, too.
In shape and sound, the Chleo Limited Edition is a very different PRS. It is, in part, a product of the vision of Herman Li, who is one half of the virtuoso lead guitar team behind DragonForce. With a total production of just 200 instruments, and a price tag just below $7,000 (and currently fetching upward of $12,500 on Reverb) the original Maryland-built version remains well out of reach for many of Li’s core fans (not to mention some wealthy landowners).
PRS Chleo SE Herman Li Signature Guitar Demo | First Look
Someone apparently heard the clamor for a more accessibly priced version, though. Enter the PRS SE Chleo. It features the same contoured, maple-topped mahogany body, super-thin neck with 20" fretboard radius, and trifecta of Fishman Fluence single- and double-coil pickups as the more expensive version. It even features Li’s preferred “Eclipse Dragon” fret inlays—a major departure from PRS practice.
All this still comes at a cost. While more affordable than the Limited Edition model, the SE Chleo is priced just under $2,000, which isn’t exactly modest. That raised some eyebrows in the guitar community. After all, the excellent PRS SE DGT David Grissom is around $700 new. The sought-after SE Silver Sky is usually around the high $600 mark. Even the SE Mark Holcomb Signature, the SE Mark Tremonti, and the classic SE Custom 24 Floyd are less than a grand.
Given that the SE Chleo’s materials and build-quality seem on par with those less expensive guitars, what exactly tilts this ostensibly metal-centric SE toward the price range of a U.S.-made PRS Silver Sky or Mark Lettieri Signature Fiore?
Dragon's Teeth
SE Chleo is as well-made and designed as any of the SE class, which is to say, it is very well built. But the SE Chleo also boasts a carbon-fiber reinforced bolt-on maple neck and a custom-contoured maple-topped mahogany body, with an artfully scooped lower cutaway offering unfettered access past the neck’s top 24th fret. The super-flat fretboard radius, smooth ebony fingerboard, and jumbo fretwire mean even the biggest hands will find sure purchase while blazing three-notes-per-string runs and sweep-picked arpeggios. The Chleo’s generous 1.75" nut width also suits the flat radius and is ideal for bigger hands and fretting fanned-out Allan Holdsworth chord voicings.
That said, the body—whose narrow upper and lower horns evoke a 1980s Veillette-Citron—can feel small and a bit awkward while sitting or standing. Whether or not you find the guitar’s ergonomic design beneficial is very personal and subjective, but the SE Chleo’s limited upper-bout surface will offer less support for some players' forearms beyond the wrist. Given that the included steel-saddled Floyd Rose 1000 Tremolo Bridge (with PRS locking nut) practically demands a default palm-mute posture for the right hand, the smaller dimensions sometimes feel like an odd design choice. Herman Li might disagree, however. Weight, by the way, is about 7 pounds, 4 ounces, around the same as an SE Silver Sky.
How to Train Your Dragon
For my money, the most compelling thing about the SE Chleo, and something it shares with its much pricier Limited Edition confrere, is the HSH-arrayed trio of Herman Li Signature Fishman Omniforce hum-free pickups. And with the push-pull volume and tone knobs and 5-way pickup selector blade switch you end up spoiled for choice when it comes to tone blends. Two voicings are available for each pickup using the push-pull tone pot alone. But the push-pull volume pot opens up coil-tap options for each humbucker which can be paired with the middle single-coil pickup. You can also jump the middle pickup entirely and blend the bridge and neck humbucker.
The Chleo’s generous 1.75 nut width suits the flat radius and is ideal for bigger hands and fretting fanned-out Allan Holdsworth chord voicings.
The sound of these single- and double-coil pickup configurations, in concert with the Chleo’s unique body resonance, mean few settings are evocative of a classic Stratocaster, Telecaster, Les Paul, or SG in a literal sense. They can be impeccably clean and have presence, but they are clearly meant to complement the kind of technical, progressive metal that DragonForce excels at with, perhaps, a tip of the cap to PRS-based riff and lead sounds from bands like Opeth, Periphery, and Sevendust.
That said, the bridge pickup’s voicing is aggressive and tight, great for fifth- and sixth-string-based pedal-tone riffing. It also kicks up syrupy sustain for soaring metal lead work (Bleed From Within’s Craig Gowans and Sam Vellen of Caligula’s Horse come to mind). Many other pickup blends hint at the coppery-clean semi-acoustic sounds you associate with King Crimson’s Beat period or latter-day Porcupine Tree.
The Verdict
So, does the PRS SE Chleo merit its nearly $2,000 price tag? Whether it does or doesn’t will be a judgement best left to the beholder. DragonForce’s best-selling record, Inhuman Rampage, moved more than 600,000 copies in the U.S. alone, a prodigious figure for a band and genre outside the mainstream. But that number suggests a lot of possible customers for the SE Chleo, with all its idiosyncracies, as well.
Factor in the persona of Li himself, an affable gentleman rocker and role model who performs challenging technical passages with ease, and the appeal grows. The SE Chleo’s build quality is excellent, so if the guitar design suits your style you should round the “build/design” score up. Similarly, players that favor the Fishman Fluence pickups’ precision should adjust upward accordingly. If Li’s sensational sweep-picking salvos and DragonForce’s fantasy concept albums are your cup of mead, this is a solidbody worth experiencing.
PRS SE Chleo Herman Li Signature Electric Guitar - Charcoal Purple Burst
![Rig Rundown: John 5 [2026]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=62681883&width=1245&height=700&quality=70&coordinates=0%2C45%2C0%2C45)
![Rig Rundown: Russian Circles’ Mike Sullivan [2025]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=62303631&width=1245&height=700&quality=70&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
