What You Should Know About Using Guitar Pedals With Other Instruments

Illustration by Kate Koenig

Ready to try cutting guitar tracks as a freelancer on your DAW? You’re joining a rich tradition, and a trio of domestic shredders are here to help you sound your best.

Do-it-yourself recording is a great musical tradition. Machines for capturing sound were available for home use as early as the 1930s. Famously, in the late ’30s and early ’40s, ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, a lover of folklore and American music, followed in the footsteps of his father, John Lomax, and drove a 1935 Plymouth sedan across the United States with some tapes and a recording machine in the trunk. In August 1941, he captured musicians on their front porches and in living rooms across the American South, including one 28-year-old McKinley Morganfield—better known by his stage name, Muddy Waters. When Waters heard himself on tape, he was deeply moved. “He brought his stuff down and recorded me right in my house, and when he played back the first song I sounded just like anybody's records,” Waters told Rolling Stone back in 1978. “Man, you don't know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice.” Lomax’s field recordings (trunk-recordings, perhaps?) are a significant jewel in the American Folklife Center’s treasury at the Library of Congress.

Read More Show less

Watch as Gabriel Bergman outlines five essential topics you need to level up your playing.

Read More Show less

The finished BYOC Classic Delay kit (Photo 1).

Never kit-built a stompbox? It’s easy—if you let pro pedal maker Alex Guaraldi of CopperSound be your guide. Here, he takes you on a step-by-step tour as he assembles a Build Your Own Clone Classic Delay.

For this DIY adventure, we’re going to be walking through the steps of building the Classic Delay pedal from Build Your Own Clone (BYOC), a company that has been a big player in the pedal-kit game for quite a while. This is a little more complicated than building a fuzz or overdrive, so I’m going to explain the process with great detail. Let’s get started.

Read More Show less

Taipei Houston’s Myles Ulrich in the studio.

Photo by Mallory Turner

Taipei Houston’s Myles Ulrich joins us in naming the pedals we can’t live without. Plus, musical obsessions!

Question: What are your “always on” effects? Aka, pedals that fit and sound good for most things you play.

Read More Show less