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State of the Stomp

G.S. Wyllie, who designed the pedal on the right, inspired Putro to improve his own enclosure creations.

After feeling inspired to make inventive pedal enclosures, our columnist met a blacksmith who lent him unique guidance in the process.

I’ll never forget this comment on my Instagram video of me making a sand-casting aluminum enclosure on one of my pedals: “Dude are you serious? Holding melted aluminum more than 1000 degrees Fahrenheit and only wear short pants and flip flop? if it blown you die.” Well, at Sehat Effectors, we make our own enclosures, but there’s another builder who makes sand-casting enclosures, G.S. Wyllie, who inspires me. The first time I saw Wyllie’s Moonrock Fuzz pedal online, I said to myself, “I have to make pedals as cool as that.” For years, I’d always thought about interesting and distinctive enclosure designs to create on my own, but always ended up with the question, “How?” One day, out of the blue, the universe answered me, guiding me to the right person. I was introduced to Mr. Yanto, a skilled traditional blacksmith in my hometown of Yogyakarta.

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When designing a guitar rig, stick to your music’s essentials.

Whether you navigate it consciously or unconsciously, guitar-rig building has multiple stages. In the beginning, it’s all possibilities and no responsibilities. The current state of the art and status of the market are such that nearly anything that you can conceive of is within your grasp. If you’d like your pedalboard to produce the sounds of yesterday, the guitar hive mind will provide you multiple methods. If you want to do something that’s never been done, the sheer volume of pedals and other gear that’s available makes for a set of permutations whose depths can likely never be fully sounded.

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To go or not to go, and the perils of the no-show.

“The NAMM Show is quickly approaching!”

That’s either a battle cry or a warning, depending on your perspective, heard biannually in the music industry. (At least in non-pandemic years.) The most universal analogy I use for NAMM is: “Think of it as Comic-Con for music gear.” For many of us in the instrument business, the trade show seems to be constantly looming. In addition to convention preparations always occupying the back of our minds, I feel it has also created pressure for companies to release products around its schedule, if not almost dictated it.

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Want to play different pedal sequences in a flash? These handy boxes provide more tone solutions than you might realize.

There is no right or wrong way to wire a pedalboard. It’s really a matter of personal taste and what our ears find pleasing. Every musician has their own thing, and our pedalboards are certainly an extension of that. For some, reconfiguring the pedalboard is a lifelong process, and adding a new device often means something has got to go, because real estate is crucial!

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There’s a wide variety of pedal-format devices available to improve your acoustic guitar’s amplified tone, including Fishman’s Aura, Line 6’s HX Stomp, and LR Baggs’ Voiceprint DI.

From DIs to multi-effects processors to IRs, there are plenty of ways to make your sound golden.

Whether you’re a professional player, weekend warrior, or a once-in-a-blue-moon open miker, you will likely be put in a position to play both electric and acoustic instruments on a gig. As you’re looking to build your switch-hitting pedalboard, you may find that electric and acoustic guitar processing haven’t exactly been treated equitably in the marketplace. Even a bog-standard electric guitar rig these days is populated with three overdrives du jour and a gaggle of space-age DSP-driven effects culled from a market saturated with bobs and bits intended to fatten your sound and thin your wallet. When compared to the smorgasbord of electric guitar processing products, the selection of acoustic-guitar-specific offerings may seem a bit spartan.

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