Our Favorite Gear of the Year

A Boss RE-202 Space Echo … on a vocal mix? A hot pink overdrive, treble boost, and echo in one pedal named SusMaryOsep—a word Filipino mothers shout at troublesome children? An Artificial Blonde—with hat’s off to Madison Cunningham—that’s a slightly pitched vibrato? Line 6’s Catalyst modeling amp—sexy or not? Amp plugins from Neural DSP and Line 6? Tone King’s royal-sounding Imperial MkII and Soldano’s SLO-30? Metallica in a box (Caroline Guitar Company’s Crom)? A Pigtronix Star Eater fuzz that looks like a wild berry Pop Tart? And have you seen the new Empress Para EQ and Origin Effects’ M-EQ Driver? Hosts Rhett Shull and Zach Broyles run down their top gear of the year. Plus, dueling Les Pauls and the eternal question: to refret or not to refret. And is a bone nut really better than nylon? And what’s a Dutchburst, anyway? Tired of questions? Well, Rhett and Zach also talk post-Thanksgiving turkey. And Zack tells about his 6-string family reunion with his first guitar and flashes the new Mythos Pedals Hephaestus, named for the Greek god of blacksmithing. What else? (Sorry, that’s another question!) Rhett opens up a box of spankin’ new pickups from Stew-Mac, and they discuss the online screeds and screeches trailing their conversation about tone woods with Paull Reed Smith in the previous episode. And yes, they do dip a rig, submitted for dissection by “Dipped in Tone” listener Kenny, whose ’90s rock setup—with stitched-rose guitar straps—sparks yet another argument about the merits of the Tube Screamer and the virtues of the Phase 90 and Phase 45 versus the Small Stone.

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