JJ Appleton
Question: What connects you to your favorite genre of music?
Guest Picker JJ Appleton
Blues legend John Hammond Jr.
Photo by Louis Ramirez
A: What I love about the blues is its deceptive simplicity, the immediacy of emotion, and the story/truth-telling. When they say, “Blues is a feeling,” it’s clear when two different people play the same three chords or the same lick. If you’re really doing it, your personality should be laid bare with every note you play and sing.
Professor Longhair, musical king of the Mardi Gras
Current obsession: Professor Longhair. I love his humorous bursts of deeply inventive rhythms. His use of extreme dynamics in one bar of music. His beautiful voice. His piano is the orchestra and there is a lot of musicality going on there. Professor Longhair has set the standard for me to try to become an “orchestrator” on the guitar and to find my own unique voice and style.
Ted Drozdowski Editorial Director
A: I’m connected to cosmic roots music via decades of exploring the nooks and crannies of the American South and its deep creative fringes. It’s defined roughly by Son House and John Lee Hooker to Pink Floyd, Sonny Sharrock, and Tom Waits—anything with an “otherness” that’s soulful and authentic. It helps keep me alive.
One of Ted’s inspirations, the late free-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock.
Current obsession: The dang movie I’ve been working on with my band Coyote Motel for about two years. After 300 hours of editing, I can see completion. And it does have “otherness.”
Coyote Motel in thier upcoming film.
Luke Ottenhof Assistant Editor
A: I was raised on folk and classic rock, but when I was 10 years old, I got Billy Talent on CD, and covertly copied my friend’s CD of Sum 41’s Does This Look Infected? onto a cassette (I wasn’t allowed to buy it because it had a parental advisory sticker). The early 2000s were a golden era of pop-punk in Canada, and while that genre post-2006 doesn’t really rev my engine anymore, those two releases set me on a path of obsession with heavy, riffy music paired with great hooks and bright vocal harmonies.
Current obsession: I’ve gotten back into soldering after taking apart my crappy Vox Cambridge 15 to finally fix it up. I was planning to just sell it for cheap to someone who wanted to repair it, but all it needed was a new gain pot, and the fix cost me $1.50 plus an hour of labor.
Luke’s Vox, redeemed by a $1.50 part and an hour’s repair time.
Gil Chiasson Reader of the Month
A: When I think of “Surfer Girl” by the Beach Boys, for instance, it is the sum total of all its parts which makes it so amazing in how it captures the context of the song. It’s about a surfer girl, a cool breeze, water spray, and hot summer sun!
The Beach Boys, when they were crafting the California dream.
Current obsession: I am currently writing music inspired by Thelonious Monk. He had these soulful chord progressions with interesting types of time signatures. His pockets, or, grooves, were full of that gold we all love to hear and feel.
Thelonious Monk had the keys—perhaps even to the universe.
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If 3 Were 6
With six times the controls found on the 1 and 2 versions (if you discount the original’s on/off slider switch,) the LPB-3’s control complement offers pre-gain, boost, mid freq, bass, treble, and mid knobs, with a center detent on the latter three so you can find the midpoint easily. A mini-toggle labeled “max” selects between 20 dB and 33 dB of maximum gain, and another labeled “Q” flips the resonance of the mid EQ between high and low. Obviously, this represents a significant expansion of the LPB’s capabilities.
More than just a booster with a passive tone, the LPB-3 boasts a genuine active EQ stage plus parametric midrange section, comprising the two knobs with shaded legends, mid freq and mid level. The gain stages have also been reimagined to include a pre-gain stage before the EQ, which enables up to 20 dB of input gain. The boost stage that follows the EQ is essentially a level control with gain to allow for up to 33 dB of gain through the LPB-3 when the “max” mini toggle is set to 33dB
A slider switch accessible inside the pedal selects between buffered or true bypass for the hard-latch footswitch. An AC adapter is included, which supplies 200mA of DC at 9.6 volts to the center-negative power input, and EHX specifies that nothing supplying less than 120mA or more than 12 volts should be used. There’s no space for an internal battery.
Power-Boosted
The LPB-3 reveals boatloads of range that betters many linear boosts on the market. There’s lots of tone-shaping power here. Uncolored boost is available when you want it, and the preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.
“The preamp gain knob colors and fattens your signal as you crank it up—even before you tap into the massive flexibility in the EQ stage.”
I found the two mid controls work best when used judiciously, and my guitars and amps preferred subtle changes pretty close to the midpoint on each. However, there are still tremendous variations in your mid boost (or scoop, for that matter) within just 15 or 20 percent range in either direction from the center detent. Pushing the boost and pre-gain too far, particularly with the 33 dB setting engaged, can lead to some harsh sounds, but they are easy to avoid and might even be desirable for some users that like to work at more creative extremes.
The Verdict
The new LPB-3 has much, much more range than its predecessors, providing flexible preamp, boost, and overdrive sounds that can be reshaped in significant ways via the powerful EQ. It gives precise tone-tuning flexibility to sticklers that like to match a guitar and amp to a song in a very precise way, but also opens up more radical paths for experimentalists. That it does all this at a $129 price is beyond reasonable.
Electro-Harmonix Lpb-3 Linear Power Booster & Eq Effect Pedal Silver And Blue
