![Rig Rundown: Yvette Young [2023]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/rig-rundown-yvette-young-2023.jpg?id=34150999&width=1245&height=700&quality=85&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
Since we last saw Yvette Young in 2019, the guitar-playing musical illustrator has been challenged, and proven courageous.
“I went from a situation where I was afraid of one of my bandmates, and did what I needed to do to free myself from what I felt to be an emotionally, and thus creatively draining, situation,” Young revealed to PG earlier this year. She parted ways with Covet’s members during the recording sessions for the new album, Catharsis, and had the bass parts re-done by noted touring and session bassist Jon Button.
Through the writing and recording process she found personal purification. “I feel like, on Catharsis, some of the songs are a bit darker and it was definitely me having an outlet for some stuff that was painful, but a lot of it is uplifting and very happy and dance-y,” Young said. “Music is transformative. If you’re ever feeling in a bad mood, if you write music that sounds really happy, it can uplift you. Writing music that sounds like how you wish you felt can be really helpful sometimes.”
And while processing her feelings through the guitar, she became reinvigorated with the instrument and rediscovered its inherent joy.
“I really have to be my own fortress and I have to really stay in tune with what excites me,” admitted Young. “The direction I go in becomes really clear when I focus on what gives me goosebumps when I’m playing, what makes me jump up and down ’cause I’m so excited about it.”
Her charismatic, vivid guitar stories excite us, so we wanted to get the scoop on her ever-changing tools and palette. Weeks after releasing Catharsis, Yvette Young and her Covet bandmates headlined Nashville’s Brooklyn Bowl. She invited PG’s Chris Kies onstage for a conversation covering her Ibanez YY10 signature models (and their potential upcoming changes), her dream pedal, and the key switches (and the alternative tones they produce) on her stomp station since the last Rundown.
Brought to you by the D’Addario Trigger Capo.
Signature Sparkle
During this headlining run, Young is traveling only with a pair of her signature Ibanez Prestige Series YY10 models with three Strat-style single-coil pickups. She has another Ibanez sig, the YY20, that is in a two-pickup, T-style configuration, but she notes in the Rundown that she prefers how the YY10 reacts with overdriven tones through her pedals and AC30. For Catharsis, she locked into F–A–C–G–C–E and wanted this set to feature fewer tuning moments and a more seamless musical narrative. Both touring YY10s have alder bodies with roasted maple necks, but “Creamsicle” has a rosewood fretboard and standard Seymour Duncan SSL52 Five-Two Strat pickups.
A fun fact from our 2023 PG interview with Yvette: These signature guitars are tuned (low to high) F–A–C–G–B–E when they are shipped. “I wanted to just kind of challenge people to try it,” she said. “I’ve been talking to a bunch of students and they’re like, ‘I never tried open tunings because I’ve always been scared of tuning it to something different.’ I was like, ‘Well what if it just came that way?’”
Green Machine
A roasted maple neck gives “Flubber” a different vibe, and its Wilkinson single-coils have sent Young down an experimental phase; she hints at P-90s potentially showing up in a future YY model. She says that the Wilkinsons are more “pristine and clear” in comparison to the Five-Twos that break up and get gritty in a pleasing way. This sparkly 6-string is reserved for tunings she drops down to D. Both guitars take D'Addario NYXLs (.011–.056).
Chime Time
Yvette has plugged into the same high input of the top boost channel of this Vox AC30 for years. Her settings reveal that she still uses the amp’s reverb even though there are two reverb pedals on her board, though Young does dial out all the amp’s trem.
Launchpad
Young has a lot of room to soar in an instrumental trio, so she travels with a plush pedal playground. Staples still being stomped on from the 2019 Rundown include a couple EarthQuaker Devices—The Warden and Avalanche Run—a MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe, an Electronic Audio Experiments Longsword, a Caroline Guitar Company Somersault, and a Meris Mercury7. For this tour, she’s welcomed some new noisemakers aboard, including a Universal Audio Galaxy ’74 Tape Echo & Reverb, a Hologram Electronics Microcosm, a Walrus Audio Julianna, a Beetronics Fatbee, a pair of Boss boxes—a DD-3 Digital Delay and OC-5 Octave—a double dose of DigiTech—Whammy Ricochet and FreqOut—a ZVEX Mastotron, and a Ground Control Audio Noodles. A D’Addario Chromatic Pedal Tuner keeps her YY10s in check.
Fig. A
Oh, how I wish that was the only means of making a ground loop! Tennyson certainly didn't have ground loops in mind when writing that nature was red in tooth and claw, but as someone who has built guitar rigs for around 25 years, it is hard to shake the idea that they serve a merciless and maniacal natural force that actively resists the pristine and well-ordered world of quiet, toneful pedalboards and rack systems.
These loops are made by the way we wire our stompboxes and the environment around them. The ones in this month's ground loop fest may be a bit more identifiable than the loops in the multi-amp scenario. In that case, part of the loop is hidden in your venue's installed power cabling. This time, we're going to discuss loops that exist wholly and entirely in your pedalboard itself.
"Tennyson certainly didn't have ground loops in mind when writing that nature was red in tooth and claw."
The first ground loop we'll discuss is a potential loop created by using daisy-chain power cables, where one power supply feeds multiple pedals. In this setup, you can make a loop via the power cables connecting two pedals and the audio cables connecting them. There is a clear ground path in Fig. A that goes from stompbox to stompbox via the audio cables. If that were the only path, there would be little chance for a loop to be formed. But if you add in the ground path made by the power cables, you can now see a circuitous path that connects the first and last pedal through the audio cables and then doubles back through the power daisy chain. This circle of wire is our loop.
A second loop type is shown in Fig. B. Most loop switchers tie the ground connections of the send and return jacks together, and when the loop switcher is connected to a stompbox, the audio cables make a ring of ground conductors. So each loop switcher loop can actually make a ground loop. Yay!
There are countless loop switcher-equipped boards out in the world. Why don't all of them hum? Ground loops can generate hum when they are driven by an outside electromagnetic field. (Bill Whitlock's Audio Engineering Society treatise "Ground Loops: The Rest of the Story" gives great theoretical and experimental explanation of EMF—electromotive force—induced ground loops.) When the ground looped cable encircles an EMF field, that field can develop a current in the wire that can translate into audible hum in your rig. So if your power/audio cable loop or your loop switcher loop wraps around a power supply transformer or a high-current, noisy power cable at a venue or in your home, you may get an induced hum that you can hear in your amplifier's output.
Fig B.
So, what can be done? Fig. A shows how daisy-chained power can make a giant ground loop susceptible to picking up stray EMF. Using isolated power for every pedal will break this loop and keep it from generating noise. If you must share power amongst pedals on your board, make sure they are next to one another in your signal chain so that the loop size (and associated hum) is minimized.
For Fig. B, the cables to and from the pedal can be as short as possible and run as close to one another as possible. This too will decrease the area encircled by the loop and commensurately minimize the induced current. Special care should be taken to make sure looping cables do not surround or run near power supplies or wall warts. The type of power supply can make a difference as well, since those from Truetone or Strymon switch at higher frequencies that are less likely to be induced in the first place, and less likely to be heard if they are.
While this is hardly a 100 percent complete picture of the cruel world of ground loops, you hopefully are armed with enough knowledge to have insight into exactly what could be causing those wayward noises and buzzes in your rig and how to clear them out to make way for a much more gratifying set of buzzes and noise.