Arielle’s No. 1 is a guitar she personally built from scratch with her friend Patrick Yates in 2007. She has dubbed this one “Two Tone” because the two knobs are individual tone controls. The guitar is loaded with Burns Brian May Tri-Sonic pickups and strung with Ernie Ball .009–.042 strings. Arielle recently announced a partnership with Brian May and BMG guitars to release a signature model in 2020.
Next up is Arielle’s “Arrow,” a tobacco burst version of Two Tone built by Brian Nutter of Nutter guitars. It also features Burns Brian May Tri-Sonic pickups.
For Strat tones Arielle goes with “Rune,” a prototype of the Fender Eric Johnson Thinline model. The f-hole is in a slightly different place than the final production model.
When Arielle needs a proper semi-hollow model, she reaches for this stock 2009 Gibson ES-339.
Arielle’s acoustic is this Martin D-28 strung with Ernie Ball Earthwood 80/20 .011–.052 strings.
Arielle’s amp setup is a two-headed monster. She uses a Blankenship Fat Boy with Sour Cream and a Divided by 13 RSA 31.
Arielle runs separate pedalboards for her acoustic and electric rigs. Both were built by Dave Philips at L.A. Sound Design. Her acoustic board features a custom interface, L.R. Baggs Session DI, Electro-Harmonix MEL9, Neo Instruments Mini Vent II, TC Electronic Flashback, and a TC Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb (not pictured). The interface sets up a wet/dry/wet feed to FOH. Arielle can turn the wet pedals on or off with the interface and the L.R. Baggs DI sends a dry signal to FOH. A Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2 supplies the juice.
On Arielle’s electric board she runs two chains, one for clean tones and the other for lead. The clean chain starts with a Dunlop Cry Baby wah, a Harman Compressor, a TC Electronic Stereo Chorus+ Pitch Modulator + Flanger, and a Catalinbread Echorec. For her lead tones it splits after the wah and heads to a Crispy Cream Treble Booster, an Analog Man Beano Boost, a Fulltone OCD, a J. Rockett Animal, an MXR Smart Gate, a Boss volume pedal, and a TC Electronic Flashback Delay. The two chains share the volume and wah. A Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 Plus 2 and a Pedal Power ISO 5 supplies the juice.
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NS Micro Clip-Free Tuner:https://www.daddario.com/ClipFreeTunerRR
thrift store Casio keyboard.
The smaller, top-most PCB is home to the chip that drives the digital processing. Not surprisingly, it’s a formidable looking beast that looks capable of powering a laptop. The same PCB is home to an input gain select switch that can help you better mate the Mini Vent to hot pickups or keyboards.
The control set is much simpler than the five-knob array on the full-size Ventilator. In fact, there are no knobs at all—just a bypass switch and one for moving between slow and fast rotary speeds. A small button on top of the unit enables switching between programmable presets.
Ratings
Pros:
Startlingly convincing rotary speaker simulations. User friendly. Factory default settings are excellent. Gain scheme can be reprogrammed to accommodate hotter or quieter instruments. Built like a rock.
Cons:
Hard to justify the cost for occasional use.
Tones:
Ease of Use:
Build/Design:
Value:
Street:
$349
Neo Instruments Mini Vent
neo-instruments.de
Kandy-Koated Karamel Swirl If you’ve struggled with trying to approximate rotary speakers through more cost-effective means like phasers, vibrato pedals, and Uni-Vibe-style pedals, the Mini Vent will probably mark an end to most of your frustrations. It’s an incredibly convincing and authentic simulation. The simulation of speaker acceleration and deceleration when you switch from slow settings to fast is excellent. It’s also exceedingly responsive to dynamics, whether it comes from your picking technique or a fuzz placed before the Mini Vent (warning: The latter setup is extremely intoxicating and addictive).
On tape (or a digital equivalent) it’s all but indistinguishable from the real thing—especially in an ensemble. And onstage it only suffers at close proximity—and only then because you won’t hear the mechanical whirring of the horns and realize the modulation is coming from your guitar amplifier rather than a Leslie at the side of the stage. Another testament to the richness of the Mini Vent is how is can make a cheap amp sound, well, expensive. My Vox Pathfinder 15 sounded rich, huge, and a whole lot like a real Leslie on a four-track demo. The Mini Vent even lent grandeur to the voice of a thrift store Casio keyboard I used for the same recording.
The Verdict Folks will undoubtedly knock the cost of a pedal that, on the surface, looks like a one-trick pony. But if you love the sound of a rotary speaker and have already spent hundreds of dollars trying to fake it with other modulation devices, the 349 bucks won’t seem like much—especially when you fool most of your friends with a recorded sample. And as well as the Mini Vent is put together, we guess it’s an investment that will pay itself back though longevity too.
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