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Level-Up Your Blues Phrasing

Level-Up Your Blues Phrasing

Learn to focus your accents and make your lines more listenable.



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Stompboxtober is finally here! Enter below for your chance to WIN today's featured pedal from Diamond Pedals! Come back each day during the month of October for more chances to win!

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Wonderful array of weird and thrilling sounds can be instantly conjured. All three core settings are colorful, and simply twisting the time, span, and filter dials yields pleasing, controllable chaos. Low learning curve.

Not for the faint-hearted or unimaginative. Mode II is not as characterful as DBA and EQD settings.

$199

EarthQuaker Devices/Death By Audio Time Shadows
earthquakerdevices.com

5
5
4
4

This joyful noisemaker can quickly make you the ringmaster of your own psychedelic circus, via creative delays, raucous filtering, and easy-to-use, highly responsive controls.

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This little pedal offers three voices—analog, tape, and digital—and faithfully replicates the highlights of all three, with minimal drawbacks.

Faithful replications of analog and tape delays. Straightforward design.

Digital voice can feel sterile.

$119

Fishman EchoBack Mini Delay
fishman.com

4
4
4
4.5

As someone who was primarily an acoustic guitarist for the first 16 out of 17 years that I’ve been playing, I’m relatively new to the pedal game. That’s not saying I’m new to effects—I’ve employed a squadron of them generously on acoustic tracks in post-production, but rarely in performance. But I’m discovering that a pedalboard, particularly for my acoustic, offers the amenities and comforts of the hobbit hole I dream of architecting for myself one day in the distant future.

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A silicon Fuzz Face-inspired scorcher.

Hot silicon Fuzz Face tones with dimension and character. Sturdy build. Better clean tones than many silicon Fuzz Face clones.

Like all silicon Fuzz Faces, lacks dynamic potential relative to germanium versions.

$229

JAM Fuzz Phrase Si
jampedals.com

4.5
4.5
5
4

Everyone has records and artists they indelibly associate with a specific stompbox. But if the subject is the silicon Fuzz Face, my first thought is always of David Gilmour and the Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii film. What you hear in Live at Pompeii is probably shaped by a little studio sweetening. Even still, the fuzz you hear in “Echoes” and “Careful With That Axe, Eugene”—well, that is how a fuzz blaring through a wall of WEM cabinets in an ancient amphitheater should sound, like the sky shredded by the wail of banshees. I don’t go for sounds of such epic scale much lately, but the sound of Gilmour shaking those Roman columns remains my gold standard for hugeness.

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