Classic-rock legends Heart, led by iconic sibling duo Nancy and Ann Wilson, tore across the United States last year on the Royal Flush tour. The show touched down at the Pinnacle in Nashville on December 21, and prior to the festivities, PG’s John Bohlinger met up with lead shredder Nancy Wilson and her tech/“guitar butler” Nathan McMurdo, plus guitarists Ryan Wariner and Ryan Waters. Check out some highlights from their rigs below, and tune in to the full Rundown for more!
On the advice of a former roadie, Wilson picked up this Lake Placid blue 1963 Telecaster when she was “nouveau riche” in the early ’80s, thanks to Heart’s success. Some encourage her to leave it at home, but Wilson insists she “can’t live without it.” Its neck pickup was changed to a PAF humbucker. Most of Wilson’s electrics use D’Addario NYXL strings (.010–.046).
Here, Fishy, Fishy
After retiring a ’60s SG, Wilson now brings this early-’80s model on the road. It sees use on “Barracuda.”
Sisters’ Signature
This custom-built acoustic was brainstormed by Nancy and the folks at Martin as a signature gift for her sister, Ann. Adorned with interstellar artwork, it’s one of only two ever made—one for each sister. All of Nancy’s acoustics use Go Acoustic pickups.
Buddhist Temple
<p>Nancy’s electrics run through a Budda Superdrive 30 head, with a second on hand as a backup, and out to an Orange 412 cabinet with Celestion Gold speakers.</p>
Nancy Wilson’s Pedalboard
McMurdo handles effect changes backstage throughout the show. Nancy’s board has a Line 6 HX Stomp, T.E.A. Barracuda, Revv G2, Keeley El Rey Dorado, MXR Studio Compressor, DigiTech Drop, Revv Tilt, and a channel switch pedal for the Budda. There are also Radial Big Shot ABY and Headshot utility boxes, and an Endorphines Plus 3 expression pedal.
Classic ’Caster
Ryan Waters bought this 1972 Telecaster Thinline in a New York City guitar shop in the mid-’90s. Loaded with Lindy Fralin pickups, it’s his top pick.
Thin Lindy
This thinline Telecaster serves as a loyal backup, with the same Lindy Fralins that are in his number-one, plus a Bigsby system.
… And Don’t Call Me Dirty Shirley!
Waters’ Friedman Dirty Shirley is his main amp, with an 18-watt Marshall plexi-style head as a backup. An Orange 412 pumps out the sound.
Ryan Waters’ Pedalboard
Waters’ board includes a TC Electric PolyTune Mini, TC Electronic Sub ‘N’ Up, MXR Phase 90, Mr. Black Tremolo, Keeley Super Rodent, Revv G2, Strymon Deco, Recovery Effects Moonstruck, and a Dunlop Volume Pedal.
MI6-String
This 2014 Les Paul is from Gibson’s Collector’s Choice series, and thanks to its serial number 007, it’s earned the nickname “Bondburst.” It has a Tom Holmes bridge pickup, and comes out for “Magic Man,” as well as Led Zeppelin covers in the set. Like Wilson, he uses D’Addario NYXLs (.010–.046) and D'Addario Nickel Bronze strings on his acoustics.
Double the Fun
Wariner acquired this lightweight double-neck from Gibson when he joined up with Heart for this tour. It has a Seymour DuncanJimmy Page pickup in the bridge, and is used for a cover of Zeppelin’s “Rain Song,” as well as the title track off of 1977’s Little Queen.
Bringing Plexi Back
Wariner’s top dog is his 1973 100-watt Marshall head, modded by Dave Friedman. Another 1970 Marshall JMP head with the same mod is on deck as a spare. The heads run through a Friedman cab with a mix of Celestion Greenbacks and Vintage 30s.
Ryan Wariner’s Pedalboard
To the left of Wariner’s main board sits a smaller rig with a Peterson StoboStomp Tuner, a UAFX Heavenly, and a Grace Design ALiX Preamp. On the motherboard, there’s an Ernie Ball volume pedal, a second StroboStomp, MXR Phase 95, MXR Super Badass, DigiTech Drop, Klon clone, Pete Cornish NB-3, T.E.A. Barracuda, Analog Man GE-7, Crowther Hot Cake, Strymon Volante, EarthQuaker Devices Dispatch Master, and Strymon Cloudburst.
Few effects delivered as much aura and musically transformative power per buck as Electro-Harmonix’s Sovtek Big Muffs from the mid ’90s. Mine set me back probably $50. But man, I might as well have stolen Excalibur from the clutches of King Arthur.
Up to that moment, my piggyback Fender Tremolux, Tube Screamer, and Rickenbacker was perfect for thrashing out ’60s Kinks riffs. But with the Big Muff in the mix, my little rig became a monster—a wrecking ball capable of the potency I savored in Black Sabbath and Dinosaur Jr. From that moment on, my amplifier would be intolerable to the public outside the confines of a rented jam space. I suspect I went to bed that night pondering, like Robert Oppenheimer, tales of Prometheus and the Bhagavad Gita. The Big Muff had unleashed a horrible new power.
“The Fade Font ’94 possesses all the signature qualities of a Big Muff—sustain, mass, and megatonnage.”
Today the Big Muff’s might is legendary, and thanks to a couple of decades of cloning and reissues its power has proliferated among players. But Big Muffs sing many songs. Like their human creators, they are full of quirks, and Wren and Cuff’s Matt Holl and protégé Ray Rosas study these oddities and irregularities fastidiously. The newest product of Holl’s obsession is the Fade Font ’94—a beautiful homage to a ’90s “Tall Font” Sovtek Big Muff in Holl’s sizable collection built with unusual components that shifted its personality to brasher ends. The Fade Font ’94 possesses all the signature qualities of a Big Muff—sustain, mass, and megatonnage. But it’s also nastier and illuminated at the edges by a ripping high-mid ferocity that counterbalances the creaminess that is the signature of most ’90s Big Muffs.
Built to Bruise
The charms of the Fade Font ’94’s olive drab, steel-slab design will no doubt elude some. But as someone who keeps their Sovtek Big Muff on a sort of informal mantle in my studio, I was genuinely thrilled to see how Wren and Cuff reproduced the original’s enclosure with such exactitude and quality. The dimensions are, save for very minor deviations, identical. At a few paces, you’d never suspect you were looking at anything other than an original Sovtek. The difference in quality, however, between Wren and Cuff’s unit and an original Sovtek is easy to see and feel. There’s a proper footswitch. The knobs (near-perfect replicas of the originals) turn with a smooth secure sense absent in Sovteks. And on the inside, the relatively simple circuit is executed masterfully on a through-hole circuit board. I also suspect the paint on the Wren and Cuff won’t flake off within weeks, and I won’t miss the Sovtek’s plastic jacks. So, yes, on the quality and craft side of the equation, Wren and Cuff deliver.
But it’s the sound that puts the Fade Font ’94 over the top. And Matt Holl was right to be excited by the sonic signature of the Muff that inspired this one. The primary design difference in that Big Muff is its use of 150k pots rather than the 100k pots most Muffs use. Holl found several component values elsewhere in the circuit that didn’t match Big Muff design norms. The sonic sum is what you hear here, and in Muff terms it’s something special.
Side by side, five Big Muff circuits can sound equally great for five different reasons. But the Tall Font conveys a sense of balance and playing to strengths—like a top-notch analog desk mix of a record, or a great mastering job. And it makes the Fade Font ’94 sound quite like listening to a Big Muff greatest hits record. It’s plenty bassy, just like a Sovtek should be. But the airy lower-midrange seems to siphon away excess low-end energy that might make a bass trap and convert it to low-mid purr. The high-mid, too, is very activated and detailed without flirting with brick-wall midrange. The top end is full of air, while the low-mid purr becomes a growl. It’s just really balanced across its gain structure and feels exceptionally alive as a result.
It’s got range, too. The tone control is a good friend when probing other voices within the brawny core output. At minimum high-pass levels (and lower gain levels) the Fade Font ’94 has some of the warmly stressed and fractured essence of an overdriven Tweed Deluxe. At more piercing tones and modest gain you can brew many shades of ’60s psych-punk. And when it comes to just doing things a Sovtek Big Muff does—doom, desert, dark psych, or just Gilmour’s smoothest, silkiest flights—the Fade Font ’94 does it all with aplomb and poise.
The Verdict
If you played the Fade Font ’94 without the benefit of side-by-side comparison with other ’90s or ’90s-style Big Muffs you might be hard-pressed to recognize the differences. If you have the ability to do so, though, it becomes hard to un-hear the shift in accent that makes it sound so much more sonorous, well-rounded, and at times, extra aggressive.
Obviously, there are practical downsides to the Fade Font ’94’s lovingly, exactingly executed big-enclosure format. Any player with more than a few additional pedals will struggle to accommodate the big footprint without scaling up to a bigger pedalboard. On the other hand, the Fade Font’s flexibility gives you justification to pare back your fuzz collection. Maybe, like I did over the course of this test, you’ll succumb to the Fade Font ’94’s brutish charms so completely that you’ll find everything but a delay pedal superfluous. For such minimalists, well-heeled maximalists with roadies, pedal aesthetes, or studio rats more concerned with delicious sounds than pedalboard space, the Fade Font ’94’s size won’t get in the way of putting it to use.
Reflecting on my $50 Big Muff purchase back in the ’90s—and the many times I put it back together with a cheap Radio Shack soldering kit and gaffer’s tape—it’s hard to imagine that such a close relative could be elevated to this level of luxury. But once again, Wren and Cuff has shaped magnificence from merely modest perfection. And any player who loves the Big Muff owes it to themselves to experience this intriguing, engaging variation on the theme.
Carondelet Pickups has introduced their newest vintage-style humbuckers: the company’s OTB Ultimates provide a sound and feel that are stunningly close to great examples of original 1957-61 Gibson “Patent Applied For”-sticker humbuckers.
Louisiana-based Carondelet -- pronounced “kuh-RON-da-let” -- teamed up with artist Owen Barry in developing the OTB with the specific goal of “cracking the code” of vintage Gibson PAF humbuckers, but at a fraction of the cost of actual vintage PAFs.
The bridge position Carondelet OTB Ultimate reads 8.2k DCR and the neck position 7.0k DCR. Both positions feature rough-cast Alnico V magnets; historically accurate coil wire, plastics and metallurgy; two-conductor braided shield leads; and are unpotted like original PAFs.
Carondelet OTB Ultimates come with permanent and period-correct American-made raw German nickel silver covers. The “standard” version featuring modern covers with etched Carondelet logo carry a street price of $249 each and $498 per set. The “grail” version features no-logo vintage correct covers created from a 3D scan of an actual 1959 Gibson PAF, and carry a street price of $279 each and $558 per set.
The OTB Bridge position pickup is available in either Gibson-spacing or Fender-spacing, while the Neck position is available in a single vintage Gibson-spacing format.
The OTB in the product name is based on the initials of Owen Timothy Barry, a Nashville-based session and touring player whose resume includes The Chicks, Jackson Browne, Celine Dion, Jennifer Lopez, Gwen Stefani and Tal Wilkenfeld, among many others. Carondelet’s owner Jeff Richard (REE-shard, Cajun French) hand-winds all Carondelet pickups one at a time in his workshop in Baton Rouge. Barry and Richard met at the Amigo Nasvillle guitar show in 2025 and R&D on the OTB Ultimates began shortly thereafter, involving multiple trips between Tennessee and Louisiana and well over 50 pickup prototypes that directly contributed to the final recipe, Richard said.
“Even the simplest guitar pickup has so many variables which forge overall tone and feel,” Richard said. “In the case of a vintage PAF, however, you’re trying to recreate pickups wound 70 years ago by primitive machines, using inconsistent to outright changing techniques, components and materials, in a process overseen by common factory workers who aren’t around today to field how-to questions.”
Said Barry: “In order to create my perfect PAF set with Jeff, I had to fully understand the original recipe. It was an incredibly intensive deep dive, but I knew we had to try and test every variable. This would be the only way to find what created the original PAF magic.”
Carondelet OTB Ultimates are available direct via CarondeletPickups.com; and select vintage/boutique dealers including Carter’s Vintage Guitars in Nashville (cartervintage.com) and LA Vintage Gear in Los Angeles (lavintagegear.com).
Few players have been more instrumental in shaping the sound of modern metalcore than Converge’s Kurt Ballou. But to hear the producer and guitarist tell it, the 6-string was originally a consolation prize, not a calling. “My buddy Rob and I had this pact to start a band together, but we both wanted to play bass because we were both really into Rush and Iron Maiden at the time,” he says, calling in from his God City recording studio in Salem, Massachusetts. “And those bands have fantastic guitar playing, but they also have these bass heroes in Geddy Lee and Steve Harris, respectively. So, we decided that whoever could save up money for a bass first got to be the bass player, and the other one had to play guitar. I obviously lost.”
It’s a good thing the chips fell where they did. Since Converge formed in 1990, Ballou’s chugging-yet-sinuous brand of guitar brutalism has proved to be the perfect foil for vocalist Jacob Bannon’s throat-rending forays into emotional catharsis. It’s a sound that has evolved exponentially since the band’s early days, though never lacking ferocity. “The music that I was making was about trying to find a voice that was true to me and to what my influences were, but wasn’t parroting something that I was a fan of,” Ballou says of the band’s earlier work. “You start out by emulating, and you either emulate poorly and come up with something original, or you just find your own voice and get to something that’s original. I think that’s what we got to eventually, but it took a while.”
A decade into their career, Converge had already solidly established themselves in the extreme music world. But with release of the album Jane Doein 2001—the band’s first to feature the almost supernaturally kinetic rhythm section of drummer Ben Koller and bassist Nate Newton—Converge demonstrated their ability to challenge, and sometimes even transcend, genre tropes with a deft balance of fury and finesse. Their new album, the bleakly titled Love Is Not Enough, is their first in nearly a decade (Bloodmoon: I, a 2021 collaboration with doom metallist Chelsea Wolfe and Stephen Brodsky of Cave In, notwithstanding). “Converge is basically our side hustle,” explains Ballou, who spends most of his time producing and mixing other artists. “So, it’s not like we’re beholden to an 18-month album cycle. But there was definitely a feeling that like, ‘Oh yeah, it's been too long.’”
Ballou with his God City Instruments Craftsman, onstage at Furnace Fest.
Photo by Ben Pike
Love Is Not Enough was well worth the wait. Songs like the album-opening title track are relentless blasts of aggression, replete with riffs and half-time breakdowns sure to incite circle pits the world over, while brooding, delay-and-reverb-drenched midtempo numbers like “Gilded Cage” continue to expand and refine Converge’s palette. Throughout the album, a compositional discipline reigns that never allows the listener’s attention to drift. “It’s a good idea in anything creative to leave people wanting more rather than giving them too much, and if you try to limit how many ideas are in one song, you can increase the impact that that song has by keeping it tight and memorable,” Ballou says. “It’s like when you listen to newer Metallica. I actually think there's a lot of cool shit on St. Anger, but they just beat every idea into the ground. Instead of doing something four times, they do it 32. And if they’re like, ‘Well, part A sounds good going into part B, but part A also sounds good going into part C, and part C sounds good going back to A, but part C also sounds good going to B, then they do it every possible way in the song. These are all cool ideas, but I think it’s better to just find the best ones, tighten up your arrangements, and give people the bestversion of the thing rather than every version of the thing.”
Converge’s economical arrangements are certainly integral to what gives their songs an instantly recognizable contour, but the bespoke alternate tunings that the band have explored since Jane Doe are perhaps what distinguishes them most. “There were only a few songs in the first 10 years of Converge that had any alternate tunings because I was always really against them,” Ballou says. “Every time I tried drop D, I felt like what I was coming up with was really generic and basic. It took a while before I cracked the code to making something that felt like me.” Ballou credits Neil Young’s soundtrack to the 1995 Jim Jarmusch film Dead Man with finally opening his ears to the possibilities of alternate tunings. “It was atmospheric, vibe-y stuff that really spoke to me,” he says. “There was also a guy named Alex Dunham, who was in the bands Hoover and then Regulator Watts and Abilene, who had a similar vibe but also played slide. And so, I started experimenting with slides. But then you realize, like, ‘Oh, I don’t want this major third here. Let me get that out of there.’ And so, you start changing the guitar’s tuning to get the chord shapes you want. Eventually, I just stopped using the slide but stayed with those open tunings.” Ballou also cites other heavy bands like Cave In, Melvins, and Neurosis with providing him with inspiration, as well as indie rock legends (and alternate tuning icons) Sonic Youth.
Bannon and Ballou at Furnace Fest in Birmingham, Alabama, October 5, 2025.
Photo by Ben Pike
“You start out by emulating, and you either emulate poorly and come up with something original, or you just find your own voice and get to something that’s original.”
“I feel like if you really boil it down, Converge is sort of like Sonic Youth meets Slayer meets New York hardcore,” Ballou says. “And I actually have a tuning I call ‘Open Slayer.’ It’s C–F#–C–F#–C–F#, which is a take on Sonic Youth’s C–F–C–F–C–F.” Ballou’s favorite tuning, however, is one that he and the band refer to as “Wacky Tuning.” And while the internet will tell you that it’s C–G–C–F–G#–C, the guitarist will neither confirm nor deny this. “For whatever reason, I’ve put my foot down,” he says, smiling. “I’m not going to say what it is. It’s a challenge for people to figure it out. But we’ve used it almost half the time on every record since Jane Doe.”
For the recording of Love Is Not Enough, Ballou auditioned many of the amps in his studio’s collection, only to return to his stalwarts. “It's funny, when I have a record where there’s a little more time in the budget to experiment, like we have with Converge, I will tend to set up more amps and do shootouts,” Ballou says. “And a lot of times I’m just like, ‘Oh yeah, the shit I use all the time I’m using all the time for a reason—this is the best shit that I have!’ There are a few amps that really are the best at everything.”
He continues, “On this record, for the main rhythm guitars, the left side is this uncommon amp from Belarus made by Sparrows Sons. There’s a handful of them that are out there. I own two, and they don’t sound the same as each other. My purple one has a very “home brew” kind of vibe. And it’s just really great sounding. I don’t know what kind of circuit it’s based on. And then the right side is a 100-watt HMW, which stands for ‘Heavy Metal Warfare,’ by Dean Costello Audio. Both amps ran through Marshall 1960 cabinets that have a mix of Celestion Classic Lead 80s and Amperian speakers, miked with Shure Unidyne SM57s and Soyuz 1973s.”
Instead of relying exclusively on his amplifiers’ preamp sections to produce crushing gain levels, Ballou prefers to hit the amp’s front end with a pedal. It’s a practice he adopted early on in Converge’s career, when he primarily employed a ’70s-era Traynor YRM-1 45-watt head, which he still owns and used for many of the clean and semi-clean sounds on Love Is Not Enough. “There’s something about starving the low end and tightening things up with a pedal that I still like,” he says. “The Traynor is somewhere between a Fender Twin and a Marshall JMP kind of circuit, so it wasn’t designed to go ‘chug, chug, chug.’ I was forcing it to do that against its will by hitting the front end with a Boss OS-2 [Overdrive/Distortion], which has a really good midrange push to it.”
Converge, 2025 (l–r): bassist Nate Newton, drummer Ben Koller, singer Jacob Bannon, Ballou
Photo by Jason Zucco
When pressed to unpack the concept of “starving the low end” a little more thoroughly, Ballou, who has a degree in aerospace engineering, is more than happy to expound. “In any negative-feedback-based op-amp overdrive, there’s always this sort of shunt to ground that happens in the negative feedback circuit in order to get gain. And basically, you have to high pass that—meaning cutting the lows—because low end tends to overdrive before high end, and you can end up with a signal where the low end is distorted but the highs are clean,” he explains. “So, to get that searing tone with high end and mids compressed and overdriven, you have to starve the bottom end going into the overdrive circuit. To do that, a lot of pedals—like, say, the Boss Metal Zone—have a bunch of EQ stages working under the hood that precondition the signal before the drive section by cutting lows, and then post-condition after the drive section to add it back in. So, you’re starving the bottom end going into it to tighten it up and make it more responsive, and then you’re boosting the bottom end at the output to restore what you’ve lost. The same theory applies when you’re hitting the front of an amp.”
Ballou eventually graduated from the OS-2 to using a Boss GE-7 graphic equalizer pedal “set to a frowny-face EQ with the output gain jacked up,” and now favors the Onslaught, a pedal that he designed for his own God City Instruments brand of stompboxes, guitars, and basses. Although he also used a Wild Customs electric, a pine T-style partscaster with Lindy Fralin pickups, and a First Act Sheena with EMGs, the bulk of the guitar parts on Love Is Not Enough were in fact tracked using GCI guitars that Ballou designed himself.
“My father’s a machinist and owns a machine shop and has CNC mills and stuff, so making shit was always just sort of normal to me,” Ballou says. “There was a summer where the studio was slow and my dad’s shop was slow as well, and I went down the rabbit hole and built about 30 guitars. I was making the bodies that I had designed on the CNC machines, and having Warmoth make the necks with a custom headstock.”
The guitarist would assemble and set up the instruments himself, a process that he found less satisfying than dialing in the design and specifications of the instruments. “I am definitely better at the design aspect of it than I am at the craftsman aspect,” he says. “Now I’ve got a relationship with this fantastic factory in South Korea that’s doing the building for me, but I still do all the quality control of each instrument myself when they get here.”
“I feel like if you really boil it down, Converge is sort of like Sonic Youth meets Slayer meets New York hardcore.”
Kurt Ballou’s Gear
Guitars
God City Instruments Craftsman
God City Instruments Constructivist
God City Instruments Deconstructivist baritone
Amps
Studio:
Dean Costello Audio 100-Watt HMW
Sparrows Son
Traynor YRM-1
Marshall 1960 4x12 cabinets with Celestion and Amperian speakers
Live:
Line 6 Helix into Quilter Labs Tone Block 202 heads
Picks, Strings, & Cables
D’Addario Duralin Standard Light/Medium Gauge (.70mm) picks
D’Addario NYXL (.011–.056) and NYXL Players Choice (.013–.064) custom set for baritone strings
D’Addario cables
While his production runs often sell out—as of this writing, there are no guitars available for sale on the God City Instruments website—one thing that never fails to bedevil Ballou (as surely it must his peers) is the mercurial and unpredictable taste of the guitar-buying community. “I am always amazed at the things that people are particular and not particular about,” he admits. “And people are very, very particular about colorways. Sometimes, I order guitars in a color where I’m like, ‘Yeah, whatever, it’s white,’ and, boom, they sell out. Then sometimes I order a colorway, and I just think like, ‘Oh my God, this color looks fucking awesome!’ And then it’s slow to sell.”
He continues. “I love doing it, but I get really scared because none of this is done through pre-order. So it’s all out of pocket to me. Twice a year, I have to wire half my life savings halfway around the world to get a batch of guitars. And then when they come in, I’m just crossing my fingers that they’ll sell!”
Guitar effects fall in and out of fashion. But I never quite understood the moment whenTube Screamers ceased to be cool. Players would complain about the midrange bump. Fair enough, mid bumps can suck air out of a signal. But then I’d watch the same players buy some other mid-pumping drive or distortion and rave about it. Perhaps it was the TS’s association with blues rock—an occasional punching bag among guitar’s leading edge. Perhaps it was the rise of the Klon Centaur, the affordable “klones” that followed in its wake, and the resulting chatter about “transparency.” Never mind that the Klon Centaur’s design shares much of its basic architecture with the TS, or as my esteemed former PG editor Joe Gore pointed out, thatthe sonic differences between the pedals are not always as different as they seem.
The collective conversation confirmed one thing for me: Guitarists are a weird, fickle bunch. Because for me, Tube Screamers have always been a reliable, forgiving source of overdrive that pair well with fuzz, distortion, and other drives, and amps across the Fender, Vox, and Marshall spectrum (though it really loves the first of these). Warm Audio’s Tube Squealer is a kind of super TS. It combines switchable TS-808, TS-9, and TS-10-style circuitry, a mix control that blends in clean signal (a touch of Klon), a humbucker/single-coil switch that shifts the midrange emphasis from the 800Hz range to the 2kHz range, and a voltage boost switch that engages a voltage doubler (another touch of Klon). It adds up to a very adaptable overdrive.
A Scream Across the Ages
Fundamentally, the Tube Squealer is a really satisfying TS-style overdrive. As a test, I situated it alongside a 1981 Ibanez TS-9 that was my primary overdrive for ages and always sounded excellent to my ears. Compared to the original Tube Screamer, the Tube Squealer in the TS-9 setting, and no clean signal in the overdriven/clean mix, is discernibly more compressed and less oxygenated in the high-end than the Ibanez. But is that better? That depends. Paired with a 16-watt, EL84-powered Carr Bel-Ray in its Vox-style setting, the Tube Squealer’s low-to-mid gain overdrive settings could seem redundant, while the TS-9 added a little more sparkle. On the other hand, the Tube Squealer’s more compressed profile lent a creamy cohesiveness to the Bel-Ray’s output that sounded fantastic with chords, and added a touch of anger to Peter Buck-ish arpeggios in the more aggro Lifes Rich Pageant vein—one of my favorite applications of the effect.
“The wet-dry mix control may be the most valuable feature on the Tube Squealer. It opens up a lot of fine tuning possibilities.”
With a late-’60s Fender Bassman, the Tube Squealer’s more compressed output illuminated the difference between the pedals more starkly. I enjoyed the warm, growly nature of the Tube Squealer’s basic distortion voice. And while the pedal felt more grafted to the amp rather than seamlessly integrated with it, I was reminded of an old J Mascis quote. To paraphrase: “What’s the point of using an effect if it’s transparent?”
There is a way that I was able to close the difference between the more compressed Tube Squealer voice and the more open TS-9, and that was by using the clean signal mix control. By dialing that knob up to noon (give or take, depending on the gain level), I could make the two pedals sound identical enough that most folks would be hard-pressed to tell them apart in a blind test. What that revealed to me is that the mix control may be the most valuable feature on the Tube Squealer. It opens up a lot of fine tuning possibilities.
Do Screamers Squeal Equally?
Though it’s nice to have the three TS voicings, the differences among them can be subtle. At low gain settings, in fact, they can be pretty difficult to tell apart. Higher gain settings make the contrasts more apparent, but even then the variations can sound really minimal. In general, they are evident as subtle EQ shifts. The TS-9 comes off as the most balanced of the three, the 808 seems to bloom a bit more, and the TS-10 has a bump in the low midrange that results in a smoothing effect. These voices are useful and fun to work with if you’re moving between guitars and amps in a studio, but I’d venture that they’d be nearly impossible to discern in a live setting.
The control that makes a big difference is the pickup voicing switch. The shift from the 800Hz peak to the 2kHz peak in the midrange is transformative enough to rip your face off if you’re not careful. With single-coils it’s spiky enough that your bandmates may ask you to take a time out. But the PAF-equipped SG I used in this evaluation became smooth and vicious in the 2k mode. In fact, I’ve rarely heard my Bassman sound so much like a JCM800. And it not only genuinely extends the utility of the Tube Squealer, it’s also raucous, rowdy fun.
The Verdict
Though the Tube Squealer’s three voices may be subtle to the point of a letdown for some potential buyers, the interactive power of the controls, when taken together, is impressive. The clean/dirty blend control adds considerable flexibility and tone shaping potential, and while I preferred the more compressed, classic TS sounds with the pedal in 9V mode, the voltage doubling switch adds a lot to the sound tapestry within. Given the extra utility here—and how close to vintage TS sounds these voices are in their most basic modes—the $149 price is quite reasonable, even when considering that new, basic Ibanez TS-9s are just $99. Even if you use the Tube Squealer to even half of its potential, it’s most certainly not your average pig.
Carondelet Introduces OTB Ultimates Vintage-Style PAF Pickups
