The Deco Plugin Tape Saturator and Doubletracker are a direct port of their critically acclaimed Deco hardware pedal and were designed to offer unique DAW features.
The new plugin has two different Saturation voices that emulate the characteristics of both professional open-reel mastering tape machines and the ALC auto-limiting circuit found on high-end ā70s cassette decks, as well as the exclusive feature of dual tape transports in the Doubletracker section. All of the classic effects Deco recreates are generated by changing the offset between the two machines, allowing incremental changes from phasing and flanging to chorusing, slapback, and echo as the offset increases. This dual-deck scenario represents a long-lost studio workflow that was critical to the sound and vibe of many early recordings made at facilities like Sun Studios and Abbey Road, but one that was replaced by modern devices many decades ago.
āāOur Deco hardware pedal has long been the secret weapon of many an engineer in the studio, so having it in plugin form represents a major step forward in accessibilityā, said Sean Hal- ley, Strymonās Head of Marketing. āThe dual tape deck scenario offers a number of truly unique and genuine vintage sounds that havenāt previously been achievable in the world of DAWs in the same wayā, Halley continues. āIf you add the fact that Deco was originally made for guitar and has a mountain of gain on tap, the result is that you can go from the mildest blush of satu- ration and echo all the way to full-on distorted chaos and everything in between, all based upon the authentic characteristics of magnetic tape.ā
The Deco Plugin is available directly from Strymon and at select dealers worldwide for $79 US.
For more information, please visit strymon.net.
- Strymon Lex Rotary Pedal Review āŗ
- Strymon Riverside Review āŗ
- Strymon Brigadier Delay, Orbit Flanger, Blue Sky Reverberator, and Ola Chorus & Vibrato Pedal Reviews āŗ
While the pedal builders at Sehat Effectors are in the game for their love of the 6-string, theyāve since begun exploring what effects pedals mean to other kinds of instrumentalists.
This time, Iād like to share my perspective as a pedal builder on how our effects pedalsāoriginally crafted with guitarists in mindāare experiencing an exciting evolution in use. Our customer base spans around the globe, and as it turns out, many of them arenāt guitarists. Instead, our pedals are finding their way into the hands of non-guitarist musicians like DJs, synth players, movie sound directors, and even drummers. Yes, a drummer once used one of my fuzz pedals in a drum miking setupāquite an extreme yet bold experiment! This made me wonder: How did such a phenomenon come about?
Most of the pedals I build are fuzz effects and other experimental types, all primarily tested within guitar setups. But then I visited a friendās studio; he goes by āBalanceā onstage. Heās a well-known musician and producer here in Indonesia, and a member of the hip-hop group JHF (Jogja Hip Hop Foundation). Now, hereās the kickerāBalance doesnāt play guitar! Yet, heās one of my customers, having asked for a fuzz and modulation pedal for his modular synthesizer rig. Initially, I was skeptical when he mentioned his plans. Neither my team nor I are familiar with synthesizers, let alone Eurorack or modular formats. I know guitars and, at best, bass guitar. My colleague has dabbled with effects experimentation, but only within the guitar framework.
So, my visit to his studio was a chance to study and research how guitar effects pedals could be adapted to a fundamentally different instrument ecosystem. The following is an interview I did with Balance to get a deeper understanding of his perspective.
As a modular synthesizer user, arenāt all kinds of sounds already achievable with a synth? Why mix one with guitar effects?
Balance: Some unique sounds, like those from Hologram Effectsā Microcosm or the eccentric pedals from Sehat Effectors, are hard to replicate with just a synth. Also, for sound design, I find it more intuitive to tweak knobs in real-time than rely on a computerādirect knob control feels more human for me.
Are there challenges in integrating guitar pedals with a modular synthesizer setup? After all, their ecosystems are quite different.
Balance: There are indeed significant differences, like jack types, power supplies, and physical format. Modular synthesizers are designed to sit on a table or stand, while guitar pedals are meant for the floor and foot control. However, they share a common thread in the goal of manipulating signals, eventually amplified through a mixing board and amplifier. The workaround is using converters/adapters to bridge the connection.āIf youāre a saxophonist who buys a guitar pedal, itās yours to use however you like.ā
Are you the only modular synth user combining them with guitar pedals?
Balance: Actually, I got the idea after seeing other musicians experiment this way. Effects like fuzz or distortion are iconic to guitar but absent in synthesizer sound options. I believe signal manipulation with fuzz or distortion is a universal idea that appeals to musicians creating music, regardless of their instrument.
This brief chat gave me new insight and sparked my curiosity about different frameworks in music-making. While Iām not yet tempted to dive into modular synths myself, I now have a clearer picture of how fuzz and distortion transcend guitar. Imagine a saxophonist at a live show using a pedalboard with a DigiTech Whammy and Boss Metal Zoneāabsurd, maybe, but why not? If youāre a saxophonist who buys a guitar pedal, itās yours to use however you like. Because, in the end, all musicians create music based on their inner concernsāwhether itās about romance, friendship, political situations, war, or anger. Eventually, they will explore how best to express those concerns from many angles, and of course, āsoundā and ātoneā are fundamental aspects of the music itself. Good thing my partner and I named our company Sehat Effectors and not Sehat Guitar Works. Haha!
Reverend Jetstream 390 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
Jetstream 390 Midnight BlackReverend Contender 290 Solidbody Electric Guitar - Midnight Black
Contender 290, Midnight BlackSingle-coils and humbuckers arenāt the only game in town anymore. From hybrid to hexaphonic, Joe Naylor, Pete Roe, and Chris Mills are thinking outside the bobbin to bring guitarists new sonic possibilities.
Electric guitar pickups werenāt necessarily supposed to turn out the way they did. We know the dominant models of single-coils and humbuckersāfrom P-90s to PAFsāas the natural and correct forms of the technology. But the history of the 6-string pickup tells a different story. They were mostly experiments gone right, executed with whatever materials were cheapest and closest at hand. Wartime embargos had as much influence on the development of the electric guitar pickup as did any ideas of function, tone, or sonic qualityāmaybe more so.
Still, we think we know what pickups should sound and look like. Lucky for us, there have always been plenty of pickup builders who arenāt so convinced. These are the makers who devised the ceramic-magnet pickup, gold-foils, and active, high-gain pickups. In 2025, nearly 100 years after the first pickup bestowed upon a humble lap-steel guitar the power to blast our ears with soundwaves, thereās no shortage of free-thinking, independent wire-winders coming up with new ways to translate vibrating steel strings into thrilling music.
Joe Naylor, Chris Mills, and Pete Roe are three of them. As the creative mind behind Reverend Guitars, Naylor developed the Railhammer pickup, which combines both rail and pole-piece design. Mills, in Pennsylvania, builds his own ZUZU guitars with wildly shaped, custom-designed pickups. And in the U.K., Roe developed his own line of hexaphonic pickups to achieve the ultimate in string separation and note definition. All three of them told us how they created their novel noisemakers.
Joe Naylor - Railhammer Pickups
Joe Naylor, pictured here, started designing Railhammers out of personal necessity: He needed a pickup that could handle both pristine cleans and crushing distortion back to back.
Like virtually all guitar players, Joe Naylor was on a personal tone quest. Based in Troy, Michigan, Naylor helped launch Reverend Guitars in 1996, and in the late ā90s, he was writing and playing music that involved both clean and distorted movements in one song. He liked his neck pickup for the clean parts, but it was too muddy for high-gain playing. He didnāt want to switch pickups, which would change the sound altogether.
He set out to design a neck pickup that could represent both ends of the spectrum with even fidelity. That led him to a unique design concept: a thin, steel rail under the three thicker, low-end strings, and three traditional pole pieces for the higher strings, both working with a bar magnet underneath. At just about a millimeter thick, rails, Naylor explains, only interact with a narrow section of the thicker strings, eliminating excess low-end information. Pole pieces, at about six millimeters in diameter, pick up a much wider and less focused window of the higher strings, which works to keep them fat and full. āIf you go back and look at some of the early rail pickupsāBill Lawrenceās and things like thatāthe low end is very tight,ā says Naylor. āItās almost like your tone is being EQād perfectly, but itās being done by the pickup itself.ā
That idea formed the basis for Railhammer Pickups, which began official operations in 2012. Naylor built the first prototype in his basement, and it sounded great from the start, so he expanded the format to a bridge pickup. That worked out, too. āI decided, āMaybe Iām onto something here,āā says Naylor. Despite the additional engineering, Railhammers have remained passive pickups, with fairly conventional magnetsāincluding alnico 5s and ceramicsāwires, and structures. Naylor says this combines the clarity of active pickups with the āthick, organic toneā of passive pickups.
āItās almost like your tone is being EQād perfectly, but itās being done by the pickup itself.ā āJoe Naylor
The biggest difficulty Naylor faced was in the physical construction of the pickups. He designed and ordered custom molds for the pickupās bobbins, which cost a good chunk of money. But once those were in hand, the Railhammers didnāt need much fiddling. Despite their size differences, the rail and pole pieces produce level volume outputs for balanced response across all six strings.
Naylorās formula has built a significant following among heavy-music players. Smashing Pumpkinsā Billy Corgan is a Railhammer player with several signature models; ditto Reeves Gabrels, the Cure guitarist and David Bowie collaborator. Bob Balch from Fu Manchu and Kyle Shutt from the Sword have signatures, too, and other players include Code Orangeās Reba Meyers, Gogol Bordelloās Boris Pelekh, and Voivodās Dan āChewyā Mongrain.
Chris Mills - ZUZU Pickups
When Chris Mills started building his own electric guitars, he decided to build his own components for them, too. He suspected that in the course of the marketās natural thinning of the product herd, plenty of exciting options had been left unrealized. He started working with non-traditional components and winding in non-traditional ways, which turned him on to the idea that things could be done differently. āI learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered,ā says Mills.
Eventually, he zeroed in on the particular sound of a 5-way-switch Stratocaster in positions two and four: Something glassy and clear, but fatter and more dimensional. In Millsā practice, ādimensionalā refers to the varying and sometimes simultaneous sound qualities attained from, say, a finger pad versus a fingernail. āI didnāt want just one thing,ā says Mills. āI wanted multiple things happening at once.ā
Mills wanted something that split the difference between a humbuckerās fullness and the Stratās plucky verve, all in clean contexts. But he didnāt want an active pickup; he wanted a passive, drop-in solution to maximize appeal. To achieve the end tone, Mills wired his bobbins in parallel to create āinterposed signal processing,ā a key piece of his patented design. āI found that when I [signal processed] both of them, I got too much of one particular quality, and I wanted that dimensionality that comes with two qualities simultaneously, so that was essential,ā explains Mills.
Mills loved the sound of alnico 5 blade magnets, so he worked with a 3D modeling engineer to design plastic bobbins that could accommodate both the blades and the number of turns of wire he desired. This got granularāa millimeter taller, a millimeter widerāuntil they came out exactly right. Then came the struggle of fitting them into a humbucker cover. Some key advice from experts helped Mills save on space to make the squeeze happen.
Millsā ZUZUbuckers donāt have the traditional pole pieces and screws of most humbuckers, so he uses the screw holes on the cover as āportholesā looking in on a luxe abalone design. And his patented ācurved-coilā pickups feature a unique winding method to mix up the tonal profile while maintaining presence across all frequencies.
āI learned early on that there are all kinds of sonic worlds out there to be discovered.ā āChris Mills
Mills has also patented a single-coil pickup with a curved coil, which he developed to get a different tonal quality by changing the relative location of the poles to one another and to the bridge. Within that design is another patented design feature: reducing the number of turns at the bass end of the coil. āPretty much every pickup maker suggests that you lower the bass end [of the pickup] to compensate for the fact that it's louder than the treble end,ā says Mills. āThat'll work, but doing so alters the quality and clarity of the bass end. My innovation enables you to keep the bass end up high toward the strings.ā
Even Millsā drop-in pickups tend to look fairly distinct, but his more custom designs, like his curved-coil pickup, are downright baroque. Because his designs donāt rely on typical pickup construction, there arenāt the usual visual cues, like screws popping out of a humbucker cover, or pole pieces on a single-coil pickup. (Mills does preserve a whiff of these ideals with āportholesā on his pickup covers that reveal that pickup below.) Currently, heās excited by the abalone-shell finish inserts heās loading on top of his ZUZUbuckers, which peek through the aforementioned portholes.
āIt all comes down to the challenge that we face in this industry of having something thatās original and distinctive, and also knowing that with every choice you make, you risk alienating those who prefer a more traditional and familiar look,ā says Mills.
Pete Roe - Submarine Pickups
Roeās stick-on Submarine pickups give individual strings their own miniature pickup, each with discrete, siloed signals that can be manipulated on their own. Ever wanted to have a fuzz only on the treble strings, or an echo applied just to the low-register strings? Submarine can achieve that.
Pete Roe says that at the start, his limited amount of knowledge about guitar pickups was a kind of superpower. If he had known how hard it would be to get to where he is now, he likely wouldnāt have started. He also wouldāve worked in a totally different way. But hindsight is 20/20.
Roe was working in singer-songwriter territory and looking to add some bass to his sound. He didnāt want to go down the looping path, so he stuck with octave pedals, but even these werenāt satisfactory for him. He started winding his own basic pickups, using drills, spools of wire, and magnets heād bought off the internet. Like most other builders, he wanted to make passive pickupsāhe played lots of acoustic guitar, and his experiences trying to find last-minute replacement batteries for most acoustic pickups left him scarred.
Roe started building a multiphonic pickup: a unit with multiple discrete āpickupsā within one housing. In traditional pickups, the vibration from the strings is converted into a voltage in the 6-string-wide coils of wire within the pickup. In multiphonic pickups, there are individual coils beneath each string. That means theyāre quite tinyāRoe likens each coil to the size of a Tylenol pill. āBecause youāre making stuff small, it actually works better because itās not picking up signals from adjacent strings,ā says Roe. āIf youāve got it set up correctly, thereās very, very little crosstalk.ā
With his Submarine Pickups, Roe began by creating the flagship Submarine: a quick-stick pickup designed to isolate and enhance the signals of two strings. The SubPro and SubSix expanded the concept to true hexaphonic capability. Each string has a designated coil, which on the SubPro combine into four separate switchable outputs; the SubSix counts six outputs. The pickups use two mini output jacks, with triple-band male connectors to carry three signals each. Explains Roe: āIf you had a two-channel output setup, you could have E, A, and D strings going to one side, and G, B, and E to the other. Or you could have E and A going to one, the middle two strings muted, and the B and E going to a different channel.ā Each output has a 3-position switch, which toggles between one of two channels, or mute.
āIām just saying thereās some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities.ā āPete Roe
This all might seem a little overly complicated, but Roe sees it as a simplification. He says when most people think about their sound, they see its origin in the guitar as fixed, only manipulatable later in the chain via pedals, amp settings, or speaker decisions. āIām not saying thatās wrong,ā says Roe. āIām just saying thereās some unexplored territory at the beginning of the signal chain. If you start looking inside your guitar, then it opens up a world of opportunities which may or may not be useful to you. Our customers tend to be the ones who are curious and looking for something new that they canāt achieve in a different way.
āIf each string has its own channel, you can start to get some really surprising effects by using those six channels as a group,ā continues Roe. āYou could pan the strings across the stereo field, which as an effect is really powerful. You suddenly have this really wide, panoramic guitar sound. But then when you start applying familiar effects to the strings in isolation, you can end up with some really surprising textural sounds that you just canāt achieve in any other way. You can get some very different sounds if youāre applying these distortions to strings in isolation. You can get that kind of lead guitar sound that sort of cuts through everything, this really pure, monophonic sound. That sounds very different because what you donāt get is this thing called intermodulation distortion, which is the muddiness, essentially, that you get from playing chords that are more complex than roots and fifths with a load of distortion.ā And despite the powerful hardware, the pickups donāt require any soldering or labor. Using a ānanosuctionā technology similar to what geckos possess, the pickups simply adhere to the guitarās body. Submarineās manuals provide clear instruction on how to rig up the pickups.
āAn analogy I like to use is: Say youāre remixing a track,ā explains Roe. āIf you get the stems, you can actually do a much better job, because you can dig inside and see how the thing is put together. Essentially, Submarine is doing that to guitars. Itās allowing guitarists and producers to look inside the instrument and rebuild it from its constituent parts in new and exciting ways.ā
Pearl Jam announces U.S. tour dates for April and May 2025 in support of their album Dark Matter.
In continued support of their 3x GRAMMY-nominated album Dark Matter, Pearl Jam will be touring select U.S. cities in April and May 2025.
Pearl Jamās live dates will start in Hollywood, FL on April 24 and 26 and wrap with performances in Pittsburgh, PA on May 16 and 18. Full tour dates are listed below.
Support acts for these dates will be announced in the coming weeks.
Tickets for these concerts will be available two ways:
- A Ten Club members-only presale for all dates begins today. Only paid Ten Club members active as of 11:59 PM PT on December 4, 2024 are eligible to participate in this presale. More info at pearljam.com.
- Public tickets will be available through an Artist Presale hosted by Ticketmaster. Fans can sign up for presale access for up to five concert dates now through Tuesday, December 10 at 10 AM PT. The presale starts Friday, December 13 at 10 AM local time.
earl Jam strives to protect access to fairly priced tickets by providing the majority of tickets to Ten Club members, making tickets non-transferable as permitted, and selling approximately 10% of tickets through PJ Premium to offset increased costs. Pearl Jam continues to use all-in pricing and the ticket price shown includes service fees. Any applicable taxes will be added at checkout.
For fans unable to use their purchased tickets, Pearl Jam and Ticketmaster will offer a Fan-to-Fan Face Value Ticket Exchange for every city, starting at a later date. To sell tickets through this exchange, you must have a valid bank account or debit card in the United States. Tickets listed above face value on secondary marketplaces will be canceled. To help protect the Exchange, Pearl Jam has also chosen to make tickets for this tour mobile only and restricted from transfer. For more information about the policy issues in ticketing, visit fairticketing.com.
For more information, please visit pearljam.com.