Stevie Van Zandt with “Number One,” the ’80s reissue Stratocaster—with custom paisley pickguard from luthier Dave Petillo—that he’s been playing for the last quarter century or so.
With the E Street Band, he’s served as musical consigliere to Bruce Springsteen for most of his musical life. And although he stands next to the Boss onstage, guitar in hand, he’s remained mostly quiet about his work as a player—until now.
I’m stuck in Stevie Van Zandt’s elevator, and the New York City Fire Department has been summoned. It’s early March, and I am trapped on the top floor of a six-story office building in Greenwich Village. On the other side of this intransigent door is Van Zandt’s recording studio, his guitars, amps, and other instruments, his Wicked Cool Records offices, and his man cave. The latter is filled with so much day-glo baby boomer memorabilia that it’s like being dropped into a Milton Glaser-themed fantasy land—a bright, candy-colored chandelier swings into the room from the skylight.
There’s a life-size cameo of a go-go dancer in banana yellow; she’s frozen in mid hip shimmy. One wall displays rock posters and B-movie key art, anchored by a 3D rendering of Cream’s Disraeli Gearsalbum cover that swishes and undulates as you walk past it. Van Zandt’s shelves are stuffed with countless DVDs, from Louis Prima to the J. Geils Band performing on the German TV concert seriesRockpalast. There are three copies ofIggy and the Stooges: Live in Detroit. Videos of the great ’60s-music TV showcases, from Hullabaloo to Dean Martin’s The Hollywood Palace, sit here. Hundreds of books about rock ’n’ roll, from Greil Marcus’s entire output to Nicholas Schaffner’s seminal tome, The Beatles Forever, form a library in the next room.
But I haven’t seen this yet because the elevator is dead, and I am in it. Our trap is tiny, about 5' by 5'. A dolly filled with television production equipment is beside me. There’s a production assistant whom I’ve never met until this morning and another person who’s brand new to me, too, Geoff Sanoff. It turns out that he’s Van Zandt’s engineer—the guy who runs this studio. And as I’ll discover shortly, he’s also one of the several sentinels who watch over Stevie Van Zandt’s guitars.
There’s nothing to do now but wait for the NYFD, so Sanoff and I get acquainted. We discover we’re both from D.C. and know some of the same people in Washington’s music scene. We talk about gear. We talk about this television project. I’m here today assisting an old pal, director Erik Nelson, best known for producing Werner Herzog’s most popular documentaries, like Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Van Zandt has agreed to participate in a television pilot about the British Invasion. After about half an hour, the elevator doors suddenly slide open, and we’re rescued, standing face-to-face with three New York City firefighters.
As our camera team sets up the gear, Sanoff beckons me to a closet off the studio’s control room. I get the sense I am about to get a consolation prize for standing trapped in an elevator for the last 30 minutes. He pulls a guitar case off the shelf—it’s stenciled in paint with the words “Little Steven” on its top—snaps open the latches, and instantly I am face to face with Van Zandt’s well-worn 1957 Stratocaster. Sanoff hands it to me, and I’m suddenly holding what may as well be the thunderbolt of Zeus for an E Street Band fan. My jaw drops when he lets me plug it in so he can get some levels on his board, and the clean, snappy quack of the nearly 70-year-old pickups fills the studio. For decades, Springsteen nuts have enjoyed a legendary 1978 filmed performance of “Rosalita” from Phoenix, Arizona, that now lives on YouTube. This is the Stratocaster Van Zandt had slung over his shoulder that night. It’s the same guitar he wields in the famous No Nukes concert film shot at Madison Square Garden a year later, in 1979. My mind races. The British Invasion is all well and essential. But now I’m thinking about Van Zandt’s relationship with his guitars.
Stevie Van Zandt's Gear
Van Zandt’s guitar concierge Andy Babiuk helped him plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings.
Guitars
- 1957 Fender Stratocaster (studio only)
- ’80s Fender ’57 Stratocaster reissue “Number One”
- Gretsch Tennessean
- 1955 Gibson Les Paul Custom “Black Beauty” (studio only)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2024 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (candy apple green)
- Rickenbacker Fab Gear 2023 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Model (snowglo)
- Rickenbacker 2018 Limited Edition ’60s Style 360 Fab Gear (jetglo)
- Two Rickenbacker 1993Plus 12-strings (candy apple purple and SVZ blue)
- Rickenbacker 360/12C63 12-string (fireglo)
- Vox Teardrop (owned by Andy Babiuk)
Amps
- Two Vox AC30s
- Two Vox 2x12 cabinets
Effects
- Boss Space Echo
- Boss Tremolo
- Boss Rotary Ensemble
- Durham Electronics Sex Drive
- Durham Electronics Mucho Busto
- Durham Electronics Zia Drive
- Electro-Harmonix Satisfaction
- Ibanez Tube Screamer
- Voodoo Labs Ground Control Pro switcher
Strings and Picks
- D’Addario (.095–.44)
- D’Andrea Heavy
Van Zandt has reached a stage of reflection in his career. Besides the Grammy-nominated HBO film, Stevie Van Zandt: Disciple, which came out in 2024, he recently wrote and published his autobiography, Unrequited Infatuations (2021), a rollicking read in which he pulls no punches and makes clear he still strives to do meaningful things in music and life.
His laurels would weigh him down if they were actually wrapped around his neck. In the E Street Band, Van Zandt has participated in arguably the most incredible live group in rock ’n’ roll history. And don’t forget Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes or Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul. He created both the Underground Garage and Outlaw Country radio channels on Sirius/XM. He started a music curriculum program called TeachRock that provides no-cost resources and other programs to schools across the country. Then there’s the politics. Via his 1985 record, Sun City, Van Zandt is credited with blasting many of the load-bearing bricks that brought the walls of South African apartheid tumbling into dust. He also acted in arguably the greatest television drama in American history, with his turn as Silvio Dante in The Sopranos.
Puzzlingly, Van Zandt’s autobiography lacks any detail on his relationship with the electric guitar. And Sanoff warns me that Van Zandt is “not a gearhead.” Instead he has an organization in place to keep his guitar life spinning like plates on the end of pointed sticks. Besides Sanoff, there are three others: Ben Newberry has been Van Zandt’s guitar tech since the beginning of 1982. Andy Babiuk, owner of Rochester, New York, guitar shop Fab Gear and author of essential collector reference books Beatles Gear and Rolling Stones Gear (the latter co-authored by Greg Prevost) functions as Van Zandt’s guitar concierge. Lastly, luthier Dave Petillo, based in Asbury Park, New Jersey, oversees all the maintenance and customization on Van Zandt’s axes.
“I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes.” —Stevie Van Zandt
I crawl onto Zoom with Van Zandt for a marathon session and come away from our 90 minutes with the sense that he is a man of dichotomies. Sure, he’s a guitar slinger, but he considers his biggest strengths to be as an arranger, producer, and songwriter. “I don’t feel that being a guitar player is my identity,” he tells me. “For 40 years, ever since I made my first solo record, I just have not felt that I express myself as a guitar player. I still enjoy it when I do it; I’m not ambivalent. When I play a solo, I am in all the way, and I play a solo like I would like to hear if I were in the audience. But the guitar part is really part of the song’s arrangement. And a great solo is a composed solo. Great solos are ones you can sing, like Jimi Hendrix’s solo in ‘All Along the Watchtower.’”
In his autobiography, Van Zandt mentions that his first guitar was an acoustic belonging to his grandfather. “I took one lesson, and they start to teach you the notes. I don’t care about the notes,” Van Zandt tells me. “The teacher said I had natural ability. I’m thinking, if I got natural ability, then what the fuck do I need you for? So I never went back. After that, I got my first electric, an Epiphone. It was about slowing down the records to figure out with my ear what they were doing. It was seeing live bands and standing in front of that guitar player and watching what they were doing. It was praying when a band went on TV that the cameraman would occasionally go to the right place and show what the guitar player was doing instead of putting the camera on the lead singer all the time. And I’m sure it was the same for everybody. There was no concept of rock ’n’ roll lessons. School of Rock wouldn’t exist for another 30 years. So, you had to go to school yourself.”
By the end of the 1960s, Van Zandt tells me he had made a conscious decision about what kind of player he wanted to be. “I realized that I really wasn’t that interested in becoming a virtuoso guitar player, per se. I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.”
After the Beatles and the Stones broke the British Invasion wide open, bands like Cream and the Yardbirds most influenced him. “George Harrison would have that perfect 22-second guitar solo,” Van Zandt remembers. “Keith Richards. Dave Davies. Then, the harder stuff started coming. Jeff Beck in the Yardbirds. Eric Clapton with things like ‘White Room.’ But the songs stayed in a pop configuration, three minutes each or so. You’d have this cool guitar-based song with a 15-second, really amazing Jeff Beck solo in it. That’s what I liked. Later, the jam bands came, but I was not into that. My attention deficit disorder was not working for the longer solos,” he jokes. Watch a YouTube video of any recent E Street Band performance where Van Zandt solos, and the punch and impact of his approach and attack are apparent. At Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., last year, his solo on “Rosalita” was 13 powerful seconds.
Van Zandt and Bruce Springsteen’s relationship goes back to their earliest days on the Jersey shore. “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity,” recalls Van Zandt. “At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster.”
Photo by Pamela Springsteen
Van Zandt left his Epiphone behind for his first Fender. “I started to notice that the guitar superstars at the time were playing Telecasters. Mike Bloomfield. Jeff Beck. Even Eric Clapton played one for a while,” he tells me. “I went down to Jack’s Music Shop in Red Bank, New Jersey, because he had the first Telecaster in our area and couldn’t sell it; it was just sitting there. I bought it for 90 bucks.”
In those days, and around those parts, players only had one guitar. Van Zandt recalls, “Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to Telecaster. At that point, I was ready to switch to Stratocaster, because Jimi Hendrix had come in and Jeff Beck had switched to a Strat. They all kind of went from Telecaster to Les Pauls. And then some of them went on to the Stratocaster. For me, the Les Paul was just too out of reach. It was too expensive, and it was just too heavy. So I said, I’m going to switch to a Stratocaster. It felt a little bit more versatile.”
Van Zandt still employs Stratocasters, and besides the 1957 I strummed, he was seen with several throughout the ’80s and ’90s. But for the last 20 or 25 years, Van Zandt has mainly wielded a black Fender ’57 Strat reissue from the ’80s with a maple fretboard and a gray pearloid pickguard. He still uses that Strat—dubbed “Number One”—but the pickguard has been switched to one sporting a purple paisley pattern that was custom-made by Dave Petillo.
Petillo comes from New Jersey luthier royalty and followed in the footsteps of his late father, Phil Petillo. At a young age, the elder Petillo became an apprentice to legendary New York builder John D’Angelico. Later, he sold Bruce Springsteen the iconic Fender Esquire that’s seen on the Born to Run album cover and maintained and modified that guitar and all of Bruce’s other axes until he passed away in 2010. Phil worked out of a studio in the basement of their home, not far from Asbury Park. Artists dropped in, and Petillo has childhood memories of playing pick-up basketball games in his backyard with members of the E Street Band. (He also recalls showing his Lincoln Logs to Johnny Cash and once mistaking Jerry Garcia for Santa Claus.)
“I was more interested in making sure I could play the guitar solo that would complement the song. I got more into the songs than the nature of musicianship.” —Stevie Van Zandt
“I’ve known Stevie Van Zandt my whole life,” says Petillo. “My dad used to work on his 1957 Strat. That guitar today has updated tuners, a bone nut, new string trees, and a refret that was done by Dad long ago. I think one volume pot may have been changed. But it still has the original pickups.” Petillo is responsible for a lot of the aesthetic flair seen on Van Zandt’s instruments. He continues, “Stevie is so much fun to work with. I love incorporating colors into things, and Stevie gets that. When you talk to a traditional Telecaster or Strat player, and you say, ‘I want to do a tulip paisley pickguard in neon blue-green,’ they’re like, ‘Holy cow, that’s too much!’ But for Stevie, it’s just natural. So I always text him with pickguard designs, asking him, ‘Which one do you like?’ And he calls me a wild man; he says, ‘I don’t have that many Strats to put them on!’ But I’ll go to Ben Newberry and say, ‘Ben, I made these pickguards; let’s get them on the guitar. And I’ll go backstage, and we’ll put them on. I just love that relationship; Stevie is down for it.”
Petillo takes care of the electronics on Van Zandt’s guitars. Almost all of the Strats are modified with an internal Alembic Stratoblaster preamp circuit, which Van Zandt can physically toggle on and off using a switch housed just above the input jack. Van Zandt tells me, “That came because I got annoyed with the whole pedal thing. I’m a performer onstage, and I’m integrated with the audience and I like the freedom to move. And if I’m across the stage and all of a sudden Bruce nods to me to take a solo, or there’s a bit in the song that requires a little bit of distortion, it’s just easier to have that; sometimes, I’ll need that extra little boost for a part I’m throwing in, and it’s convenient.”
In recent times, Van Zandt has branched out from the Stratocaster, which has a lot to do with Andy Babiuk's influence. The two met 20 years ago, and Babiuk’s band, the Chesterfield Kings, is on Van Zandt’s Wicked Cool Records. “He’d call me up and ask me things like, ‘What’s Brian Jones using on this song?’” explains Babiuk. “When I’d ask him why, he’d tell me, ‘Because I want to have that guitar.’ It’s a common thing for me to get calls and texts from him like that. And there’s something many people overlook that Stevie doesn’t advertise: He’s a ripping guitar player. People think of him as playing chords and singing backup for Bruce, but the guy rips. And not just on guitar, on multiple instruments.”
Van Zandt tells me he wanted to bring more 12-string to the E Street Band this tour, “just to kind of differentiate the tone.” He explains, “Nils is doing his thing, and Bruce is doing his thing, and I wanted to do more 12-string.” He laughs, “I went full Paul Kantner!” Babiuk helped Van Zandt plunge deeper down the Rickenbacker rabbit hole. Currently, Van Zandt has six Rickenbackers backstage: two 6-strings and four 12-strings. Each 12-string has a modified nut made by Petillo from ancient woolly mammoth tusk, and the D, A, and low E strings are inverted with their octave.
Van Zandt explains this to me: “I find that the strings ring better when the high ones are on top. I’m not sure if that’s how Roger McGuinn did it, but it works for me. I’m also playing a wider neck.”
Babiuk tells me about a unique Rick in Van Zandt’s rack of axes: “I know the guys at Rickenbacker well, and they did a run of 30 basses in candy apple purple for my shop. I showed one to Stevie, and purple is his color; he loves it. He asked me to get him a 12-string in the same color, and I told him, ‘They don’t do one-offs; they don’t have a custom shop,’ but it’s hard to say no to the guy! So I called Rickenbacker and talked them into it. I explained, ‘He’ll play it a lot on this upcoming tour.’ They made him a beautiful one with his OM logo.”
The purple one-off is a 1993Plus model and sports a 1 3/4" wide neck—1/8" wider than a normal Rickenbacker. Van Zandt loved it so much that he had Babiuk wrestle with Rickenbacker again to build another one in baby blue. Petillo has since outfitted them with paisley-festooned custom pickguards. When guitar tech Newberry shows me these unique axes backstage, I can see the input jack on the purple guitar is labeled with serial number 01001.“Some of my drive is based on gratitude,” says Van Zandt, “feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever.”
Photo by Rob DeMartin
Van Zandt also currently plays a white Vox Teardrop. That guitar is a prototype owned by Babiuk. “Stevie wanted a Teardrop,” Babiuk tells me, “but I explained that the vintage ones are hit and miss—the ones made in the U.K. were often better than the ones manufactured in Italy. Korg now owns Vox, and I have a new Teardrop prototype from them in my personal collection. When I showed it to him, he loved it and asked me to get him one. I had to tell him, ‘I can’t; it’s a prototype, there’s only one,’ and he asked me to sell him mine,” he chuckles. “I told him, ‘It’s my fucking personal guitar, it’s not for sale!’ So I ended up lending it to him for this tour, and I told him, ‘Remember, this is my guitar; don’t get too happy with it, okay?’
“He asked me why that particular guitar sounds and feels so good. Besides being a prototype built by only one guy, the single-coil pickups’ output is abnormally hot, and the neck feels like a nice ’60s Fender neck. Stevie’s obviously a dear friend of mine, and he can hold onto it for as long as he wants. I’m glad it’s getting played. It was just hanging in my office.”
Van Zandt tells me how Babiuk’s Vox Teardrop sums up everything he wants from his tone, and says, “It’s got a wonderfully clean, powerful sound. Like Brian Jones got on ‘The Last Time.’ That’s my whole thing; that’s the trick—trying to get the power without too much distortion. Bruce and Nils get plenty of distortion; I am trying to be the clean rhythm guitar all the time.”
If Van Zandt has a consigliere like Tony Soprano had Silvio Dante, that’s Newberry. Newberry has tech’d nearly every gig with Van Zandt since 1982. “Bruce shows move fast,” he tells me. “So when there’s a guitar change for Stevie, and there are many of them, I’m at the top of the stairs, and we switch quickly. There’s maybe one or two seconds, and if he needs to tell me something, I hear it. He’s Bruce’s musical director, so he may say something like, ‘Remind me tomorrow to go over the background vocals on “Ghosts,”’ or something like that. And I take notes during the show.”
“Everybody had a different guitar; your guitar was your identity. At some point, a couple of years later, I remember Bruce calling me and asking me for my permission to switch to a Telecaster.” —Stevie Van Zandt
When I ask Newberry how he defines Van Zandt’s relationship to the guitar, he doesn’t hesitate, snapping back, “It’s all in his head. His playing is encyclopedic, whether it’s Bruce or anything else. He may show up at soundcheck and start playing the Byrds, but it’s not ‘Tambourine Man,’ it’s something obscure like ‘Bells of Rhymney.’ People may not get it, but I’ve known him long enough to know what’s happening. He’s got everything already under his fingers. Everything.”
As such, Van Zandt says he never practices. “The only time I touch a guitar between tours is if I’m writing something or maybe arranging backing vocal harmonies on a production,” he tells me.
Before we say goodbye, I tell Van Zandt about my time stuck in his elevator, and his broad grin signals that I may not be the only one to have suffered that particular purgatory. When I ask him about the 1957 Stratocaster I got to play upon my release, he recalls: “Bruce Springsteen gave me that guitar. I’ve only ever had one guitar stolen in my life, and it was in the very early days of my joining the E Street Band. I only joined temporarily for what I thought would be about seven gigs, and in those two weeks or so, my Stratocaster was stolen. It was a 1957 or 1958. Bruce felt bad about that and replaced that lost guitar with this one. So I’ve had it a long, long time. Once that first one was stolen, I decided I would resist having a personal relationship with any one guitar. But that one being a gift from Bruce makes it special. I will never take it back on the road.”
After 50 years of rock ’n’ roll, if there is one word to sum up Stevie Van Zandt, it may be “restless”—an adjective you sense from reading his autobiography. He gets serious and tells me, “I’m always trying to catch up. The beginning of accomplishing something came quite late to me. I feel like I haven’t done nearly enough. What are we on this planet trying to do?” he asks rhetorically. “We’re trying to realize our potential and maybe leave this place one percent better for the next guy. And some of my drive is based on gratitude, feeling like we are the luckiest guys in the luckiest generation ever. That’s what I’m doing: I want to give something back. I feel an obligation.”
YouTube It
“Rosalita” is a perennial E Street Band showstopper. Here’s a close-up video from Philadelphia’s Citizens Bank Park last summer. Van Zandt’s brief but commanding guitar spotlight shines just past the 4:30 mark.
Sam Shipstone ripping on his G&L Tribute ASAT T-style in butterscotch blond.
Photo by Jamie Macmillan
Yard Act’s Sam Shipstone joins reader Greg DeGood and PG staff members in naming the guitars they love best, stock—with no need to mod.
Question: What is your favorite guitar that comes stock without the need for modding?
Guest Picker - Sam Shipstone
Yard Act’s latest release, from earlier this year.
A: My G&L Tribute ASAT classic barely needed modding, and I’ve used three nearly exclusively for Yard Act now. I love the MFD pickups above all—they really sing when driven.
Obsession: After listening to the atmospheric drone duo Stars of the Lid for years, I finally looked up their live equipment setup. Even a guitarist could miss that their primary sound-making tool is guitar: It sounds so otherworldly and organic. Gonna be delving deeper.
Reader of the Month - Greg DeGood
The Roland G-5 VG Fender Stratocaster in sunburst.
A: I would pick the Roland G-5 VG Fender Stratocaster for its versatility. Its range of electronically programmed alternate-tuning settings and guitar modeling options gives a musician a palette of sounds at the turn of two knobs. The VG Strat would be my first choice of a guitar ready to go “out of the box” without any necessary mods. For acoustic, I would pick the Martin HDC-28E. The standard HD-28 is legendary for its great sound. The HDC-28E has a cutaway for easy access to the upper range and an electronic pickup for live sound or recording. Those extra options just make sense to me for any acoustic guitar.
The now-discontinued Martin HDC-28E.
Obsession: My latest obsession is using a clean boost instead of an overdrive in front of a mildly overdriven 1982 Marshall JCM800 4104. I used to enjoy the extra “hair” added by a Tube Screamer or Boss SD-1, but I missed the clarity. I tried a TC Electronic Spark, and the added gain I needed by hitting the front end of the amp was there without sacrificing clarity. Open chords sound huge and put a grin on my face every time I play.
Director of Advertising - Brett Petrusek
Brett’s 1958 Explorer reissue.
A: My 1958 Explorer reissue in TV White. I’ve been known to mess with every guitar, trying different pickups, pots, etc., just to see where I can take it. It’s like therapy for me. But this guitar is perfectly 100-percent stock. I won’t touch it. If my house was on fire it’s the one I’d grab.
Brett onstage with his band Fuzzrd.
Obsession: Fifty-watt 2204 Marshall JMP combos. There’s something magical about the open-back 2x12 cabs—plus you can (occasionally) still score a combo for a fair price. Easy enough to drop into a head shell, and then you have a couple of options.
Senior Editor - Nick Millevoi
Nick’s Danelectro baritone.
A: Last year, I bought a Danelectro baritone. I’ve played these a bunch over the years, and they’ve always felt consistent, even as the model has changed a bit. I took it to a gig basically straight out of the box, and it was exactly as I’d hoped. With only a little setup since then, I’ve been using it regularly and couldn’t imagine making any mods—it’s perfect! I love the scale of this model, and the lipstick pickups, especially in middle position, have so much character.
The latest Meridian Brothers album.
Obsession: Meridian Brothers have been one of my favorite artists for years. Primarily featuring Eblis Álvarez on record—though with a full ensemble live—the relentlessly creative guitarist/composer/bandleader perfectly balances traditional songwriting and deep body-moving rhythms with experimental, futuristic guitar tones and adventurous production. Every new release is a cause for celebration and their newest, Mi Latinoamérica Sufre, is further proof that Álvarez is among the most fun musical minds on the planet.
Six classic dirt circuits are paired across three pedals with recombinant drive and EQ sections, yielding many unexpected sounds.
The BB and OC circuits both sound excellent in standard mode. Hybrid sounds are intriguing and expansive.
Sometimes requires a fair bit of knob twiddling when moving between drive modes.
$199
Keeley Electronics Blues Disorder
robertkeeley.com
Anyone aware of Robert Keeley’s knack for marrying timeless circuits to contemporary functionality knows the sense of anticipation when he decides to take on another classic. In the case of the pedals reviewed here, however, Keeley didn’t take on a single pedal. Instead, these three stomps from the new 4-in-1 Series each combine two classic circuits and then add the ability to use the clipping and EQ sections from each interchangeably. In many cases, these recombinations lead to untapped potential and unexpected sounds.
As a family, the Blues Disorder, Angry Orange, and Super Rodent (along with the Noble Screamer overdrive) have several features in common. All have drive, level, and tone controls with mini-toggles beneath the first and last of these. The pedals also allow the user’s choice of true bypass or buffered bypass operation, which can be switched on the fly with a two-second press of the footswitch. Each is built around a rugged printed circuit board and the pedals are all made in the U.S.
“The drive and tone mini-toggles mean you can choose the juicy, soft clipping and balanced response of the BB, or the hard clipping and midrange bump of the OC.”
Other basics shared throughout the line include a folded-metal enclosure measuring approximately 5" x 2.5" x 1.75", with jacks on the crown of the enclosure, and a standard center-negative power input for any 9-to-18-volt DC supply. I tested all three with a Fender Stratocaster and a Gibson ES-355, along with a tweed Deluxe-style 1x12 combo and a 65 Amps London head and 2x12 cab.
Blues Disorder Overdrive and Distortion
When Marshall released the BluesBreaker pedal back in 1991, which aimed at capturing the overdrive characteristics of its fabled Bluesbreaker amplifier, did they realize they were unveiling a classic in its own right? Few players thought it sounded much like a cranked mid-’60s JTM45 2x12 combo, but plenty of guitarists—John Mayer among them—dug its ability to slather succulent low-gain overdrive tone on a guitar signal. So, what happens if you combine this with another classic, the Fulltone OCD, and offer switching between the circuits or a hybrid mode? Voilà! The Blues Disorder.
Keeley isn’t the first to rethink these circuits. But his outside-the-box approach might make the pairing of the two more versatile than any rendition that has come before. The drive and tone mini-toggles mean you can choose the juicy, soft-clipping and balanced response of the BB, or the hard-clipping and midrange bump of the OC—and chain or double up on both. On the tone side, the BB position yields a transparent tone stage with simple high-frequency roll-off control, and the OC setting adds an active midrange boost with treble bleed from the knob. The brilliant part is you can mix one set of drive characteristics with the other’s tone stack.
The Blues Disorder quickly proved that the design premise is more than a novelty. The rich, warm overdrive of the BB side worked as an always-on tone sweetener or as a low- to medium-gain bump that can be tuned for blues, indie, or classic rock leads. That versatility is a big part of what made the BluesBreaker legendary in the first place. Set to dual OC, the heavier grind provides a canvas for harder-edged rhythm crunch and more in-your-face soloing.
The Verdict
The basic drive sounds here are arguably worth the price of entry. But the hybrid settings enable exponentially more shades of those original colors, many of which are dramatically different than the classic Marshall or Fulltone. I particularly liked the BB gain setting with the OC tone stage, which yielded rawer, throatier medium-gain OD. It’s important to note that output levels can change with switch changes. That inconvenience aside, I could barely find a bad sound in the Blues Disorder.
Angry Orange Distortion and Fuzz
The subjects of Keeley’s shotgun wedding on this occasion are the Sovtek “Civil War” Big Muff on the fuzz side and a ’78 Boss DS-1 on the distortion end. These two effects occupy very different segments of the drive spectrum. But Keeley points out that, while voiced differently, both the Big Muff and DS-1 employed very similar tilt control tone stacks, making them, in Keeley’s view, ripe for hybridization.
Both circuits rely on diode clipping to help generate distortion, but the MF uses soft-diode clipping where the DS mode switches to more jagged-sounding hard-diode clipping, which lends edgy aggression. The mini-toggle in the tone stage taps a slightly scooped-sounding profile in the MF position, then delivers a midrange push in the DS position. Of course, these stages can be mixed to apply one frequency curve to another style of clipping.
Just a few minutes with the Angry Orange offers a surprising lesson in how close these two iconic distortion tools can come to sounding like each other. Both modes excel at thick retro-metal riffs and lurching doomy power chords in their natural clipping and EQ pairings, and add sizzle and edge to lead lines. And though the tone shift between them is clear when you throw the drive switch from DS to MF, they transition quite seamlessly.
The Verdict
Switching to DS for drive and MF for tone tastefully broadens the frequency range of that signature Boss distortion, yielding thicker lows and more jagged highs. The flip side of that coin—the MF drive with DS tone—struck me as less versatile, yielding a very boxy, hollowed-out frequency range. Still, players that like to tinker with filtered fuzz sounds might find many tones to use here, and on the whole there’s a lot to love and explore in this classic fuzz-distortion fusion.
Super Rodent Overdrive and Distortion
Skeptics that view overdrives and distortions as variations on a few basic design riffs might look at the Super Rodent and ask, “Didn’t we already visit this flavor combo in the Blues Disorder?” We would counter that the Super Rodent proves there are many dirt circuits out there in the deep blue sea. And Keeley’s pairing of these unexpected bedfellows underscores that notion, delivering two more variations of hard and slightly less-hard filth via the mix-and-match tone and drive formula. The inspirations this time out are the Pro Co RAT Distortion and Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive, two very different gain pedals that combine here surprisingly well.
Though the basic design is consistent with other pedals in the 4-in-1 series, the combination of circuits here results in four very different and distinct voices, compared to those that we’ve heard so far. The RAT-style RT position of the drive switch accesses the heavier, more aggressive hard-clipping distortion in the pedal, while the SD setting yields a more tube-like, soft-clipping overdrive. Here, the tone switch changes things up significantly—from a basic, easily managed treble roll-off in the RT position to an active low-pass filter that provides rangier low and high end in SD mode.
To my ear, the Super Rodent proved the most successful of the hybridization efforts among the 4-in-1 pedals reviewed here. That observation is not meant to detract from the cool sounds the others achieve, but simply point out how well the Super Rodent expands the potential of these two circuits. Robert Keeley obviously knows his overdrive onions so it’s no surprise that the renditions of the classic RAT and SD-1 are so accurately achieved in their natural drive and tone switches. Flip the drive and tone settings against type in either direction, though, and the sonics expand dramatically.
The Verdict
Settling in quickly to the easy, juicy tone-thickening of the SD drive setting, I found myself totally seduced by this early Japanese overdrive circuit with the unique RAT tone stack grafted on. There’s a little more harmonic swirl in the midrange and a pillowy compression that makes things sound bigger and thicker overall, if a little less punchy. The result? A new overdrive classic that, to my knowledge, never existed. Conversely, mating the RT drive to the SD tone adds aggression, muscle, and bark to the fabled Pro Co sound. In every combination it’s great stuff!