The guitar world is chock-full of gizmos, doodads, and whatchamacallits that solve myriad problems. Some are bogus—or at least seem that way to experienced players. I mean, do you really need finger weights, pick hats, $1,000 cables, pick punchers, or guitar string bracelets? How about $5 picks or $40 slides?
Maybe.
But even if you’re skeptical, there’s no shortage of serious products that make life easier. Tools exist to tighten an impossible output jack from the inside, extend a guitar cable up to 300 feet without signal loss, restring a Bigsby sans frustration, and even to remember your settings without marking up vintage pedals.
But what you don’t know, you don’t know.
Believe it or not, a small army of techs, geeks, tinkerers, and tone fiends have spent years researching, developing, testing, and perfecting new devices, fixes, and workarounds to solve common problems that hamper performance and cause frustration. They’ve invested thousands, turned their basements into laboratories, skipped meals, slept on the floor, and drank enough coffee to give an elephant a buzz. And in some cases, these gear pioneers have stumbled upon genius.
In this roundup, we highlight a handful of these ingenious-yet-little-known innovations. Many of these products will make you say, “Duh, I should’ve thought of that.” They will save you headaches, time, money, and help you focus on the important stuff—like guitar playing.
Pedal-Setting Savers
Pedal Labels offer a simple, cheap way to mark settings on your stompboxes without ruining them with gooey adhesives or scribbling on their faces. They come in sheets of pre-printed stickers featuring large white circles and a sticky back: mark your settings and stick them to your pedals.That’s it.
The stickers come in standard configurations—like the most popular Boss, MXR, and Ibanez models—as well as individual knobs to match to whatever one-of-a-kind boutique devices you use.
$7.95 street (six 9”x4” sheets of assorted configurations) or $2.95 (for two)
pedallabels.com
Guitar Output Tightener
Few things are more frustrating than a loose output jack that you can’t retighten. Worse, the loose piece inside the electronics cavity spins around as you attempt to fix it—and that yanks loose solder joints and wires. It’s a simple problem that shouldn’t require taking your guitar apart or a trip to the shop, but sometimes you have no choice.
Enter the Bullet Guitar Jack Tightener. It grabs the jack from the inside and enables you to tighten or loosen it without having to use other tools or remove the jack plate. It fits U.S.-sized half-inch nuts for quarter-inch jacks, is an all-in-one contraption, and is made from a hard plastic (as opposed to metal, like most tools) that won’t ruin your finish.
$15 street
allparts.com
Bigsby Re-Stringing Buddy
If you own a Bigsby, you probably hate restringing it. Making a kink in the ball end, putting it under the roller, and connecting it to the string peg while somehow keeping it tight and from popping out … yikes. The Vibramate String Spoiler is a godsend. It’s a bracket that slips over the string pins on the Bigsby’s central roller. You install the first string and, once that’s set, you just drop the other five in place and you’re done. This handy contraption is made of high-grade stainless steel, fits all Bigsby models, and is available in silver, black, or gold.$35 street in silver (additional $20 for black or gold)
vibramate.com
Secure Straps
Lock-It Straps are a strap-lock system that doesn’t require mods, new endpins, or anything. The locking leather strap ends fit over your guitar’s existing endpins. They don’t use metal parts, don’t rattle, fit most guitars, and—at least according to the manufacturer—always work.$20 street
lockitstraps.com
Floating Bridge Stabilizers
For some guitarists, the frustration of using a floating bridge is that when you bend strings—even when not using the whammy—the other strings go out of tune. Super-Vee has a product, the Mag-Lok, that holds your bridge in place, but disengages when you grab the whammy. It enables you to have the best of both worlds: a standard bridge when you need one and a whammy when you don’t.
The Mag-Lok uses two super-strong, rare earth magnets that keep the tremolo from moving when you bend the strings in normal playing. When you grab the whammy, you pull the magnets apart and allow the tremolo to work as normal. When you let go, the magnets are drawn back together and hold the bridge in place. Installation is simple and requires just one screw in the tremolo cavity to hold the unit in place.
$59.95 street
super-vee.com
General Maintenance
You don’t need to send your guitar to the shop to remove knobs, tighten loose hardware, or even to do a complete setup (assuming you know what you’re doing). Great tools abound. For less than 9 bucks you can get the P-51 Knob Puller. It’s a plastic gizmo that won’t ruin your finish and gently slides underneath most standard guitar knobs. You use it to pull the knob up instead of using a screwdriver to try and pry the knob off.For $11, you can get the ESP Multi Spanner. It’s a small, metal, double-mouthed wrench that is toothed on one end to tighten and on the other to loosen hardware, jacks, and knob bushings. It is versatile and can work with nuts as small as 0.075 inches.
You can also get a basic setup kit. It comes with a String Action Gauge for—you guessed it—adjusting your action. It also includes an 18” precision straightedge and nine understring radius gauges. These tools are laser cut from stainless steel and the straightedge is machined for accuracy of ±0.0015 inches per foot.
P-51 Knob Puller, $8.50 street; ESP Multi Spanner, $11 street; Basic Setup Kit, $98 street
stewmac.com
Guitar Cable Extender
Sometimes you need to be far away from your amp. It might be in the studio: You want to sit in the control room and you want your amp far away in an isolation booth. Or maybe it’s on a huge stage and you want your rig far away so your insane volumes won’t ruin the gig for the rest of the band. But you’re afraid of signal loss, noise, and interference.
The Radial SGI Studio Guitar Interface system might be your solution. It isn’t cheap, but you get two boxes—a transmitter and receiver—and they drive your unbalanced guitar signal via a balanced 300-foot microphone cable, which connects to the boxes with standard 3-pin XLR plugs. The transmitter is active and uses a 15V DC power supply, but the receiver is passive. The SGI has a drag control, which, according to the owner’s manual, has a “unique load correction circuit [that] allows you to apply a resistive-capacitive load on your pickup to counteract any effect of the buffering circuit or cable. It is designed specifically for passive guitar pickups that are most sensitive to the input impedance of an amplifier.” It’s built like a tank, with a 14-gauge steel chassis and outer shell, and comes in bright yellow so you can find the other end when it’s 300 feet away. It has a frequency response of 20 Hz–18 kHz (-2 dB), a signal-to-noise ratio of 102 dB (0 dBu input), and a dynamic range of 112 dB. Your guitar and amp connect to the boxes on either end via standard guitar cables and your tone comes out the other end buffered and noise free.
$259.99 street
radialeng.com
Voltage Reduction
Vintage tube amps were designed and built at a time when the voltage from the wall was lower than it is today. Wall voltage also varies depending on where you live, the time of day, and other factors. Higher—and inconsistent—voltage means your expensive vintage amp doesn’t work or sound the way it was designed.The AmpRx BrownBox is a unit that serves as a buffer between the wall and your amp. It has a custom-wound 5-amp transformer, which supplies a maximum of 540 continuous watts at 120V AC. In bypass mode, nothing happens; your amp is fed the regular wall current. But when you lower the current to period-correct voltage—the BrownBox has a knob which allows you to lower the calibrated wall voltage by 3, 4, 6, or 10 percent—your amp’s circuits are optimized to work as designed. Theoretically, their true harmonic character is heard and your tone is vintage and righteous.
Voltage reduction isn’t cheap and not something you should do without consulting a competent technician, but if you’re investing in vintage gear, common sense says, “Do your homework. Make sure your amp works as designed.”
$349 street
amprx.net
Tube Tester
The Orange DIVO VT1000 Valve Tester (or tube tester in the Colonies) is a simple device that does two things. It tests your tubes and tells you if they’re good, fair, or dead. And if a tube is good, it assigns the tube a score so you can match it with other tubes for optimum performance. It tests almost every type of power tube and pre-amp tube.Specifically, the VT1000 tests the tube’s heater filament to see if the circuit is short, open, and for tolerance; the heater cathode insulation for leakage or a short; looks for heater current abnormalities; tests the amplification factor and voltage and power gain; tests the inter electrode for leakage or a short circuit; and tests emissions and gas ionization. It tests for a small army of other details as well.
Do you need this? If you blow through lots of tubes, own lots of amps, or like to experiment and geek out with tones—this may be a product for you.
$499 street
orangeamps.com
Modless Whammy
Les Pauls and Teles are great if you don’t want the hassles or headaches of whammy-equipped floating bridges. But what if you want a whammy on your Les Paul or Tele? Is there a way to install a pro-level tremolo unit on your guitar without routing a huge cavity, drilling new holes, or destroying your guitar?The Stetsbar is a top-mounted whammy bar that fits into your guitar’s existing holes and doesn’t necessitate routing or mods. It is top-loading; comes as a one-piece, self-contained unit including bridge, saddles, and string anchors; has a bridge plate that slides on smooth linear bearings; and has adjustment screws to set for different string gauges.
The Stetsbar is a fully functioning whammy—you can pull up, push the strings slack—and it’s supposed to stay in tune no matter how much you manhandle it. Even if you break a string. It comes in gold, chrome, black, and other colors to match your instrument’s hardware. Different models are available to replace Gibson-style stop tailpieces, Tele-style bridges, Strat-style bridges, and more.
$200—$300 street
stetsbar.com
Cable Tester
Cables go bad—and when they do, you’re stuck. Many cable testers exist, but none of them were made with guitarists in mind.
The Cusack Music Cable Tester is a new stompbox-sized solution that specifically tests guitar cables. It detects bad cables—as you’d expect—but it also detects when the ohm level is too high (i.e., when it exceeds one ohm), which is a problem particularly for solderless cables. Insert both ends of a standard quarter-inch cable into the inputs on the face of the device. Push the plug in until it clicks once, and that tests the cable’s tip. Two clicks tests the ring, and three the sleeve. The unit also has a large red knob so you can calibrate it, and a toggle to switch between calibration and use.
$79 direct
cusackmusic.com
Solderless Cable Kit
DisasterPlugs is a solderless cable system designed to connect pedals on an ultra-tight, super-snug pedalboard. The plugs are compact and can be configured as either straight or right-angle plugs. The low-capacitance cable measures only 4 millimeters in diameter and uses 24 AWG oxygen-free copper wire. You cut the cable to length, insert into the DisasterPlugs opening, and tighten the ground screw with the screwdriver that’s included with the kit. Boom. DisasterPlugs is perfect for tight fits, cramped spaces, and awkward angles.$79.99 street (kit makes up to six connectors)
disasterareaamps.com
Boss’ firstWaza Tube Amp Expander, built with an integrated power amp that enables boosted signal as well as attenuated sounds, was and remains the OX’s main competition. Both products have copious merits but, at $1,299 (Boss) and $1,499 (Universal Audio), each is expensive. And while both units are relatively compact, they aren’t gear most folks casually toss in a backpack on the way out the door. The new Waza Tube Expander Core, however, just might be. And though it sacrifices some refinements for smaller size, its much-more accessible price and strong, streamlined fundamental capabilities make it a load-box alternative that could sway skeptics.
Micro Manager
The TAE Core is around 7 1/2" wide, just over 7 " long, and fewer than 4 " tall, including the rubber feet. That’s about half the width of an original TAE or OX. The practical upside of this size reduction is obvious and will probably compel a lot of players to use the unit in situations in which they’d leave a full-size TAE at home. The streamlined design is another source of comfort. With just five knobs on its face, the TAE Core has fewer controls and is easier to use than many stompboxes. In fact, the most complicated part of integrating the TAE Core to your rig might be downloading the necessary drivers and related apps.
Connectivity is straightforward, though there are some limitations. You can use TAE Core wirelessly with an iOS or Windows tablet or smartphone, as long as you have the BT-DUAL adaptor (which is not included and sets you back around 40 bucks). However, while desktop computers recognize the TAE Core as a Bluetooth-enabled device, you cannot use the unit wirelessly with those machines. Instead, you have to connect the TAE Core via USB. In a perfectly ordered world, that’s not a big problem. But if you use the TAE Core in a small studio—where one less cable is one less headache—or you prefer to interface with the TAE Core app on a desktop where you can toggle fast and easily between large, multi-track sessions and the app, the inability to work wirelessly on a desktop can be a distraction. The upside is that the TAE Core app itself is, functionally and visually, almost identical in mobile and desktop versions, enabling you to select and drag and drop virtual microphones into position, add delay, reverb, compression, and EQ effects, choose various cabinets with different speaker configurations and sizes, and introduce new rigs and impulse responses to a tone recipe in a flash. And though the TAE Core app lacks some of the photorealistic panache and configuration options in the OX app, the TAE Core’s app is just as intuitive.Less Is More
One nice thing about the TAE Core’s more approachable $699 price is that you don’t have to feel too bad on nights that you “underutilize” the unit and employ it as an attenuator alone. In this role, the TAE Core excels. Even significantly attenuated sounds retain the color and essence of the source tone. Like any attenuator-type device, you will sacrifice touch sensitivity and dynamics at a certain volume level, yielding a sense of disconnection between fingers, gut, guitar, and amp. But if you’re tracking “big” sounds in a small space, you can generate massive-sounding ones without interfacing with an amp modeler and flat-response monitors, which is a joy in my book. And again, there’s the TAE Core’s ability to “expand” as well as attenuate, which means you can use the TAE Core’s 30-watt onboard power amp to amplify the signal from, say, a 5-watt Fender Champion 600 with a 6" speaker, route it to a 2x12, 4x12, or virtual equivalent in the app, and leave your bandmate with the Twin Reverb and bad attitude utterly perplexed.
The Verdict
Opting for the simpler, thriftier TAE Core requires a few sacrifices. Power users that grew accustomed to the original TAE’s super-tunable “resonance-Z” and “presence-Z” controls, which aped signal-chain impedance relationships with sharp precision, will have to make do with the simpler but still very effective stack and combo options and the “air feel level” spatial ambience control.The DC power jack is less robust. It features only MIDI-in rather than MIDI-in/-through/-out jacks, and, significantly, 70 watts less power in the onboard power amp. But from my perspective, the Core is no less “professional” in terms of what it can achieve on a stage or in a studio of any size. Its more modest feature set and dimensions are, in my estimation, utility enhancements as much as limitations. If greater power and MIDI connectivity are essentials, then the extra 600 bones for the original TAE will be worth the price. For many of us, though, the mix of value, operational efficiencies, and the less-encumbered path to sound creation built into the TAE Core will represent a welcome sweet spot that makes dabbling in this very useful technology an appealing, practical proposition.
Guitarist Dave Harrington concedes that while there are a few mile markers in the music that he and musician Nicolas Jaar create as Darkside, improvisation has been the rule from day one. The experimental electronic trio’s latest record, Nothing, which released in February on Matador, was the first to feature new percussionist Tlacael Esparza.
Taking the record on tour this year, Darkside stopped in at Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl, where Harrington broke down his complex signal chains for PG’s Chris Kies.
Brought to you by D’Addario.
Express Yourself
Harrington bought this mid-2000s Gibson SG at 30th Street Guitars in New York, a shop he used to visit as a kid. The headstock had already been broken and repaired, and Harrington switched the neck pickup to a Seymour Duncan model used by Derek Trucks. Harrington runs it with D’Addario NYXL .010s, which he prefers for their stretch and stability.
The standout feature is a round knob installed by his tech behind the bridge, which operates like an expression pedal for the Line 6 DL4. Harrington has extras on hand in case one breaks.
Triple Threat
Harrington’s backline setup in Nashville included two Fender Twin Reverbs and one Fender Hot Rod DeVille. He likes the reissue Fender amps for their reliability and clean headroom. Each amp handles an individual signal, including loops that Harrington creates and plays over; with each amp handling just one signal rather than one handling all loops and live playing, there’s less loss of definition and competition for frequency space.
Dave Harrington’s Pedalboards
Harrington says he never gives up on a pedal, which could explain why he’s got so many. You’re going to have to tune in to the full Rundown to get the proper scoop on how Harrington conducts his three-section orchestra of stomps, but at his feet, he runs a board with a Chase Bliss Habit, Mu-Tron Micro-Tron IV, Eventide PitchFactor, Eventide H90, Hologram Microcosm, Hologram Chroma Console, Walrus Monument, Chase Bliss Thermae, Chase Bliss Brothers AM, JHS NOTAKLÖN, two HexeFX reVOLVERs, and an Amped Innovations JJJ Special Harmonics Extender. A Strymon Ojai provides power.
At hip-level sits a board with a ZVEX Mastotron, Electro-Harmonix Cathedral, EHX Pitch Fork, Xotic EP Booster, two EHX 45000 multi-track looping recorders, Walrus Slöer, Expedition Electronics 60 Second Deluxe, and another Hologram Microcosm. A Live Wire Solutions ABY Box and MXR DC Brick are among the utility tools on deck.
Under that board rest Harrington’s beloved Line 6 DL4—his desert-island, must-have pedal—along with a controller for the EHX 45000, Boss FV-50H volume pedal, Dunlop expression pedal, Boss RT-20, a Radial ProD2, and another MXR DC Brick.
