What was your go-to album during quarantine?
JD Simo - Guest Picker
A: There were a lot of records spinning, haha! After doing 200 or so dates a year since 2016, it was a blast for me to get to indulge in my relatively large collection in a deep way. I'm an obsessive vinyl guy. There are two that rose above the rest for me, though. Fela Kuti's Open & Close was a constant. It's one of his earliest albums. After the death of his legendary drummer Tony Allen at the beginning of the pandemic, I did an Afrobeat deep dive that I've been meaning to do for years. I have almost everything he ever recorded now, but this record is just dope!
Fela Kuti - Open and Close (LP)
Secondly, Junior Kimbrough's Most Things Haven't Worked Out. Junior has bit me hard. I mean, it was always there to some extent, but his music has just grabbed me in a way that few others have in my whole life. This record is probably his most fucked up, but it's my favorite. It's not for the faint of heart. I love it so much! That raw, primal trance. I wanna live in this record!
Junior Kimbrough - Most Things Haven't Worked Out (Full Album)
Current obsession: The two styles of these records I mentioned have really opened up a path musically forward for me. Hill country trance blues over Afrobeat type grooves. I made a new record during lockdown that'll come out later this year, and that's the basis for it. To me, it's like they were meant to go together and it just happened naturally. Hillfro we call it, haha! Feels right to me.
Kelly Blanchard - Reader of the Month
Kelly Blanchard
A: Emma Ruth Rundle's Marked for Death and On Dark Horses. She's an artist I discovered on a Rig Rundown!
Emma Ruth Rundle // On Dark Horses (FULL ALBUM)
Built To Spill - Carry The Zero (Live in Sydney) | Moshcam
Current obsession: Having fun learning the Built to Spill song "Carry the Zero," mainly because my friend and collaborator Jim Roth (aka Jerms Fuzz) used to be in Built to Spill and showed me the basic chord progression. Jim has produced the last couple of releases for my band Blue Star Creeper and we're finally practicing again and getting ready to play shows here in Seattle and the Northwest. I guess that would be my other current obsession: Getting used to playing as a band again!
Ted Drozdowski - Senior Editor
Ted Drozdowski
Photo by Peter Lee
A: David Gilmour's Live at Pompeii album and concert film really helped me remain nailed together. The astonishingly high level of musical and visual performance kept the intention toward creativity in my mind. The empathy of Gilmour's and Waters' lyrics helped my heart. And the guitar tones speak about a thousand things too complex to put in words every time Gilmour bends or hangs a note. There's an understanding within it all that reminded me of my humanity and brought light.
David Gilmour - Shine On You Crazy Diamond (Live At Pompeii)
Current Obsession: Lately, I've been returning to my foundation in the rural hill country and Delta blues of Mississippi, and it's been incredibly rewarding emotionally and in crystallizing my idiosyncratic technique. R.L. Burnside lives, and always will!
Nick Millevoi - Associate Editor
Nick Millevoi
A: Sometime last year, a friend sent me a link to a recording of Kostas Bezos and the White Birds, a 1930s Hawaiian-inspired band from Athens, Greece. I fell in love with the songs and the playing on this record, which have a pretty esoteric combination of influences. While I've gone down a deep rabbit hole in search of similar music, I'm yet to find anything that comes close.
Kostas Bezos and the White Birds - Λαίντυ Γιουκούλελε Lady Ukulele
Current Obsession: I've been going through Todd Rundgren's catalog with as much of a completist approach as I can. It's a wild and weird journey that is full of so many special treasures.
Rig Rundown - Todd Rundgren
Article & photos: https://bit.ly/ToddRundgrenRRDuring a stripped-down tour stop at Nashville’s City Winery, guitarist-producer Todd Rundgren spent nearly 40 m...- Best Albums of 2020 - Premier Guitar ›
- Last Call: Things I Learned During Quarantine - Premier Guitar ›
- Instagram-Filter Mentality Is Ruining Your Music - Premier Guitar ›
Silos features six presets, tap tempo, one full second of delay time, and three voices—two of which are styled after bucket-brigade and tape-delay sounds. In the $150 price category, it’s not unusual for a digital delay to leave some number of those functions out. And spending the same money on a true-analog alternative usually means warm, enveloping sounds but limited functionality and delay time. Silos, improbably perhaps, offers a very elegant solution to this can’t-have-it-all dilemma in a U.S.-made effect.
A More Complete Cobbling Together
Silos’ utility is bolstered by a very unintimidating control set, which is streamlined and approachable. Three of those controls are dedicated to the same mix, time, and repeats controls you see on any delay. But saving a preset to one of the six spots on the rotary preset dial is as easy as holding the green/red illuminated button just below the mix and preset knobs. And you certainly won’t get lost in the weeds if you move to the 3-position toggle, which switches between a clear “digital” voice, darker “analog” voice, and a “tape” voice which is darker still.
“The three voices offer discernibly different response to gain devices.”
One might suspect that a tone control for the repeats offers similar functionality as the voice toggle switch. But while it’s true that the most obvious audible differences between digital, BBD, and tape delays are apparent in the relative fidelity and darkness of their echoes, the Silos’ three voices behave differently in ways that are more complex than lighter or duskier tonality. For instance, the digital voice will never exhibit runaway oscillation, even at maximum mix and repeat settings. Instead, repeats fade out after about six seconds (at the fastest time settings) or create sleepy layers of slow-decaying repeats that enhance detail in complex, sprawling, loop-like melodic phrases. The analog voice and tape voice, on the other hand, will happily feed back to psychotic extremes. Both also offer satisfying sensitivity to real-time, on-the-fly adjustments. For example, I was tickled with how I could generate Apocalypse Now helicopter-chop effects and fade them in and out of prominence as if they were approaching or receding in proximity—an effect made easier still if you assign an expression pedal to the mix control. This kind of interactivity is what makes analog machines like the Echoplex, Space Echo, and Memory Man transcend mere delay status, and the sensitivity and just-right resistance make the process of manipulating repeats endlessly engaging.
Doesn't Flinch at Filth
EarthQuaker makes a point of highlighting the Silos’ affinity for dirty and distorted sounds. I did not notice that it behaved light-years better than other delays in this regard. But the three voices most definitely offer discernibly different responses to gain devices. The super-clear first repeat in the digital mode lends clarity and melodic focus, even to hectic, unpredictable, fractured fuzzes. The analog voice, which EQD says is inspired by the tone makeup of a 1980s-vintage, Japan-made KMD bucket brigade echo, handles fuzz forgivingly inasmuch as its repeats fade warmly and evenly, but the strong midrange also keeps many overtones present as the echoes fade. The tape voice, which uses aMaestro Echoplex as its sonic inspiration, is distinctly dirtier and creates more nebulous undercurrents in the repeats. If you want to retain clarity in more melodic settings, it will create a warm glow around repeats at conservative levels. Push it, and it will summon thick, sometimes droning haze that makes a great backdrop for slower, simpler, and hooky psychedelic riffs.
In clean applications, this decay and tone profile lend the tape setting a spooky, foggy aura that suggests the cold vastness of outer space. The analog voice often displays an authentic BBD clickiness in clean repeats that’s sweet for underscoring rhythmic patterns, while the digital voice’s pronounced regularity adds a clockwork quality that supports more up-tempo, driving, electronic rhythms.
The Verdict
Silos’ combination of features seems like a very obvious and appealing one. But bringing it all together at just less than 150 bucks represents a smart, adept threading of the cost/feature needle.
EarthQuaker Devices Silos Multi-generational Time Reflection Delay Pedal
In this episode, we’re celebrating the thrill of guitarmony, sick riffs, and driving 8th-note rhythms by talking about Judas Priest. Before getting ready for this episode, neither of your esteemed hosts had ever delved into the Priest discography beyond the rock-radio hits and Beavis and Butthead—though we’d both spent our time with Heavy Metal Parking Lot. Since so many of the GOATs hold the band in the highest of regard, we knew that K.K. Downing and Glenn Tipton belonged on this list, so we embarked on a journey to find out why.
After hours of listening and watching, we’re happy to report that we get it. From their debut, 1974’s Rocka Rolla, through 1980’s British Steel, deep into the ’80s-production era with 1986’s Turbo, and through the speed-metal bravado of 1990’s Painkiller, plus live videos and records—the super-loud US Festival performance and the crushing Unleashed in the East record—we found a lot that we love.
