Four new micro stomps from EHX’s NYC DSP range offer old-school tones, psychedelic sounds, and straight-up sonic anarchy.
Convincing reverse tape sounds at the right settings. Forces cool alternative picking approaches. Staccato effects sound spectacular through short delay/long repeat echoes.
Only 20 bucks less than the more full-featured version. Pretty specialized for most players.
$136
Electro-Harmonix Pico Attack Decay
ehx.com
Mini pedals are immensely practical. I fantasize about traveling with a little board populated exclusively by them. And were it not for my attachment to a few old favorites, I might have already pivoted to an exclusively mini-pedal rig for any trip involving checked baggage.
Electro-Harmonix is a relative newcomer to the mini-pedal sphere. In fact, most of their efforts at miniaturization involved taking pedals like the Big Muff and Electric Mistress that were quite large and reducing them to sizes more in line with other company’s standard-sized stomps. But if they were a little late to the game, EHX, as they will, entered the marketplace with a sense of style and adventure. Each of EHX’s nine new Pico pedals, as EHX calls them, are part of the digital NYC DSP series. Curiously, confinement to the digital realm means this set of Pico releases is without legendary EHX pedals that would be logical candidates for miniaturization—most notably the Big Muff. But what the new Pico pedals lack in predictability, they make up for in color: Some of EHX’s most interesting pedal ideas are part of this series.
In imagining possible combinations of these nine pedals, it occurred to me that you could fashion a lot of very unique tone palettes from just a few of them. Though each of the pedals reviewed here—the Pico Attack Decay, Pico Oceans 3-Verb, Pico Canyon Echo, and Pico Deep Freeze—are evaluated on their own merits, they were selected with the notion of creating a little psychedelic sound laboratory. And while you can wring conventional sounds from these four pedals, their capacity for weaving weird and complex patterns of sound speaks to the exciting potential of these little stomps and EHX’s enduring sense of irreverence and invention.
Pico Attack Decay
The original EHX Attack Decay, an analog volume envelope that first appeared around 1980, was called a “tape reverse simulator” for its ability to generate reverse-tape-like volume swells. It’s an odd bird—even by EHX’s lofty standards. Next to the analog original, which came in a Deluxe Memory Man-sized enclosure, the Pico version is pico indeed. But this version is derived from the digital reimagination of the effect that appeared in 2019. That permutation includes a built-in fuzz, expression control, presets, an effects loop, and preset capability, but I’d guess that more than a few players will be more tempted by this smaller, streamlined version.
It's easy to create the volume swell effects that give the Pico Attack Decay its tape reverse simulator handle. You put the pedal in mono mode (activated by the small poly button), set the attack knob around the 10 o’clock position, and park the decay to the right of noon. The reverse tape effect can be pretty uncanny, and it’s fun to play leads and melodies using pre-bends, odd intervals, and off-beat timing to achieve more authentically disorienting reverse effects. These settings also make the pedal a nice stand-in for a volume pedal for simple melody lines. Certain fast attack times mated to shorter decay times produce clipped, no-sustained tones or stuttering, fractured tremolo textures. The former sounds especially amazing paired with fast echoes and long repeat times from the Canyon delay—creating spacey Joe Meek-style percolations. Used in mono mode exclusively, the Attack Decay can seem limited. Using poly mode doesn’t add oodles of additional textures, but it does often add a vowelly, mutant flange/filter effect that’s good for alien envelope-filter tones, which, again, sound pretty incredible with a heap of echo.
For the right player, the Pico Attack Decay can be an effective way to reshape instrument timbre and create interesting, off-kilter versions of volume-swell, envelope, and even bizarre staccato modulation effects. At just 20 bucks less than the larger, full-featured Attack Decay, the small size may be the main appeal here. But that mini footprint can make the difference between a niche effect making the cut when space is tight.
The Pico Canyon Echo is as engaging as any delay I can think of in a package this size. It’s flexible and full of surprises, thanks in large part to the cool filter control, a super-wide 8-millisecond-to-3-second delay range, and an infinite repeats function that effectively functions as a looper.
Sans filtering, the Pico Canyon’s basic delay voice is fairly neutral, which is no bad thing, and it’s certainly not chilly the way some digital delays can be. Introducing the filter, however, steers the Pico Canyon along unique tone vectors, particularly when you use the super-short, ADT-style delays. The filter moves between neutral no-filter sounds at noon and low-pass and high-pass settings on either side of the dial. Depending on where you set the filter and feedback control, these short delays can produce ring-modulation-like tones, lo-fi AM radio colors, and resonances and feedback effects that change dramatically depending on your pickups, amplifier, and playing dynamics. It also yields unexpected sounds that you don’t necessarily associate with delay. The filter control isn’t exclusively for oddball sounds, though. The low-pass filter adds darkness to repeats that hints at BBD delay sounds and is particularly effective for adding fog to long feedback settings. The high-pass filter, meanwhile, can lend digital crispness or ringing and howling Space Echo-style resonances with long feedback times.
Though weird sounds abound in the Canyon, it is a delay of great utility too. The tap-division button enables fast switching between eighth-note, dotted eighth-note, and quarter-note divisions, and it features a tap tempo function. With an appealing $149 price tag, I’d be tempted by the Pico canyon if it was twice the size. The combination of small size, straightforward functionality, interactivity, and flat-out fun make it an extra attractive delay option that will tempt players across many styles.
Like the Pico Canyon, the Oceans 3-Verb inhabits a crowded market space that ranges from ultra-low-priced imports to fancier fare. But while the Pico Canyon distinguishes itself from the competition with a wide range of straight-ahead to weird sounds, the Oceans 3-Verb mostly focuses on fundamentals. Here, that means digital emulations of spring, plate, and hall reverbs. The 3-Verb’s one great wild-card feature is its infinite reverb, which works in the hall and plate settings. It’s an awesome addition that ups the fun quotient exponentially and makes the 3-Verb an appealing option for noise, drone, ambient, and other experimental artists.
The 3-Verb’s voices each capture the spirit and quirks of their inspirations—often with great fidelity. The most subdued voices all add classy ambience that pairs nicely with drive pedals, adding air without turning gain-activated overtones to a filthy wash. Differences between the hall and plate reverbs are most discernible at these less-intense levels. Hall reverbs are tight and reactive with the tone, time, and pre-delay levels at modest levels. Add a little treble and you’ll hear a nice approximation of tile reflections. The plate reverb sounds most distinctively authentic with a little extra treble, pre-delay, and decay time, lending the slightly metallic and ghostly overtones that make real plate reverb so delicious. Both hall and plate reverbs can be taken to stranger lands, particularly when you add a generous helping of pre-delay, which can evoke Kevin Shields’ reverse-reverb tricks or add endless miles of ambience. At these more extreme settings, the hall reverb tends to emphasize high-octave content, while the plate is more diffuse and spectral. In both settings you can use the infinite reverb effect, generating huge washes that are beautiful when mixed with droning feedback.
As solid as the plate and hall reverbs are here, the spring reverb is the hit of the bunch. It doesn’t have quite as much body as a real Fender Reverb unit or the splashy reverb in the mid-’60s Fender Vibrolux I used for comparison. It’s also basically brighter than those two reverbs. But it is really no less awesome or fun for those differences. At advanced tone settings and in the large tank mode, it practically becomes a caricature of spring reverb. This is not a diss. I’ve gone looking for this tone many times in order to achieve extra-big-picture surf or Fillmore psychedelia sounds and come up short. It’s the kind of spring reverb that can absolutely slice through a recorded mix—even a busy one. I’d even venture that many players would pick this over the real thing.
Not every player needs an EHX Freeze. But a lot of players don’t know what they’re missing. The Freeze inhabits an interesting place among guitar effects. It is, in effect, a little sampler that grabs your signal and freezes it for a given period—sometimes infinitely. A freeze is different than just a sustained tone. There is a lag in a freeze capture that can add many overtones. They can be pretty or ugly, depending on the moment you capture, the relationship between dry and effected signal, and how long you freeze the audio picture you capture. Put another way, the Freeze can be a drone machine, a chilly digital cimbalom, a tamboura in a box, a synth-generated sine wave, a freeze-frame ring modulator, or a distant ship’s horn sounding through the fog. Getting predictable and harmonious outcomes can take a steady hand, a bit of concentration, a smooth touch, and familiarity with how the Freeze’s interesting controls interact. But in and among these strange tone relationships await interesting sounds that can add gobs of extra vocabulary to your electric guitar expressions.
The Deep Freeze features three modes of operation: latch, moment, and auto. In latch, Deep Freeze grabs and holds your signal at the moment you press the footswitch. In moment mode, the pedal holds the freeze for as long as you hold the foostswitch. In auto mode, the Deep Freeze grabs the last note you play, enabling you to freeze each note in a sequence. Controls for dry and effect manage the critical balance between dry and effected signal. Gliss controls the speed at which an existing freeze morphs into a new one. The speed/layer knob controls the volume envelope in auto or moment mode, and in latch mode, it controls the volume of the previous freeze as you layer in new ones. That probably sounds complex, but it’s surprisingly easy to feel out the interactivity between these controls.
If there is a fundamental bit of knowledge with which you must approach the Deep Freeze, it’s that it likes to capture pure notes or chord tones without too much dissonance, which will cause fluttering freeze tones colored with cold digital artifacts. If you want a prettier, more unadulterated freeze—particularly in latch and moment modes—it’s critical that you freeze the note or chord at the most harmonious point of its bloom. If you hit the switch right as you pick a note or hit a chord, overtones from pick attack that might otherwise go unnoticed turn into dissonant rattle. Likewise, pitch changes or irregularities—from hitting your vibrato arm as you freeze a chord, for instance— will turn into the same digital clatter. In auto and moment modes, I got best results by using a soft picking touch and waiting for the sweetest moment of a note or chord bloom to hit the switch. Harmonics, too, can make beautiful drones if you capture them at their most beautifully blossoming moment.
- The Stompbox-Builder’s Secret Weapon ›
- pedal issue - Premier Guitar ›
- Confessions of a Pedal Nerd ›
- WIN the Entire NYC DSP Pico Series from Electro-Harmonix! - Premier Guitar ›
Stompboxtober Day 23 is here! Today’s prize is a pedal from J. Rockett Audio. Enter now and come back for more daily prizes!
J. Rockett Audio Designs PXO Phil X Signature Overdrive Pedal
The PXO was created as a live or studio tool. When we sent Phil the overdrive sample he found that it saved him in backline situations and provided him a drive that plays well with others.
The PXO is an overdrive/boost where you can select pre or post giving you variety in how you want to boost, EQ and overdrive. We have provided standard controls on the overdrive side such as Volume/Gain/Overdrive and EQ but on the boost side you have a separate Tilt EQ that allows you to EQ with simplicity. You can experiment by cascading in a pre or post situation and experiment from there. The PXO has a lush, thick feel to the bottom end and a smooth top end that begs you to dig into the note.
Here’s part two of our look under the hood of the funky rhythm guitar master’s signature 6-string.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this edition, we’re continuing our journey through the Fender Cory Wong Stratocaster wiring, bringing it all together.In the previous installment, the last feature on the funky 6-stringer’s signature axe that we discussed was the master volume pot and the corresponding treble-bleed circuit. Now, let’s continue with this guitar’s very special configuration of the tone pots.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
Pickups are more than magnets and coils. When you’re thinking about how they sound, consider all of the many elements that go into creating their tone.
Pickups, by definition, are magnetic microphones that lay under guitar strings. These devices are a fundamental piece of our musical instrument industry and, rightfully, get a lot of serious attention from guitarists/musicians. PRS has spent an inordinate amount of time, research, and engineering on these devices. They are complicated equations—a combination of magnetic materials, magnetic manufacturing/engineering methods, magnetic strength, physical dimensions and layout, coil winding for turning magnetic fields into electrical signals, coil-wire gauge and wire coating (type and thickness), wax potting to prevent howling and squealing (wax type and amount), electrostatic and magnetic hum protection in the form of pickup covers and cover material, cabling for attaching the pickup to the electronic controls of the instrument, pot values, and capacitor values and types.
The magic is in the interactive nature of all these factors … and then some. (This list is for passive pickups and does not include many aspects of active pickups.) Sometimes I see pickups boiled down to only a few factors, and I do not think that is a sophisticated enough view of these complicated and potentially beautiful-sounding devices.
As an example, it is thought that most players have an idea of the sound that humbucking pickups with alnico 4 magnets that are wound to 7.8k make. They’re historically associated with PAF humbuckers, but those qualities don’t fully explain what gives those pickups character. For example, if the pickup’s wire is standard-size 42 gauge, at 5,000 turns the pickup would have a resistance of about 7.5k. If you use 42-gauge wire that is undersized (which is a common inconsistency) and 4,800 turns, the pickup would still be around 7.5k. Because of the wire diameter and different number of turns, the pickups would sound different even though it’s the same magnet and same resistance. The wire matters; 7.5k is just the resistance of both coils. Just as wire diameter varies, alnico 4 purchased from four manufacturers sounds four different ways, so you have to compensate for that in other design areas as well.
If you think about the sound of a Strat, there is a “whistle note” (or you can think of it as a “ping note”) in every note you play. Think about playing on the neck pickup on a Strat; you can hear that whistle sound in every note. The pickup without a load is resonating at about 11k and at about 15 dB. Fifteen decibels is a lot. Imagine adding 15 dB of 11k (high treble) to your vocal at a gig! The potentiometers on a Strat, and those are 250k (which is a fairly low value for a volume and tone control), calm down how loud the whistle note is. When these single-coil pickups are built well, this whistle note can be very musical. Just think of Robbie Blunt playing “Big Log” on Robert Plant’s 1983 album The Principle of Moments. For us at PRS, getting the whistle note to be the right frequency and the right volume is very important. It is believed, for good reason, that an old PAF pickup can sound very much like a single-coil Strat pickup. That is because of the frequency and volume of the whistle note coming out of these vintage pickups.
“In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do?”
In the end, it’s really simple. Do you like the sound of the pickup? Will it do the job that you’re looking for the instrument to do? When David Grissom worked with us on our DGT pickups, he spent almost a year on them, and at the end of the process, he was adjusting the coil wire by 25 turns at a time until it was exactly where he wanted it. And that’s only the amount of turns. We also evaluated the magnetic type, strength, etc. I bring up all these parameters to give you an idea of how complicated it is to get all the specifications to dance well together. I like what’s going on pickup-wise at PRS and believe that our 2025 offering is gonna turn some heads. Normally, I don’t bring up what we do at PRS in these articles, but this time I think it’s worth mentioning, so stay tuned.
Consider all the types of pickups out there: humbuckers, covered humbuckers, P-90s, Strat single-coils, Tele single-coils, Gretsch Filter’Trons, Jazzmaster, P Bass, Jazz Bass, no-hum single-coils, and mini-humbuckers that make single-coil sounds. Within each one of these types, there can be scores of variations. How to choose? Simply try a pickup and see if you like it!
Your 100 Guitarists hosts are too young to have experienced SRV live. We’ve spent decades with the records, live bootlegs, and videos, but we’ll never know quite how it felt to be in the room with SRV’s guitar sound.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was a force of nature. With his “Number One” Strat, he drove a veritable trove of amps—including vintage Fenders, a rotating Vibratone cab, and a Dumble—to create one of the most compelling tones of all, capable of buttery warmth, percussive pick articulation, and cathartic, screaming excess. As he drew upon an endless well of deeply informed blues guitar vocabulary, his creativity on the instrument seemingly knew no bounds.
Your 100 Guitarists hosts are too young to have experienced SRV live. We’ve spent decades with the records, live bootlegs, and videos, but we’ll never know quite how it felt to be in the room with SRV’s guitar sound. So, we’d like to spend some time imagining: How did it feel when it hit you? How did he command his band, Double Trouble? The audience?
SRV was mythical. His heavy-gauge strings tore up his fingers and made a generation of blues guitarists work a lot harder. And his wall of amps seems finely curated to push as much air in all directions as possible. How far did he take it? Was he fine-tuning his amps to extreme degrees? Or could he get his sound out of anything he plugged into?