Premier Guitar features affiliate links to help support our content. We may earn a commission on any affiliated purchases.
GALLERY: Reader Pedalboards 2013, Part 1
We asked PG faithful to show us their pedalboards, and you delivered! In honor of our annual pedal blowout, we bring you 30 of our readers' personal stomping grounds.
Roger Williams stomps on aFulltone Deja-Vibe, Keeley Fuzz Head, Keeley Red Dirt Overdrive, Keeley Katana Boost, Visual Sound H2O Liquid Chorus/Echoâ??all powered by a T-Rex FuelTank Junior.
Like the Silver Sky, the NF 53 revealed Paul Reed Smith’s deep reverence for classic Fullerton designs and curiosity about how to expand on those templates. 2023’s NF 53 release left us impressed, and it was only a matter of time until an offshore-built SE model followed. That time has come: The SE NF 53 is here, dressed in the same lines and livery as the USA-built model, but at a more affordable price point thanks to PRS-licensed and supervised manufacturing by the Cor-Tek Musical Instrument Co. in Indonesia.
Like the NF 53, the SE model is more a riff on the Telecaster theme than a copy. Unburdened by tradition, PRS carved away at every line of the single-cutaway form, and the electronics are very much about enhancing versatility, rather than reducing componentry to the absolute basics. Even so, the SE NF 53 still drips with Tele-ness.
Single-Cut Minded
T-style traditionalists will find much that feels familiar, like the 25.5" scale length and bolt-on maple neck. From there, though, the SE NF 53 deviates from vintage T-style spec pretty quickly. There are 22 medium-jumbo frets, and the neck is constructed with a scarf joint that increases strength at the headstock break. The maple fretboard is sliced away from the neck and reglued after installation of the truss rod. Its width at the nut falls between Gibson and Fender camps at 1 41/64". The 10" radius also splits the difference between vintage Gibson and Fender specs, and it all feels great in hand courtesy of a rounded-C profile that measures about .87" deep at the first fret. The guitar’s overall weight is around 8.1 lbs.
In Telecaster style, the SE NF 53’s body is made from swamp ash—in this case, using 3-piece construction. It features belly and forearm contours, and a contoured cutaway for easier upper-fret access. PRS maximized the drama of the ash’s distinctive grain with a white doghair finish on our review sample, and black grain filler makes the wide, rippling lines pop and weave beneath the white. They reverse the effect entirely on the black doghair version, and hide the grain entirely on the pearl white finish.
In the hardware department, the SE NF 53’s bridge nods to a vintage Telecaster’s brass barrel saddles, but it uses a steel-base design with string-anchor notches rather than through-body stringing. It also deviates from T-style tradition by assigning three strings to a saddle with two adjustment bolts, rather than three saddles with two strings each.
Like the USA model before it, the SE NF 53 is fitted with a pair of PRS’s Narrowfield DD pickups, although these are the “S” variant, which are designed to enhance low-end tones while retaining snarl and twang. The “DD” stands for deep dish, meaning these single-coil-sized humbuckers are made with deep bobbins to enable extra coil windings, using a mix of magnet pole pieces with steel poles in between. They are wired through master volume and tone controls and a three-way selector switch on a plate that nods toward the late ’60s Fender Telecaster Thinline.
Taken together, the SE NF 53 is a cohesive design, made stronger by its robust build quality. There’s no real lack of refinement in evidence when compared to the USA model. Some of the woods and components are a different grade, but the overall result is a guitar that lends a sense of confidence.
Field Day
Plugged into a Fender Bassman head and 2x12 cab, a Vox AC15 1x12 combo, and a Fractal FM9 into headphones, the guitar reveals a genuine alternative to the T-style formula suggested by its components. Its character is distinctly its own—and with noticeably less hum.
The Narrowfield DD “S” pickups play a big part in the guitar’s success. The easiest reference point I can think of might be a blend of Telecaster and P-90 tonalities, but with plenty of their own thing going on. With a clean amp or setting there’s a meaty growl on top of the twang. Yet the guitar isn’t short on bright, sparkly chime, and sounds alive in those frequencies without being strident or spikey. This sonic foundation puts edge-of-breakup tones right in the SE NF 53’s wheelhouse, where the chewy bite segues into a little bit of breakup when you hit it hard. And it’s just as comfortable with high-gain tones, where the same sonic characteristics that contribute sweetness in cleaner settings enable clarity and cutting power while avoiding harshness in the highs. In fact, the guitar is at home in so many settings, sharing a Telecaster’s versatility and its effortless ability to handle almost anything with style.
The Verdict
The NF 53 platform is a very likeable tribute to the seminal T-style without trying to replicate it and, as a result, it’s versatile and inspiring guitar in its own right and in its way. And in the SE version of this design it delivers at a price that belies its vocabulary and its confidence.
As the leaves change and the holiday season approaches, PG contributor Tom Butwin highlights standout pedals from the bevy of tone machines that graced shelves this year. In his first installment of Pedalmania, hear demos of the flexible Keeley Manis Overdrive, Mr. Black's DoubleTracker Stereo, the spacey new Hotone Verbera convolution reverb, and the featured-packed NUX Amp Academy Stomp.
There are more flexible means for mashing up fuzz and delay thanBenson’s Deep Sea Diver. And in a time of preposterously low-priced pedals, there are more economical methods, too. But there’s no guarantee that a more traditional and cost-conscious path will yield results as interesting—or inspirational—as those offered by the Deep Sea Diver. It’s a pedal that often serves up zigs where you seek zags—depending on your sense of adventure and creative latitude, it can feel versatile, forgiving, and full of exciting surprises.
Bathyspheric Battiness
The Deep Sea Diver was developed withJessica Dobson, who fronts the band that shares the pedal’s name—and for whom more unusual applications of the fuzz/delay equation are a sonic cornerstone. The basic architecture of the Deep Sea Diver makes a great departure point for any player keen to ply the odder corners of that stompbox formula. It’s hard to know firsthand exactly what that architecture is—Benson flipped the circuit board so that you don’t see components, but rather a stylized representation of Dobson’s face in silhouette. (For the record, the solders you can see all look exceptionally tidy).
Chris Benson says that the 3-transitor fuzz section of the circuit uses a mutant mix of the 2-transitor Tone Bender MK 1.5 and the 3-transistor Tone Bender MK 2.0 as a foundation. Dobson says she envisioned a less hectic version of the ZVEX Fuzz Factory—a relation borne out here by the gate and bias controls. The delay section, meanwhile, is built around a PT2399 chip. This is a device many builders have put to creative use in spite of first turning up in karaoke machine delays. Its sonic signature—lo-fi, hazy—can be similar to that of bucket brigade delays, but still occupies a different lane than the analog EHX Memory Man and Diamond Memory Lane devices that underpin Dobson’s rig. As a whole then, the Deep Sea Diver doesn’t really replicate any particular part of Dobson’s tone recipe as much as it adds a new color formed in the spirit of where her playing has been and where it might be going.
One Deep Sea Diver feature that is a fixture of Dobson’s tone is a delay that is situated before the fuzz—except for when it isn’t. By holding down the bypass switch while powering up, you can reverse the order of the effects. If you’ve never experimented with switching fuzz and delay, the results can be revelatory.
Submarine Flip Flops
Given how interesting it is to move between the order of effects on the Deep Sea Diver, it’s a shame that you can’t make the switch without powering off the unit. Obviously, that’s not the most complicated process, but it’s also not one you’ll attempt in the middle of a song or set. Many pedals enable effect-order switching via a toggle or alternate footswitch input. In this case, the latter possibility was difficult for good reason, as pressing and holding the footswitch activates an endlessly entertaining runaway oscillation effect.
To a passively listening bystander, a switch in fuzz/delay effects order isn’t always glaringly obvious. In a very general sense, fuzz before delay results in greater clarity, and vice versa. But on the Deep Sea Diver, situating the delay before the fuzz lends a gauzy, foggy smear around the edge of transient notes and the repeats that you feel as much as hear. Comparing the Deep Sea Diver to a bucket brigade delay and a ZVEX Fuzz Factory, you can hear why Chris Benson employed the PT2399 chip. There’s a slightly more lo-fi blur to the Deep Sea Diver’s delay signature, which, to my ears, lends extra mystery.
One Deep Sea Diver feature that is a fixture of Dobson’s tone is a delay that is situated before the fuzz—except for when it isn’t.
But it’s the fuzz section of the Deep Sea Diver that really expands its performance envelope. The gate and bias controls both have impressive range and work together pretty seamlessly to broaden the pedal’s fuzz voice. There are lots of collapsing, fractured fuzz-on-the fritz and dying-AM-radio sounds made more appealing by the smoky delay signal. You’ll find many shades of super-cool mid-1960s buzz, too. But it’s also capable of unique, punchy drive sounds that hit hard and are easy to compose with, and situate in a mix without sounding entirely unhinged. The Deep Sea Diver will happily go bonkers if that’s what you’re after though, and as you get a feel for the way the gate and bias controls interact you might not even miss the conspicuously absent gain level control—which, I venture, would complicate matters significantly.
The Verdict
I played the Deep Sea Diver next to a few different fuzz/delay combinations, and there is an audible cohesiveness in the two effects at the Benson's core. Furthermore, the resulting dovetailed fuzz/delay voices lend the Deep Sea Diver a truly individual voice at many settings. Though it falls short of mimicking the butter-smooth sustain of, say, a Big Muff and a Boss DD-5, it can still dish many rich fuzz tones in that spirit—just a bit filthier. The Deep Sea Diver is most certainly eccentric, just as its creators no doubt intended. But it’s not exclusively weird. There are plenty of sounds here for classicists, even if the Deep Sea Diver tends to beckon the player toward more unorthodox ends.
When California-based effects company Noise Engineering released their Desmodus Versio in 2020, it represented the first reverb effect in their product line, but they coined a new term for the DSP-based effect: a synthetic-tail generator. The name reflects the reality that, by definition, it doesn't create literal reverberation, as in reflections in a room, but instead builds “tails” onto an audio signal. Taxonomy aside, it was a powerful, well-received, and positively jam-packed digital unit.
The Batverb, launched earlier this year, is an evolution of Noise’s tail-generating efforts. However, it uses brand-new code programmed for Electrosmith’s Daisy Seed DSP platform. A stereo effect box that spans delightful and demented flavors of delay and reverb, the Batverb is generously featured and full of unique takes on space-making effects.
Heads or Tails
The Batverb’s main panel includes six knobs, three 3-way switches, two footswitches, and one “bat” button, which you press and hold to access alternate parameters assigned to the knobs. On the crown are input jacks for either mono or stereo performance. On the sides are MIDI in/out and expression pedal jacks. Up to 16 different presets can be saved and recalled via MIDI.
In normal operation, the knobs govern, from bottom left to bottom right, input volume, time, a suboctave chorus, an octave-up shimmer, “regen” or feedback, and a blend of dry and wet signals. When holding the bat button, those same knobs, in order, control output volume, MIDI channel selection, high-pass filter, low-pass filter, duck amount, and expression pedal parameter assignment. The focus switch changes the diffusion of the delay lines. In the left position it behaves more like a delay, while the other two settings sound and feel more like reverbs. Grit adds, in the middle and right positions, a discrete soft-clipping distortion, and duck determines the responsiveness of the feedback. In the switch’s center position, there’s no ducking. At left, feedback momentarily increases when input volume is received, then tapers off as the signal does. At right, the opposite happens, and feedback increases as the signal gets quieter.
Enter the Bat Cave
To my ears, the Batverb’s more reverb-y patches are in hall or room territory—albeit very cavernous halls or rooms. But reverb sounds created by the Batverb’s algorithms sound more authentic to me than many sought-after reverbs I’ve played. Rather than an indistinct wash of sound, the tails here give the convincing impression of your amp’s signal ricocheting around a high-ceilinged cathedral, at first coming back in clearer, sharper bursts, then melting into smeary ambience. And the handy hold feature can be engaged for infinite regeneration by tapping the footswitch, or for a specific window by pressing and holding. That double utility goes a long way toward determining whether the Batverb sounds organic or unhinged.
The sub- and up-octave content injected by the doom and shimmer knobs is more chaotic and spacious than garden-variety iterations of those effects you’ll find on many octave-based reverbs, and that’s a good thing. Like most effects generated by the Batverb, it feels like the product of thoughtful, well-considered programming.
The delay algorithm, engaged with the focus toggle at left, is pleasant and plenty usable, and it’s nice to have alongside the less predictable reverb settings. But the Batverb’s deep tweakability means you can still dial in a broad range of both standard and more marginal delay sounds. The chunky transistor-ish dirt summoned by the grit switch widens the palette further. Add in the touch-sensitive ducking (and its customizable parameters), and you’ve got a ton of ground to play with.
The Verdict
Noise Engineering created an outstanding reverb and tail generator here. Considering its steep asking price, the Batverb will be out of reach for many, but it’s obviously geared toward adventurous players and discerning producers, especially those looking for authentic, parallel universe-conjuring ambience and noise in their studio or live rigs. For these musicians, the Batverb will be more than worth the bite it takes from the bank balance.
If you’ve owned a tube amp for pretty much any amount of time, you’ve been there: Your amp starts making noise—probably at the worst possible moment, whether onstage, in the studio, at rehearsal, or when you just really want to play—and you don’t know what to do. Maybe you keep it cool, but maybe you panic: Is my amp broken for good? Is this going to cost me hundreds of dollars? Fortunately, there are a few basic things you can check before you call your amp tech in a frenzy.
Ultimately, an all-tube guitar amp is actually a very durable device. But it’s important to remember that these amps need maintenance and have parts that are going to need to be replaced over the course of their lives—and tubes are the most likely place to check when you’re having a problem.
Many vacuum tubes are “military grade,” which means they can withstand shock, vibration, humidity, temperature, and many other harsh conditions. That doesn’t mean they are fail-proof, though. So, when your amp is making noise, here are some ways to check out your tubes.
Look
Do a visual inspection. Are your amp’s tubes bright and shiny, or do they look weathered and dirty? If they look old, they may be old. This doesn’t have to be a sign of something wrong, but tubes wear out like lightbulbs—they work until they don’t. I usually say power tubes have a two- to five-year lifespan (for professionals, it’s more like six months to two years). Preamp tubes have more like a five- to 20-year life. They can function longer but start to get problematic before they just die.
Look at what’s going on inside. Is the clear part of the glass still clear? If there is a smoky look on the inside of the glass, that is a sign of heavy wear. Look at the shiny mirror-looking part; that is the getter flashing. It should look bright, though sometimes there is a little fuzziness along the edges. If it is getting smoky, then the tube is tired. And if it has gone completely white, the tube is toast.
The last visual is best done in darkness. Look for the heater element inside. It is a wire in the very center of the tube structure that glows red when operating. Don’t worry about what shape it is, how much you can see it, or if it looks exactly like the other tubes. If it is glowing, it’s good; if it is dark in there, it’s toast.
In his final PG column, the amp maker to the stars teaches you how to troubleshoot your guitar’s loudhailer if it’s raising a sonic ruckus.
Listen
Let’s move on to audible diagnostics. The amp works but is making extraneous noises. The first thing to do is unplug the guitar cable from the input of the amp, so nothing is plugged in, the amp is fully on, and the tone controls, volume, and master (if applicable) are full on. What noises do you hear? If it is silent with a tiny little bit of background noise, that is as good as a guitar amp gets.
Are you hearing an electronic, almost morse-code sound? A common modern problem is RF (radio frequency) noise from routers, cell phones, and transmission towers. It is not the amp and there is nothing to fix, but if you try moving the amp around the room or building, you may find a quieter place.
Is the amp making a constant “shhhhh” sound? Does it get louder if you turn the volume knob up? That is thermionic emission, the noise of electrons flowing. It is a byproduct of gain. Low-gain amps have less, and high-gain amps suffer greatly. Some tubes can add to this, so if you replace the first couple tubes in the signal path and it helps drop the noise floor, then keep the noisy ones for less critical positions.
Is the amp sitting there doing the snap-crackle-and-pop thing? This can be a tube issue, but most of the time it is a component issue inside. If you have a known good tube, you can replace the tubes one at a time, seeing if the noise changes. If you find that it was a tube, that tube is toast, so don’t use it as a spare.
Now, let’s talk about microphonics. Because of the amount of gain we have in guitar amps, microphonic tubes can be problematic. Start turning the amp volume/gain all the way up. If you get a howl, like with an open microphone, you have a microphonic tube. If it is still behaving but you can tap on the amp and get a sound like tapping on a microphone, that can be acceptable.
Finding the Cause
There are multiple tubes in an amp, so let’s find the root of the noise. The first thing is tap testing. The best tool is a pencil with an eraser. One by one, tap on the tubes with the amp on and turned up. If you get a significant microphonic sound from one, it should be swapped out with a quieter one. Now, this is the thing: A little bit of microphonics is normal, so it will take a little getting to know your amp to learn what is acceptable or not. Certain brands/models of tubes are better than others, so just because it’s new doesn’t mean it’s better or even good. As you go down the line of the signal chain, the gain is less, so you are looking for slight noises. Once you get to the power tubes, they can be microphonic, but they don’t howl like a preamp tube. They make a thud sound when tapped.
The other thing we’re looking for with this tap testing is rattling. Again, there is a certain level of acceptable rattle. But if you can hear it through the speaker, that’s unacceptable. If you have power tubes that rattle, this sometimes does not come through the speaker, but you can hear it when playing the amp at lower levels. If that bothers you, then they need to be replaced even though they’re functioning properly.
The last diagnostic is pulling the preamp tubes (not the power or rectifier tubes). Starting with the first tubes in the signal chain, pull them out one at a time and listen to see if the noise goes away. If you pull a tube and the noise disappears, then either that tube is the culprit, or your problem lies in that part of the circuit.
If you’re looking for a quick fix to get you through your gig or session and you narrow your problem down to a tube, go ahead and swap it out. If your amp is fixed bias, you may still need to head to your tech tomorrow and have it biased, but you’ll get your work done today. And when in doubt, replace your old tubes. If it turns out that wasn't the issue, you now have good spares for when a tube does eventually give you problems.
