Guest Picker - Gina Gleason of Baroness
A: One of my most embarrassing stage moments was during my time playing guitar for Michael Jackson: ONE by Cirque du Soleil. I remember feeling very confident as I ran across the stage to reach the top of a large multi-tiered light-up set piece. I jumped to the first step fine and then tripped over my own feet, sending myself (and worse yet, my guitar) flying face and fretboard-first into the next two huge steps. I’ll never forget the sound of my open strings clanging and feeding back. As I crawled my way to the top of my destination to finish the song, I felt a cold, oily surge rushing down the front of my shin. At the end of the show, I had to peel my costume pieces away from the river of then-dried blood that encased my leg. I jumped in my car to head to urgent care and received 17 stitches to the front of my shin. I guess I was running a little too hard that night!
Current obsession: The double-edged sword of music obsession is that, as your passion for consuming music heightens, you are no longer capable of being a passive listener or casual fan! It’s fun to begin to pay attention to things like the air between cymbal crashes, but your ability to let music just play in the background without having an active role in the experience begins to diminish.
Brett Petrusek - PG's Director of Advertising
Brett Petrusek onstage with his band, Fuzzrd.
A: Circa 2015, my former band was slotted on a festival-style show at Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis. On the first guitar switch, a very green tech handed me my Les Paul perfectly tuned, but one half-step sharp! Two songs later, a nasty storm rolled in and blew two backline Marshall stacks over, nearly killing our bass player. I’m not sure if it was embarrassing or just plain horrible. We dusted off and finished our set.
Current obsession: Having been raised on 100-watt Marshalls, I’ve always snubbed my nose at amp simulation, but lately, I’ve been experimenting with blending plugins and big amps in the studio. Neural DSP has been my go-to. I really like the way they sound, and more importantly, feel, for big rock and higher-gain tones. Learning to trust your ears is a good thing: If it sounds good, it is good.
Ted Drozdowski - PG Editorial Director
Ted Drozdowski
A: In 2011, I was playing a post-Deep Blues Festival gig at a dive bar called Big V’s in Saint Paul, Minnesota. I’d walked bars hundreds of times, and always made it a point to suss out obstacles before the show. During the first number, I’m on the bar and suddenly a drunk throws her head and shoulders on the bar exactly where I’m about to put down my raised foot. Instinctually, I pulled up to avoid her, and a rusty metal ceiling fan like the propeller of a Cessna caught me right above the eyes. I staggered, but kept playing all the way from the bar to the restroom, where I saw I’d been sliced to the (exposed) bone. I still kept playing. After all, there were paying patrons! At one point, a local promoter ran to a nearby 24-hour CVS for bandages, and he came up onstage to try to tape the wound while I played. No luck. When this photo (below) was taken, I’d gone outside, where Mississippi bluesman T-Model Ford was watching the show from the open door of a van, and I grabbed his Jack Daniel’s bottle to play some slide. An hour later, after the gig, I sold merch, packed up, and then went to the hospital. I have a scar.
Ted Drozdowski
Current obsession: Never walking into another ceiling fan!
Chris Reichl - Reader of the Month
Chris Reichl
A: It so happened that as we were setting up, we forgot the important rule of setting up a stage PA. If I remember correctly, it was that the amps weren’t on the same circuit as the PA was, so as a result, as I would approach the microphone to sing, I would get zapped. I would also get zapped while playing the guitar if I was making contact with the microphone.
Current obsession: I wouldn’t necessarily call it an obsession, but I tend to listen to Pandora a lot, mostly on a progressive rock station. Recently I expanded my playlist to include guitarists like David Gilmour’s solo work, Jeff Beck, Eric Johnson, and some Allan Holdsworth when he was with the band U.K. Also, I’ve been trying to play more guitar, as in, just play, without overthinking it.
- Rig Rundown: Baroness [2019] ›
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- Last Call: Why I'm a Big-Picture Guy ›
- Things You Gotta Do to Land the Saturday Night Live Gig ›
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- Question of the Month: How to Pick Your Picking - Premier Guitar ›
The Schaffer Replica® - BASS-X
After introducing the Schaffer Replica Storm low end legends like Rudy Sarzo, Billy Sheehan, and Pino Paladino discovered it to be equally amazing on bass. Based upon their input we made a few minor changes to this beloved circuit to make it more conducive to higher amplitude and lower frequencies. To our loyal bassists who have waited so patiently, we proudly introduce The Schaffer Replica - BASS-X.
Fender’s Greasebucket system is part of Cory Wong’s sonic strategy.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
Key Features of the ZOMA
● Intuitive Control Layout: Three large knobs give you full control over Reverb Level, Tremolo Rate,and Depth
● Easy Access to Alternate Controls: Adjust Reverb Decay, Reverb Tone, and Tremolo Volume withsimple alt-controls.
● Instant Effect Order Switching: Customize your signal path. Position tremolos after reverb for avintage, black-panel tone or place harmonic tremolo before reverb for a dirty, swampy sound.
● True Bypass or Buffered Trails: Choose the setting that best suits your rig.
Three Reverb and Tremolo Modes:
● SS – Spring Reverb & Sine Tremolo: Classic spring reverb paired with a sine wave tremolo for that timelessblack-panel amp tone.
● PH – Plate Reverb & Harmonic Tremolo: Smooth, bright plate reverb combined with swampy harmonictremolo.
● PV – Plate Reverb & Pitch Vibrato: Achieve a vocal-like vibrato with ethereal plate reverb.
Reverb: Sounds & Controls
● Spring Reverb: Authentic tube amp spring reverb that captures every detail of vintage sound.
● Plate Reverb: Bright and smooth, recreating the lush tones of vibrating metal plates.
● Reverb Decay: Adjust the decay time using the REVERB/ALT SWITCH while turning the Level knob.
● Reverb Tone: Modify the tone of your reverb using the REVERB/ALT SWITCH while turning the Rate knob.
Tremolo: Sounds & Controls
● Sine Wave/Volume Tremolo: Adjusts the volume of the signal up and down with smooth sine wavemodulation.
● Harmonic Tremolo: Replicates classic tube-amp harmonic tremolo, creating a phaser-like effect withphase-split filtering.
● Pitch Vibrato: Delivers pitch bending effects that let you control how far and how fast notes shift.
● Alt-Control Tremolo Boost Volume: Adjust the boost volume by holding the REVERB/ALT footswitch whileturning the Depth knob.
The ZOMA is built with artfully designed circuitry and housed in a proprietary angled aluminum enclosure, ensuring both simplicity and durability. Like all Keeley pedals, it’s proudly designed and manufactured in the USA.
ZOMA Stereo Reverb and Tremolo
The first sound effects built into amplifiers were tremolo and reverb. Keeley’s legendary reverbs are paired with their sultry, vocal-like tremolos to give you an unreal sonic experience.
Stevie Ray Vaughan was a force of nature. With his “Number One” Strat, he drove a veritable trove of amps—including vintage Fenders, a rotating Vibratone cab, and a Dumble—to create one of the most compelling tones of all, capable of buttery warmth, percussive pick articulation, and cathartic, screaming excess. As he drew upon an endless well of deeply informed blues guitar vocabulary, his creativity on the instrument seemingly knew no bounds.
Your 100 Guitarists hosts are too young to have experienced SRV live. We’ve spent decades with the records, live bootlegs, and videos, but we’ll never know quite how it felt to be in the room with SRV’s guitar sound. So, we’d like to spend some time imagining: How did it feel when it hit you? How did he command his band, Double Trouble? The audience?
SRV was mythical. His heavy-gauge strings tore up his fingers and made a generation of blues guitarists work a lot harder. And his wall of amps seems finely curated to push as much air in all directions as possible. How far did he take it? Was he fine-tuning his amps to extreme degrees? Or could he get his sound out of anything he plugged into?
