PG editors pick their top gear from the second day of Summmer NAMM 2016. See everything from day 2 in our photo gallery.
The Senn by Eastwood
Eastwood's collaborating with respected guitar builders to create a line of more affordable "boutique-style" guitars. New for NAMM, Nashville builder Jeff Senn's retro mojo heavy entry, the Senn.
Alexander Pedals Radical Reverse
Alexander Pedals makes no secret of their appetite for weird. And for those that similarly embrace this ethos, the Radical Reverse delay will be as welcome as the first blooms of spring. The key to the reverse delay is a truly effective mix control that lends the summed output a more integrated, tape-like quality. The effect is compounded by a cool, rangy modulation (tweak) control. It's also switchable between spiral and fractured granular delays. At $189, that's a lot of weird for the price too.
Greer Amplification Super Hornet
Fuzz with buzz: the Greer Super Hornet by Greer Amplification debuts at NAMM. It's a powerhouse octave fuzz inspired by the classic Foxx Tone Machine, with NOS BC-107B transistors juicing up the circuit. With a momentary Stinger switch to goose up the tone and make it slice, it goes from proud octave roar to wall of raging sound instantly.
Swindler Effects Red Mountain Tremolo
Birmingham, Alabama's Swindler Effects showed this prototype of their Red Mountain tremolo at NAMM, which will likely hit the streets in August. It's pretty loaded for a compact tremolo circuit, with expression options for depth and rate, a phase inversion switch, a preset, five wave forms and a stutter switch you can use to create momentary tremolo effects a hyper speeds. Street price will be around $175.
Yamaha Revstar
In addition to introducing a couple of new Pacifica solidbodies, Yamaha came to NAMM with two tweaks to its swaggering new Revstar line. At left is the Japanese master-luthier-built version ($1,799 street) with vintage-toned alnico-7 pickups and a copper pickguard, while the standard Indonesian-made Revstar at right displays the new Bigsby option.
Coppersound Pedals Telegraph Stutter
Boston's Coppersound Pedals debuted the Telegraph Stutter, a simple kill pedal that looks like something your grandpappy might have used to warn the next town that a buffalo stampede was on the way. Imaginative and basic all at once, and tagged at only $45.
Valve Train Amps Santa Monica
We're big fans of just about everything Valvetrain Amps has built, but the company had been relatively quiet of late. That'll change this autumn with the release of the Santa Monica (you're seeing a late-stage prototype here)--a '63 Bassman inspired howler that will be around 45 ways and in the neighborhood of $1,600 when it hits the street. Stay tuned!
Valeton Pedals
First-time NAMM-ers Valeton brought a bunch of new miniature stomps to Nashville, including the shrunken yet very familiar-looking Loft series—nine pedals with all-analog signal paths based on classic Japanese pedals of yore. Shown here, the pink HB Flanger is based on the old HF-2 Hi-Band Flanger, the blue Analog Chorus aims for old CE-2 tones, and the root-beer-colored Octave goes for the endearingly glitchy vibe of yesteryear's OC-2.
Foxpedal's Wave and Defector Fuzz
Richland, Washington, stomp outfit Foxpedal made its NAMM debut with a diverse line of pedals that includes the Wave reverb/delay (left)—which has Echorec-, Space Echo-, and Echoplex-style modes, as well as a self-oscillation "wash" footswitch—and the Russian-style Defector fuzz. The latter has a unique pre-gain stage, as well as a footswitch that sends your signal into an instant feedback frenzy.
Gretsch Tom Petersson
Cheap Trick bassist Tom Petersson brought his most tantalizing signature 12-string bass ever to this year's Summer NAMM. The Fender Custom Shop-built anachronistic wonder doesn't come cheap with its street price of $11,999, but it looks 100-percent badass—as if it's seen decades of loving yet gentle road use. Features include Filter'Tron-style blade humbuckers, a metal armrest, and a faithfully quirky ol' belt-buckle protector around back.
Guitarists are used to coveting cranky, old gear, but if you’re not a rack user, the H3000 might not be for you! If you ever see one of these in a studio, be sure to take some time to check it out, and maybe give the plugin a try.When it debuted in 1987, the H3000 was marketed as an “intelligent pitch-changer” that could generate stereo harmonies in a user-specified key. This was heady stuff in the ’80s! But while diatonic harmonizing grabbed the headlines, subtler uses of this pitch-shifter cemented its legacy. Patch 231 MICROPITCHSHIFT, for example, is a big reason the H3000 persists in racks everywhere. It’s essentially a pair of very short, single-repeat delays: The left side is pitched slightly up while the right side is pitched slightly down (default is ±9 cents). The resulting tripling/thickening effect has long been a mix-engineer staple for pop vocals, and it’s also my first call when I want a stereo chorus for guitar.
The second-gen H3000S, introduced the following year, cemented the device’s guitar bona fides. Early-adopter Steve Vai was such a proponent of the first edition that Eventide asked him to contribute 48 signature sounds for the new model (patches 700-747). Still-later revisions like the H3000B and H3000D/SE added even more functionality, but these days it’s not too important which model you have. Comprehensive EPROM chips containing every patch from all generations of H3000 (plus the later H3500) are readily available for a modest cost, and are a fairly straightforward install.
In addition to pitch-shifting, there are excellent modulation effects and reverbs (like patch 211 CANYON), plus presets inspired by other classic Eventide boxes, like the patch 513 INSTANT PHASER. A comprehensive accounting of the H3000’s capabilities would be tedious, but suffice to say that even the stock presets get deliciously far afield. There are pitch-shifting reverbs that sound like fever-dream ancestors of Strymon’s “shimmer” effect. There are backwards-guitar simulators, multiple extraterrestrial voices, peculiar foreshadows of the EarthQuaker Devices Arpanoid and Rainbow Machine (check out patch 208 BIZARRMONIZER), and even button-triggered Foley effects that require no input signal (including a siren, helicopter, tank, submarine, ocean waves, thunder, and wind). If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute. (Spin the big wheel and find out what you’ve won!)
“If you’re ever without your deck of Oblique Strategies cards, the H3000’s singular knob makes a pretty good substitute.”
But there’s another, more pedestrian reason I tend to reach for the H3000 and its rackmount relatives in the studio: I like to do certain types of processing after the mic. It’s easy to overlook, but guitar speakers are signal processors in their own right. They roll off high and low end, they distort when pushed, and the cabinets in which they’re mounted introduce resonances. While this type of de facto processing often flatters the guitar itself, it isn’t always advantageous for effects.
Effects loops allow time-based effects to be placed after preamp distortion, but I like to go one further. By miking the amp first and then sending signal to effects in parallel, I can get full bandwidth from the airy reverbs and radical pitched-up effects the H3000 can offer—and I can get it in stereo, printed to its own track, allowing the wet/dry balance to be revisited later, if needed. If a sound needs to be reproduced live, that’s a problem for later. (Something evocative enough can usually be extracted from a pedal-form descendant like the Eventide H90.)
Like most vintage gear, the H3000 has some endearing quirks. Even as it knowingly preserves glitches from earlier Eventide harmonizers (patch 217 DUAL H910s), it betrays its age with a few idiosyncrasies of its own. Extreme pitch-shifting exhibits a lot of aliasing (think: bit-crusher sounds), and the analog Murata filter modules impart a hint of warmth that many plug-in versions don’t quite capture. (They also have a habit of leaking black goo all over the motherboard!) It’s all part of the charm of the unit, beloved by its adherents. (Well, maybe not the leaking goo!)
In 2025, many guitarists won’t be eager to care for what is essentially an expensive, cranky, decades-old computer. Even the excitement of occasional tantalum capacitor explosions is unlikely to win them over! Fortunately, some great software emulations exist—Eventide’s own plugin even models the behavior of the Murata filters. But hardware offers the full hands-on experience, so next time you spot an old H3000 in a rack somewhere—and you’ve got the time—fire it up, wait for the distinctive “click” of its relays, spin the knob, and start digging.
