Feeding clean power to guitar effects is really important. We do our best to buy the highest quality power supplies that we can find for our precious pedals. Once that clean power is fed into the unit from the wall outlet, it often goes through something called a power filter, inside the power supply. This ensures that the pedal's power needs are being met, and allows each pedal to function properly. It also mostly gets rid of ripple.
Ripple (specifically ripple voltage) in electronics is the residual periodic variation of the DC, or direct current voltage, within a power supply using an AC, or alternating current, source, like the electrical outlets in your home or studio. If you're curious, you can read all about DC versus AC current at electrical4u.com/dc-current.
Ripple is wasted power, and has many undesirable effects. It heats components, causes noise and distortion, and may cause digital circuits to operate improperly. Ripple can be reduced by adding the aforementioned electronic filter into the circuitry, to ensure that the pedal is getting the proper juice. There are parts called electrolytic capacitors that do a lot of the heavy lifting in this section of a circuit. You can learn more about capacitors at a variety of websites, including Wise-Geek.com, Techcircuit.org, Beavisaudio.com, and coda-effects.com, and you can see what they look like above.
Ripple is wasted power, and has many undesirable effects.
Those of us who love and cherish old amps know all about capacitors. The first thing I do when I acquire a gem from yesteryear is take it to a qualified amplifier technician to have it thoroughly inspected, and to have the power filter capacitors replaced with new ones. The reason for this is that over time these capacitors can dry out and cause the amp to not function properly, or to just simply stop working. In a worst case scenario, it can even cause electric shock.
When an electrolytic capacitor is going bad, it can appear to be deformed, sometimes bulging out at the ends. If the power filter capacitors—or really any of the electrolytics—look like this, it's a sure sign that it's time to take the amp to a tech for them to be replaced. In some cases, there might not be any visual indication at all when a cap goes bad. Most amp technicians I have dealt with say that a good rule of thumb is to replace these capacitors every seven years or so.
For reference, here's what caps can look like when they're blown:
The electrolytic capacitors in effects pedals also wear out over time. As in amps, caps in pedals are used for multiple purposes. Coupling capacitors let AC pass through them, but not DC. And RC (resistor-capacitor) filter caps cut off frequencies above or below a certain threshold. But the classic role is the one we're discussing here: smoothing out ripples in the power supply. Capacitors have what is known as an "end of life cycle." This means that the manufacturer only guarantees them to remain fully functional for a certain amount of time. That time frame can typically range anywhere from 1,000 to 5,000 hours.
There have been a few occasions when I have purchased a vintage pedal I had been trying to find for ages, only to get it plugged in and find it unusably noisy and/or dull-sounding. I usually re-cap these old circuits before I do anything else to them. This usually brings the pedal's power back to its former glory, ensuring that the unit will behave as it was intended to for another decade or so. I would say nine times out of 10, replacing these capacitors creates a massive difference in clarity and sound. Take a look at one of my recapped circuit boards:
Keeping your pedals healthy internally is a great way to ensure that they will last lifetimes. Having them re-capped is one way to help maintain the integrity of the circuits inside. I am so glad I discovered this when I was early in my career as a pedal user and builder. It has certainly given a few of my formerly fallen soldiers a new lease on life.
After eight years, New Orleans artist Benjamin Booker returns with a new album and a redefined relationship to the guitar.
That evening, Booker played a release celebration show at Euclid Records in New Orleans, which has become the musician’s adopted hometown. He spent a few years in Los Angeles, and then in Australia, where his partner gave birth to their child, but when he moved back to the U.S. in December 2023, it was the only place he could imagine coming back to. “I just like that the city has kind of a magic quality to it,” he says. “It just feels kind of like you’re walking around a movie set all the time.”
Witness was a ruminative, lonesome record, an interpretation of the writer James Baldwin’s concept of bearing witness to atrocity and injustice in the United States. Mavis Staples sang on the title track, which addressed the centuries-old crisis of police killings and brutality carried out against black Americans. It was a significant change from the twitchy, bluesy garage-rock of Booker’s self-titled 2014 debut, the sort of tunes that put him on the map as a scrappy guitar-slinging hero. But Booker never planned on heroism; he had no interest in becoming some neatly packaged industry archetype. After Witness, and years of touring, including supporting the likes of Jack White and Neil Young, Booker withdrew.
He was searching for a sound. “I was just trying to find the things that I liked,” he explains. L.A. was a good place for his hunt. He went cratedigging at Stellaremnant for electronic records, and at Artform Studio in Highland Park for obscure jazz releases. It took a long time to put together the music he was chasing. “For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do,” says Booker. “I just wasn’t interested in it anymore. I hadn’t heard really that much guitar stuff that had really spoke to me.”
“For a while, I left guitar, and was just trying to figure out what I was going to do. I just wasn’t interested in it anymore.”
LOWER is Booker’s most sensitive and challenging record yet.
Among the few exceptions were Tortoise’s Jeff Parker and Dave Harrington from Darkside, players who moved Booker to focus more on creating ambient and abstract textures instead of riffs. Other sources of inspiration came from Nicolas Jaar, Loveliescrushing, Kevin Shields, Sophie, and JPEGMAFIA. When it came to make LOWER (which released on Booker’s own Fire Next Time Records, another nod to Baldwin), he took the influences that he picked up and put them onto guitar—more atmosphere, less “noodly stuff”: “This album, I was working a lot more with images, trying to get images that could get to the emotion that I was trying to get to.”
The result is a scraping, aching, exploratory album that demonstrates that Booker’s creative analysis of the world is sharper and more potent than ever. Opener “Black Opps” is a throbbing, metallic, garage-electronic thrill, running back decades of state surveillance, murder, and sabotage against Black community organizing. “LWA in the Trailer Park” is brighter by a slim margin, but just as simultaneously discordant and groovy. The looped fingerpicking of “Pompeii Statues” sets a grounding for Booker to narrate scenes of the homelessness crisis in Los Angeles. Even the acoustic strums of “Heavy on the Mind” are warped and stretched into something deeply affecting; ditto the sunny, garbage-smeared ’60s pop of “Show and Tell.” But LOWER is also breathtakingly beautiful and moving. “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” and “Hope for the Night Time” intermingle moments of joy and lightness amid desperation and loneliness.
Booker worked with L.A.-based hip-hop and electronic producer Kenny Segal, trading stems endlessly over email to build the record. While he was surrounded by vintage guitars and amps to create Witness, Booker didn’t use a single amplifier in the process of making LOWER: He recorded all his guitars direct through an interface to his DAW. “It’s just me plugging my old Epiphone Olympic into the computer and then using software plugins to manipulate the sounds,” says Booker. For him, working digitally and “in the box” is the new frontier of guitar music, no different than how Hendrix and Clapton used never-heard-before fuzz pedals to blow people’s minds. “When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time,” he adds.
“When I look at guitar players who are my favorites, a lot of [their playing] is related to the technology at the time.”
Benjamin Booker's Gear
Booker didn’t use any amps on LOWER. He recorded his old Epiphone Olympic direct into his DAW.
Photo by Trenity Thomas
Guitars
- 1960s Epiphone Olympic
Effects
- Soundtoys Little AlterBoy
- Soundtoys Decapitator
- Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe
- Soundtoys Little Plate
“I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary. I wanted a little bit of ugliness.”
Inspired by a black metal documentary in which an artist asks for the cheapest mic possible, Booker used only basic plugins by Soundtoys, like the Decapitator, Little AlterBoy, and Little Plate, but the Devil-Loc Deluxe was the key for he and Segal to unlock the distorted, “three-dimensional world” they were seeking. “Because I was listening to more electronic music where there’s more of a focus on mixing than I would say in rock music, I think that I felt more inspired to go in and be surgical about it,” says Booker.
Part of that precision meant capturing the chaos of our world in all its terror and splendor. When he was younger, Booker spent a lot of time going to the Library of Congress and listening to archival interviews. On LOWER, he carries out his own archival sound research. “I like the idea of being able to put things like that in the music, for people to just hear it,” says Booker. “Even if they don’t know what it is, they’re catching a glimpse of life that happened at that time.”
On “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar,” there are birds chirping that he captured while living in Australia. Closer “Hope for the Night Time” features sounds from Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market. “Same Kind of Lonely” features audio of Booker’s baby laughing just after a clip from a school shooting. “I guess I have a problem with anything being too sugary,” says Booker. “I wanted a little bit of ugliness. We all have our regular lives that are just kind of interrupted constantly by insane acts of violence.”
That dichotomy is often difficult to compute, but Booker has made peace with it. “You hear people talking about, ‘I don’t want to have kids because the world is falling apart,’” he says. “But I mean, I feel like it’s always falling apart and building itself back up. Nothing lasts forever, even bad times.”
YouTube It
To go along with the record, Booker produced a string of music videos influenced by the work of director Paul Schrader and his fascination with “a troubled character on the edge, reaching for transcendence.” That vision is present in the video for lead single “LWA in the Trailer Park.”
Reverend Descent W Baritone Electric Guitar - Transparent White
