Oddball, one-off, custom, and handmade guitars, amps, and effects
Have your own unique piece of gear? Send pictures and description to rebecca@premierguitar.com for inclusion in our next gallery!
The Warg is a modern revamp of the Ace Tone “Fuzz Master” FM-3, designed to offer uniquely aggressive high-gain options.
"Despite its feral exterior, the Warg is refined under the hood, with several quality-of-life improvements, like silent soft true-bypass switching, top-mounted jacks, high-end German-made hardware and premium internal components."
Features:
- EQ profile switch toggling between the scooped wall of fuzz tones of the original circuit, and a flat profile with a fuller and punchier midrange
- Versatile tone control and broad gain range allows for anything from chunky riffage to searing leads
- Silent soft touch switching system via an internal relay
- Art by the talented Jordan from Pine-Box Customs
Like all Evil Eye FX pedals, the Warg features a lifetime warranty and is hand-built one-at-a-time in Philadelphia, PA.
Street price of $149.
Available now at www.evileyefx.com, or through any of our fine retailers.
Evil Eye FX is a joint venture from childhood friends and bandmates Sean and Ben, building their brand around their love of DnD and other tabletop RPGs, video games and fantasy. In 2019, the pair began modding BOSS pedals to meet the needs of their band, and quickly fell in love with the craft. In 2023, they founded Evil Eye FX with the vision of providing unique handmade pedals at working musician-accessible prices.
Check out Jackson Brooksby’s look at the history of the FM-3 and demo of the Warg.
Our columnist makes an argument against the usefulness of tap tempo footswitches. Should we really be bothering with them?
The ability to tap in a tempo on pedals is a fairly new concept, especially compared to the amount of time that stompboxes have existed in our world. I would venture to guess that this is due in part to the availability of, and need for, digital ICs. Then, being able to code them and apply them to effects circuits appropriately.
Piece of cake! … If you’re good at baking cake. This process isn’t exactly easy to implement, but these days, I feel like some players are almost expecting this modern commodity—to the point where a great delay pedal might be overlooked due to not having tap tempo.
Setting aside the history and design applications, I’ve been pondering if tap tempo even makes sense or is achievable in a band context. For this thought experiment, I’d like to run through a few scenarios, while also shedding light on a few software/hardware aspects for you to consider. To put it plainly, “Why would you need tap tempo on a pedal?” The most compelling argument I’ve thought of is the “band” aspect: being part of a band where the rhythm section has laid down the tempo and you’d like to add delay to the song. Now, if you set the knobs on your delay pedal and started playing to that tempo, your bandmates could join along with your delay line acting as the group’s metronome. However, in this scenario, you didn’t start the tempo. That’s no problem! You’ve got a footswitch on your delay that allows you to tap your foot to the beat of the drummer and you’ll be all set! But will you?
Let’s assume, for argument’s sake, that the drummer is playing to a click track at 120 bpm. Your foot starts tapping along and you press that magical tap footswitch on your favorite delay three to six times. Boom! Now you’ve set the delay line to 120 bpm. But what are the chances that you tapped 120 exactly? Is it likely that you tapped in 122 bpm? Or 121.3 bpm? Absolutely. This discrepancy may not be very noticeable for a couple bars, but every subsequent bar you play will start to become more noticeable. So what do you do? You can keep tapping in the tempo to the best of your ability every few bars. Seems cumbersome given that you still have to play the guitar parts and focus on other things that are inherently involved in a band setting.
Pulling the curtain back for a second here, let’s call the part of the pedal that handles the tap tempo “the brain.” The brain of the delay sees you pressing the tap footswitch multiple times and processes this in a couple ways (that I’m aware of). One, it measures the distance between all the consecutive taps and spits out an average. Two, it takes the last two distances in the string of taps and makes that the bpm. That’s not even going into whether the brain is floating point (121.3 bpm) or fixed point (121.32 bpm).
“You’ve got a footswitch on your delay that allows you to tap your foot to the beat of the drummer and you’ll be all set! But will you?”
Your drummer is still waiting for you to get the tempo dialed in. So what can you try next? Well, if your delay pedal has an insert jack for tap tempo, we can try to connect something like the Disaster Area SMARTClock. The tap footswitch on it won’t help here. It’ll be the same as the bpm discrepancy we discussed previously. However, there’s an encoder knob that allows you to scroll through the output tempo in bpm or millisecond increments. Yes! Not all is lost! You just have to make sure to sync it up exactly on the downbeat of the tempo—crap!
Another more intricate and exact option would be to have the drummer’s click track send a MIDI signal to your SMARTClock that then connects to your delay. At this point, I’d change my question to, “Is this level of tap tempo necessary?” Perhaps if you’re the Edge and/or the song is predicated on the delay.
If you’re adding a lead part to a song and the delay isn’t exactly “on” with the bpm, I would argue that it can stand out better, be more easily heard, and be more interesting. I would also argue that an amplitude-style tremolo makes more sense to require exact bpm. I’m thinking about the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now?”
Tap-tempo options on modulation have been fun and we’re seeing more of it nowadays, but we’ve been playing and listening to the Phase 90 for decades without needing tap. Ultimately, if having certain options inspires you and brings you joy, go for it! Enjoy! But I’d ask you, “Did you actually tap in the correct bpm?” and “Did it matter?”Orianthi joins forces with Orange Amplification for her signature combo, the Oriverb, based on the classic Rockerverb MKIII 50 NEO Combo.
"Seeing this whole amp come to life has been a dream come true," said Orianthi, "it’s a beautiful amp and it really reflects my eccentric personality!"
The platinum-selling virtuoso guitarist has gained a reputation as a multi-faceted artist, singer, songwriter and first-call collaborator. With roots planted firmly in hard rock, her latest single "First Time Blues" featuring Joe Bonamassa and "Ghost" are a combination of blues-based riffs and memorable melodies. She is currently on tour in the USA and working on a new album to be announced soon.
The Oriverb, inspired by the Rockerverb 50 MKIII Combo Neo, is voiced to embody Orianthi’s unique sound. It has a cleaner mid-range warmth that reflects her classic blues and rock tone, whilst retaining all of its desired variable distortion.. A tweaked EQ gives the Oriverb creamy, sparkly cleans and saturated screaming overdrives.
Fitted with a pair of lightweight, British-made Celestion Neo Creamback speakers and EL34 valves, the Oriverb has that definitive British flavour with incredibly versatile tone shaping abilities. The new combo also boasts a much-loved footswitchable spring reverb, built-in attenuator for maxed out textures at neighbour-friendly volumes, switchable power options and a near-transparent, valve-driven effects loop. The cabinet is crafted using the highest quality 15mm Baltic birch plywood, making it one of the lightest 2 x 12” speaker cabinets on the market and is finished in an embossed white Tolex, selected by Orianthi.
"We created this to be something very special, unique, something that when people plug into it, whatever guitar they are gonna use through this, it is going to amplify their personality," explained Orianthi, "being able to bring something to life that I feel a lot of people are really going to enjoy has been a real honour. I am so proud of this amp and I can’t wait for people to check it out."
To find out more about the new Oriverb, plus all the other Orange Amplification
products, please go to orangeamps.com.
A scalpel for carving out huge but controlled reverb spaces.
Makes huge reverb blooms possible in tight spaces. Adds ghostly character to metal, shoegaze, psychedelic, and pop riffs and hooks. Fun tool for tightening arrangements.
Controls can feel elusive in early experimentation.
$199
Catalinbread CBX Gated Reverb
catalinbread.com
For music fans of a certain age, gated reverb can conjure conflicted, even hostile, feelings. Though there are myriad uses, in the 1980s it was employed to drive snare drums to migraine-inducing levels in mixes. But as the Catalinbread CBX proves, gated reverb needn’t be an ice pick or bludgeon. In fact, the CBX works best as a scalpel of sorts—enabling the player to fit big reverb sounds in very confined and specific musical spaces.
The basic reverb voice of the CBX is plate-like—spectral, blooming, and vaporous. It’s a nice fit for the CBX’s functionality and makes surreal juxtapositions of big reverb and tight spaces even more striking. At first, CBX’s control set can feel elusive. But that’s the key to its surgical tunability. The lag control enables cool swelling effects, which can, in turn, be more dramatic with saturation from the preamp control and advanced mix settings—which then can be clipped and tightened by the gate. The musical possibilities made by these combinations are endless. High-gain, palm-muted, machine-gun riffing can be made extra ghostly and huge when the CBX is placed after distortion. And aspiring Kevin Shields-types looking to twist My Bloody Valentine templates can use spacious, gated sounds to lend clarity to melody and pitch-shifted overtones when the CBX is situated before overdrive or fuzz. But even mainstream producers and players seeking punch in arrangements will find many paths forward via this unusual stompbox