The 60+ guitars, amps, pedals, basses, and accessories that stood out from the crowd and earned our coveted Premier Gear Award this year.
Carr Telstar
This handwired 17-watt, 1x12 combo employs two familiar power tubes—a 6L6 and an EL84—to produce the presence and immediacy of a great Fender tweed, the thrilling sparkle of Vox overdrive, and a tighter, tougher bass response than you’d expect from a strictly vintage midsized combo. Telstar’s suave spring reverb, strong note fundamentals, articulate attack, and extraordinary touch response caused Joe Gore to exclaim, “I love this frickin’ amp.”Read the review
$2,450 street, carramps.com
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Plus! December Premier Gear Award Winners!
Read the full reviews on the pages indicated below!
1. Peavey Invective.MH — $699 street, peavey.com
2. Chase Bliss Dark World — $349 street, chaseblissaudio.com
3. Comins CGS-16 — $2,399 street, cominsguitars.com
4. Ernie Ball Music Man Short-Scale StingRay — $1,999 street, music-man.com
5. EBS MicroBass 3 — $349 street, ebssweden.com
Spring-reverb junkies rejoice: This brilliant offering from France puts three amp-rivaling ambience options right on your pedalboard.
Recorded using a Squier Vintage Modified Telecaster Custom with Curtis Novak Tele-V bridge and JM-V neck pickups going into a Ground Control Tsukuyomi boost (set at 9 o’clock) and then into a Warehouse G10C/S-equipped 1976 Fender Vibrolux Reverb (with reverb off) miked with a Royer R-121 and feeding an Apogee Duet going into GarageBand with no EQ-ing, compression, or effects.
Clip 1: Le Bon tank (first bypassed) then with two different settings: 1) All controls at noon and spring-saturation switch off, first in middle pickup position, then neck pickup. 2) Out and low at max, mix at 2 o’clock, and high at 10 o’clock, first in middle pickup position, then in middle pickup position with spring-saturation switch engaged.
Clip 2: Same as clip 1, but with La Brute tank.
Clip 3: Same as clip 1, but with Le Truand tank.
RatingsPros:Adds world-class spring-reverb sounds of all stripes to any amp. Great build. Reasonable price. Cons: Requires careful pedalboard placement and possibly extra padding, particularly for heavy stompers. Street: $349 street (Premium bundle, tested), $249 (Le Bon bundle), $279 (La Brute bundle), $299 (Le Truand bundle) Anasounds Element anasounds.com | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
A forewarning—I’m about to blaspheme. Okay, here goes: The Anasounds Element is a game-changing means of stocking your pedalboard with analog spring reverb that can rival ’verb in classic amps. Hear me out—I’ve been obsessed with reverb for years, and none of this is said lightly.
How It Works
The France-built Element consists of two units: a 4-knob controller/preamp stompbox that connects via a 3.5 mm-to-RCA cable to one of three available tank sizes. The smallest, Le Bon, is approximately 7"x 2"x 1 1/2", while La Brute is about 9"x 3"x 1 1/2" (roughly the size of a Fender Blues Junior tank), and Le Truand, at 17"x 4"x 1 1/2", is about as big as the tank from a Fender Twin Reverb. (All three are also available in a Premium bundle.) Each tank contains three springs, and includes screws and washers for mounting to your board through holes outfitted with shock-absorbing rubber grommets. All pedal jacks are up top, and controls are straightforward: Mix shifts the dry-to-wet ratio, out governs wet-signal gain (9 dB at max), and low and high adjust the reverberated signal’s bass and treble content. A single toggle engages a “saturation” mode.
Lequel Est Pour Toi?
My tests began by running each Element tank through my ’76 Vibrolux Reverb, toggling back and forth between the amp’s built-in ’verb and Anasounds sounds driven by a Telecaster and a baritone “Jazzblaster” with Wide Range-style humbuckers. My initial impression, even with little Le Bon, was … “Dayum!”
For starters, I heard no difference in the character of foundational tones when the effect was engaged versus bypassed—a testament to Anasounds’ incredibly clear preamp. Secondly, even little Le Bon offered a huge array of sounds; everything from a splash of amp-like ambiance to tidal waves of completely legit surf tones. I thought I detected a little more low-end oomph in the Fender’s reverb at first, but as I experimented with Element’s controls I realized there was hardly a Vibrolux reverb sound I couldn’t mimic—plus a jillion more that would be hard to extract from a single-knob circuit.
Even using an RCA-to-1/4" adapter to route my Vibrolux’s own reverb into the amp’s normal channel—which lets you use that channel’s controls to EQ the reverberated signal (a trick I learned from new PG Silver and Black columnist Jens Mosbergvik)——didn’t yield tonal variety to rival the Element. And that’s not just because the amp lacks a mix control. The Element’s high knob is perfect for taming ping-y treble drips or dialing in warmer sounds. But even treble-accentuated settings usually sounded less grating to my ears than extreme Vibrolux reverb settings.
The low control is more subtle, but it’s a welcome and important inclusion. Meanwhile, routing the Element through my Jaguar HC50 1x12 highlighted how effective the out knob is at fine-tuning the system for differently voiced amps. The British-voiced Jag’ seemed to thrive at advanced out knob levels, yielding pleasingly bristling harmonics, while the Fender’s mid-scooped sounds reacted a little more stuffily. As for saturation mode, with low treble settings its chaotic, quasi-fuzz sounds could be a cool niche effect for experimentalists.
The Verdict
The Anasounds Element imbues whatever amp you love with a touch of vintage Fender reverb magic. The main difference between Le Bon, La Brute, and Le Truand is smoother transients and decays as you increase tank size, but at conservative to moderate settings, most players will struggle to hear a significant enough difference—particularly in a band mix—to warrant the extra cash and real estate for the larger options. That said, avowed reverb junkies will thrill at Le Truand’s gorgeous depth: With mix straight up, low cranked, and high between 9 o’clock and noon, I found that higher out settings expanded the spaciousness of the big tank’s sounds so much that it effectively bridged the gap between everyday amp reverb and more atmospheric digital reverbs—particularly when you feed boosts or overdrives into Element’s front end.
Though capable of chaotic violence, this granular delay is also ingenious, inspiring, and endlessly fun.
Many cool tones—and the means to control them. Fine sound quality. Good price.
Definitely not for-everyone.
$299
Red Panda Particle 2
redpandalab.com
You’re about to read a rave review of an innovative and inspiring pedal. Red Panda’s Particle 2 is practically guaranteed to take your tones to new places. But before proceeding, be aware that those destinations aren’t for everybody.
No Pain, No Grain
The Particle 2 is a granular delay. (Skip ahead if you already know what that means.) The concepts behind granular delay/synthesis originated in the 1960s. The process has been available in music software for some 20 years via such programs as Native Instruments’ Reaktor and Cycling 74’s Max/MSP. But it’s only existed in stompbox form for a few years.
Granular delays divide incoming audio into tiny slices—or particles, if you like. These slices are then subjected, independent of each other, to digital manipulation including time and pitch shifting, delay, reverse playback, phase manipulation, and more. Additionally, any of those parameters can be modulated, producing violent storms of sound. This is not a pedal for the ol’ Tuesday night blues jam.
Colors of Chaos
The Particle 2 improves your odds of getting musically coherent results from granular delay’s anarchic process. The crucial control is the 8-position mode switch. The role of the adjacent parameter control varies from mode to mode. The first mode, density, is the simplest, and probably the most utilitarian if you want unusual tones that still conform to standard chords and rhythms. Layered behind your dry signal, its shimmering, blurry textures can be downright beautiful, like a pretty landscape viewed through a window on a rainy day.
LFO mode expands and contracts the speed of the delayed signal. Reverse mode randomly reverses some slices. Pitch mode randomly detunes echoes, while random mode scrambles the delay times. The pitch modes manipulate tuning, LFO modulation, and grain density.
The intricacies of these effects are best understood by listening. You hear the various modes in the demo clip. It’s a long clip because there’s much to explore here—and because playing Particle 2 is fun.
The Particle 2 improves your odds of getting musically coherent results from granular delay’s anarchic process.
Digital Dexterity
The remaining controls set the intensity of various parameters. There’s an all-important wet/dry control. The chop control sets the grain size. Its results range from near-conventional echoes to thick harmonic soup. The delay time and feedback controls do what you’d expect. Together, these knobs regulate the intensity of the Particle 2’s effects, permitting relatively subtle sounds that make this pedal more than a frantic noise bomb.
In all modes, the Particle 2’s sound quality is stellar for its price range. There’s none of that low-resolution bleating you often encounter in stompbox pitch shifters. The pedal runs on standard 9V power supplies. (Adapter not included.) You can’t use a battery.
The Particle 2 can store four settings in memory with a single button-push, or access 127 saved sounds via external MIDI program change commands. You can pilot any one knob with a foot controller. (The parameter knob is an obvious choice.) There’s also a tap-tempo switch that doubles as a freeze control when held.
The Verdict
It’s no surprise that the Particle 2 can generate violent, chaotic sounds—it’s a granular delay! It’s more remarkable for its ability to wrangle this unruly family of effects into more subdued and musical contexts. It’s easy to imagine some of these sounds finding a home in a relatively straightforward pop track. The Particle 2 is well made. Its sound quality is excellent. The interface is lucid. It has a vast repertoire of head-spinning tones. The R&D this design surely required more than justifies the $299 price. The Particle 2 is ingenious, inspiring, and endlessly fun.
Turn off your mind, relax, and float the treble stream!
RatingsPros:Spot-on ’66/’67 Beatles tones. Unique overdrive sounds. Snappy response. Excellent build quality. Intuitive, rangy, and responsive control set. Cons: Super spendy. Street: $320 Aclam Dr. Robert aclamguitars.com | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
I fell in love with the Beatles, early and hard. But among the cosmic expanse of Beatles sounds I’ve discovered since my youth, it’s the tart, trebly, and paradoxically dreamy guitar sounds of Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s… and Magical Mystery Tour that remain most constantly enrapturing.
Aclam’s Dr. Robert generates uncannily authentic approximations of the tones from these records. But as thrillingly accurate as it is, the Dr. Robert is no one-trick pony. Its overdrive, fuzz, and boost tones surprise with their richness. And when it comes to surgically slotting a guitar sound distinctly in a mix, the Dr. Robert is a very sharp scalpel indeed.
Head Heritage
Aclam, which hails from Barcelona, used their own, very rare Vox UL730 solid-state/tube hybrid amp as reference when laying out the Dr. Robert’s topology. Where and when this amp was used in the Beatles discography is hard to pinpoint with exactitude. The band also used the similarly hybridized but much more powerful Vox UL7120 around the time of Revolver, the Vox UL430 bass amp for Sgt. Pepper’s,and the solid-state Vox Conqueror on dates spanning Sgt. Pepper’s and The Beatles (aka, The White Album). The Beatles, by the way, weren’t the only superstars using Vox’s new hybrids and solid-state models at the time. The Stones used similar UL760 and Supreme models around the Between the Buttons and Satanic Majesties sessions. And a UL730 is allegedly one of Jimmy Page’s secret weapons on Led Zeppelin II.
While we’ll probably never know with absolute certainty which Vox amps account for what tones in specific Beatles songs, the Vox amps the Beatles used in this period share many sonic attributes. Those sounds—and that spirit—are easy to source via the Dr. Robert’s simple but effective control set.
Aclam’s relatively strict adherence to UL730 topology results in a few unique pedal circuit quirks. On the UL730, Vox separated the midrange control from the rest of the EQ stack, situating it before the volume pot and upstream from the bass and treble controls. The Dr. Robert is wired in similar fashion, which means that the midrange shapes the pedal’s tone and gain profile profoundly before interacting with an amplifier’s bass/treble tone stack.
In another twist, the Dr. Robert’s gain control is situated where a UL730’s volume control would be in the amp circuit. But Aclam placed the volume pot after the pedal’s FET section, so it would work as a gain control rather than a simple volume. (UL730s had no master volume and had to be played at deafening levels to achieve saturation.) A second footswitch on the pedal called Mach Schau—German, for “make a show,” reflecting the Fab Four’s Hamburg days—boosts the entire signal to psychedelic “She Said She Said” levels of saturation and compression. It’s amazing for kicking solos into high gear when you don’t want to introduce the color of another gain pedal. But it’s also capable of shaping unique tones that extend beyond the UL730 palette.
So, how do the Dr. Robert’s tones stack up against the Fabs? Startlingly well, I must say. I managed near-perfect approximations of the searing “She Said She Said” intro lick, the meaty, honking, and propulsive rhythm textures of “Paperback Writer” and “Dr. Robert,” and the sharp, clanging rhythm stabs of “Taxman” and “Getting Better” with relative ease. Having P-90s around to chase these tones is a plus. (I got the best results from a P-90-equipped Jazzmaster.) But I extracted nearly-as-convincing Beatles tones from Rickenbacker Hi Gains and Novak Wide Range-style humbuckers.
And while everything about the Dr. Robert—from the name to the enclosure artwork by Revolver cover artist Klaus Voorman—is clearly Fab-centric, the pedal generates tones that are interesting and unique outside the Beatles canon. Anyone looking for original mid-gain and fuzz tones, or the means to cut through a dense band mix, would be well served by investigating Aclam’s Beatles-inspired box.
The Verdict
You don’t have to be obsessive about John Lennon’s Revolver tones to justify the expense of the Dr. Robert. But you do need to be open to the recording and performance potential of a fangy, brash, hot-and-trebly mid-’60s Vox. Preference for these tones is a very personal matter. My tones score is a 5, based on a lifelong fixation with Beatles sounds and the Acclam’s ability to deliver them. But if you strongly prefer, say, the compressed, contoured, and controlled tones of a tweed or blackface Fender, you might need to adjust that score lower. Cost is another very subjective issue. At $320, the Dr. Robert is unquestionably spendy. But the tones within are so close to the Beatles tones I’ve been chasing for decades, and so unique in non-Beatles contexts, that the cost seems rational to me—particularly given the quality and care and thought that went into this impressive design.
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MXR cuts the Carbon Copy down to size—and it’s every bit as excellent as the original.
RatingsPros:Sounds every bit as good as an original. Contrasting LED for modulation mode. Super-clear repeats in bright mode. It’s mini! Cons: Too bad bright switch isn’t top-mounted. Street: $149 MXR Carbon Copy Mini jimdunlop.com | Tones: Ease of Use: Build/Design: Value: |
Loving delay like I do (some would probably call it a crutch), I’m always itching to try the newest DSP version of some obscure tape/oil-can echo or pitch-modulated, twice-reversed delay machine. I love these pedals and the sounds they make possible. Which makes it curious that I so often return to my secondhand MXR Carbon Copy in a pinch.
Part of my affection for the Carbon Copy comes from its practicality in touring and travel situations. It’s small, it always works, it’s beautifully simple. Even the glow-in-the-dark level indicators are invaluable. But practicality isn’t what keeps me pulling the Carbon Copy off my shelf at home. I do that because it sounds reliably great and gives a lot in terms of inspiration and depth without asking for a lot of fuss in return. It remains, in my book, a steal, and the perfect analog delay for veteran players or anyone just getting started with the type. So what could make the Carbon Copy even more utilitarian and appealing? How about a mini version that’s half the size and includes a bright switch?
Mini Mean Green Machine
If you know the original Carbon Copy, you’ll know the Carbon Copy Mini. The regen, mix, and delay controls are arrayed in the same triangle configuration as they are on the big version. The small push-button that activates the modulation circuit is situated adjacent to the footswitch rather than adjacent to the mix knob, as it is on the original. But MXR also made a very simple, but very awesome, improvement by making the “modulation-on” LED orange instead of blue, which is the color of the bypass LED. Why is that a big deal? Well, at the risk of making myself look a bit thick here, I can’t say how many times, in a flurry of activity on a dark stage, I mistook the old blue “modulation-on” LED for the blue bypass LED and stood befuddled, wondering why my tone was suddenly so thin. So welcome to the party, little orange LED! Where have you been all my life?
Inside the enclosure, the circuit utilizes nearly every millimeter of space on the machine-populated board. But they still found room for the two dials that adjust the modulation speed and depth (or “width,” as it’s known in MXR nomenclature). Unfortunately, it seems there wasn’t room to make the bright switch a top-mounted push button like the modulation switch. The good news is that MXR didn’t situate it on the inside, either. Instead, it’s hidden in a clearly labeled slot on the enclosure’s side, tucked deep enough that you won’t accidentally activate it, but accessible enough that you can switch it on with a small screwdriver or the tip of a pocketknife blade. A side-mounted blue LED indicates when the bright switch is on (and not once did I mistake it for the bypass switch LED).
Copy of a Copy of a…
There’s no letdown on the tone front when you switch on the Carbon Copy Mini. If I had to make a guess, I’d say it sounds about 98.3 percent the same as my old full-sized version. In moments, I thought I perceived extra brightness from the Mini. But I’m also about 98.3 percent sure I tricked myself into that perception. At any rate, I would not hesitate to switch this unit in for my original. The repeats are soft, contoured, and slide seamlessly into the slipstream behind the dry signal—just as on the original, which has one of the most balanced delay voices I know. If you want to understand the appeal of analog delay, this is a great place to start.
If you’re on the fence between an analog or digital delay because of issues of clarity or darkness, the bright switch may well give the advantage to the Carbon Copy. In bright mode, it’s brighter than a Boss DD-5. It’s even brighter than my amp without the delay on! But I love the effect, and if you’re concerned about your echoes lying buried in a mix, the Carbon Copy Mini’s bright mode may be the fix and then some.
The Verdict
I already love my original Carbon Copy. And if it weren’t for my sentimental side and an irrational fear of twisting an ankle while stepping on unsecured mini pedals, I might love the Carbon Copy Mini even more. Just like its big brother, the Carbon Copy Mini is a rock-solid, reliable performer, and a great deal, too.
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