Nashville luthier and repair tech Dave Johnson from Scale Model Guitars leads you through a simple process to improve your guitar's playability by showing the steps to execute a neck adjustment, dial in your string action at the bridge, improve your nut slots, and lock down stable intonation.
Words of wisdom from the legendary engineer, proprietor of Chicago’s Electrical Audio, World Series of Poker champion, and, in the band Shellac, the compass for brutal guitar aesthetics.
“All day every day, we’re grinding it out,” says engineer Steve Albini of his team at Electrical Audio, the Chicago studio he built and has run since 1997. “We’re constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
While it might be tempting to geek out and ask Albini about all the iconic albums that he’s recorded with the utmost finesse—and surely, there would be value in rapping about recording some of the biggest names in guitar music—that’s all been done.
What’s much more interesting is the work that goes on every single day at the studio. So, when he tells me, “My colleagues at Electrical Audio and I are constantly having to interrogate our methods and validate the things that we’re doing and come up with arguments for why we should do things this way or that,” that’s the stuff I want to know about. If you want to learn about how he recorded In Utero, go listen to Conan’s podcast. (Albini was a guest, along with Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, on the October 23, 2023 episode of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, and it’s a thorough discussion that is totally worth checking out.)
The fact is, Albini has recorded countless records. I’m sure he has a tally in his books somewhere, but it would be exceedingly difficult to know for sure how many albums he’s engineered. That’s because, as extensive as his credits are in various record-collecting resources, he’s also impressively accessible as a for-hire engineer. All levels of artists—from superstars to harder-to-track, mostly unknown road dogs—have carved out their time with him. Plus, he’s been at it since he started renting four-track demo packages on the weekends during his high school years in Missoula, Montana.
The body of engineering work that Albini has amassed is monumental not just in size, but also in musical scope, which extends further than from Sunn O))) to Magnolia Electric Company, Cheap Trick to Neurosis, or Low to The Thing. And with those artists, he often helps capture a landmark album, or at least the record that fans refer to as “the one they recorded with Albini.”
Aside from his day job, there’s also his guitar playing. Albini serves as the compass for cutting, brutal tone in the punk and underground rock scenes. Since his early days in the hard-hitting Big Black through his continuing work alongside bassist Bob Weston and drummer Todd Trainer in the band Shellac—whose soon-to-be six (no info yet, but a new one is confirmed to be on the way) full-length albums and some other recorded odds and ends are maybe the purest documents of his overall sonic aesthetic—he’s used a fairly concise rig of well-suited esoteric gear to shape his incisive, metallic, and esoterically personal guitar sound in the creation of angular riffage and gnarly feedback.
Albini’s sonic mastery seems to know no bounds: He’s probably the most-cited proponent of analog recording. His live-band-in-a-room sound is unparalleled. And his drum sounds are peerless. But, while it’s not as if he never talks about guitar, it’s rare to see him dive deep on his guitar-specific processes.
So, we called up Electrical Audio and had a chat about his methods on recording guitars and how they’ve evolved, his take on modern guitar culture, and the definitive details of his sound.
In addition to his gear collection, Albini is also a good-bandname-T-shirt collector. (If this isn’t proof enough, go look up a photo from when he won his first gold bracelet in the World Series of Poker.)
Photo by Daniel Bergeron
When you’re going to record a guitarist, what’s your process of deciding how you’re going to choose a microphone, and how you’re going to mic their amp or cabinet?
Steve Albini: You have a conversation—what kind of sound are they shooting for? Who are some guitarists whose sound would be appropriate for their music? That sort of thing. And sometimes that’ll give you a clue about how to get started.
If they like a thick, bass-y, chewy, distorted sound, you want to make sure you’re using mics that capture that low-frequency stuff with good definition and not get muddy or soft. If the kind of guitar sound they’re shooting for is very bright and very crisp and dry, you’ll want to make sure to avoid using mics that can have some resonance or bloom to them that will soften that sort of precision.
I think it’s a bad idea to have a standard method where when whatever guitarist walks in you stick an SM57 on it and call it good. A lot of people do that as a default just because it resolves the issue quickly, and they can get on with their day and do more fancy stuff. But I think it’s absolutely critical to pair the microphone with the actual sound that’s coming out of the amp.
After having a conversation with the guitar player, understanding what their aesthetic is, I have them set up their gear and just play a bit, to get a feel what their playing style is like. Are they using a lot of feedback and sustain or are they hopping on a bunch of different pedals all the time? Is the sound derived from their playing style or from particular layering of pedals? Getting intimate with the exact specifics of the guitar style and sound and aesthetic guides you on what microphones to use and physically where to put them.
The main thing is not to have a preconceived notion about what mics are good for guitar. I’ve used everything from vocal-caliber condenser microphones to quite limited electret microphones to high-quality ribbon microphones to pawnshop junk microphones—I’ve used absolutely everything you can imagine on a guitar amp, and that selection is always based on the aesthetic of the person playing and then the actual sound that’s coming out of the cabinet. In your mind, you might have an idealized notion of what a heavy guitar sounds like or what a clean guitar sounds like, but until you get down on all fours and listen to the sound coming out of the speakers, you don’t really know what you’re dealing with.
“When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.”
How do you interpret what you’re hearing then?
Albini: When you’re down on all fours listening, you need to be forming a mental image of what that sound is like. Are there spikes and dips in the frequency response? Is there a lot of granular treble detail? Is it a really smooth sound? Does it have a sort of billowing quality, like a trombone-like fundamental, or is it really dry and raspy? Even using wine-tasting words like that, it helps you form an internal image of what that guitar is supposed to sound like when you hear it on playback, and from your experience with your mic collection, you’ll know what microphones are best suited to sounds like that, or you’ll know where to start anyway.
When you listen to the speaker when the guitar player is playing, the sound that’s coming off—you should consider that the goal. What you’re trying to do is you’re trying to make that sound happen in people’s homes.
Steve Albini's Gear
Hands on faders, Albini and his team at Electrical Audio are “constantly in session, constantly under fire.”
Photo by Kevin Tiongson
Guitars
- Travis Bean TB500
Amps
- Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp
- Fender Bassman
- Custom homemade speaker enclosure based on Electro-Voice TL Series plans with 10" and 12" Celestion Greenbacks
Effects
- Interfax Harmonic Percolator
- MXR Smartgate
Strings and Picks
- Ice picks with the points cut off
- D’Addario XLs (.012–.016–.020w–.028–.038–.048)
Once you’ve chosen a mic, what’s next in the decision-making process?
Albini: One thing that I do that I think is probably distinctly different from what a lot of other engineers do, I tend to have whatever microphone I’m using on the guitar in the middle of the speaker cone, and I don’t generally use microphones pressed up close to the grille cloth right next to the speaker. I tend to use microphones at a working distance of between eight and 14 inches from the cabinet.
A lot of engineers made their bones as live engineers, where they’re trying to get isolation on stage, so they have the mics as close as possible to the speaker cabinet, and that practice translated into the studio. I experimented with that technique because I saw everybody else doing it, but I just never got good results with it. It always sounded slightly tweaked and muffled and weird. I found that when I put the microphone dead center on the speaker, then the sound hitting the microphone sounded more like what I heard when I was down on all fours listening to the speaker myself.
Working distance has a big effect on the sound quality. If the microphone is choked up tight on the speaker, you get a lot more low-frequency energy. You get a lot more muscular pumping low end from the proximity effect of the microphone, and, especially with ribbon microphones that are bi-directional and have a fairly exaggerated proximity effect, you can really use that to tune the response of the microphone. So, I say that I use a working distance of between eight and 14 inches. If I’m in the closer part of that range, six to eight inches from the speaker, there’s going to be a lot more of the sub low end emphasized in a bi-directional ribbon microphone, and that can be great to add weight and heaviness to a heavy guitar.
Then, if the microphone is backed off more like 12 to 14 inches, then you get much more of an overall picture of the sound of the cabinet, where it’s not emphasizing any particular region, for lack of a better word. It’s a flatter representation of the sound coming off the speaker. Being able to tune the behavior of the microphone by moving the microphone in and out just by a matter of inches can make a noticeable difference in the sound quality.
At this point in your career, do you know what mic to use as soon as you listen to someone’s playing?
Albini: It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius. That’s really satisfying. That means the first 30 years of your career weren’t wasted, but it doesn’t happen often.
Often, you have to move the microphone, or sometimes you have to swap the microphone out completely, like this microphone just can’t handle that much high end, it sounds too raspy, it’s just too midrange forward, it starts to sound nasal and different parts of the playing vocabulary can sound different as well. Sometimes, you’ll have a setup that sounds amazing when the guitarist is just playing rhythm stuff, but then when they go up the strip and start showing off, it can be too piercing or too woolly sounding, so it’s often a good idea to have a complement microphone.
“It’s really rare for me to listen to a speaker, listen to somebody playing guitar, grab a microphone, put it up, and have it be right in the first instance. When that does happen sometimes, you feel like a fucking genius.”
You’ll have a couple of microphones in the same position, one that is maybe a brighter, drier sound and one that’s maybe a fatter, darker sound. And that way you can either balance those microphones against each other for a composite sound or use them in stereo to synthesize a stereo image. Or when the lead kicks in, you can nudge the brighter microphone for a little bit more bite and attack.
I think having an ambient character available on the recording often helps with the sense of realism. If you’re just using a single guitar, for example, then having an ambient microphone that you can use to create a stereo image helps add to the sensation of hearing the sound in a room, even if it’s a very dry room. Having close mics on the amp and then also having a distant mic out in the room eight or 10 feet away gives you a little bit of air on that secondary mic, which you can then use to create a stereo image to help localize the guitar in the stereo image of the whole thing.
All of those little things, if you don’t have it set up so you have those kinds of options available, then you can’t make those choices down the road. I have been in sessions where some engineers have an array of microphones around a speaker cabinet. They’ll have eight or 10 microphones in a sort of swarm around a speaker cabinet. And that, to me, just speaks of really poor decision making. If you’re recording eight or 10 microphones at once and with the idea that you’ll sort it all out later, that just puts all your critical decisions off until the last minute and means that you’re going to make those decisions poorly. I think it’s much, much better to listen to it on the first playback and decide if you are on the right track or not. And if you’re not, just stop and fix it. Don’t just carry on with the plan to deal with it later, because when you get to later, you just have way too much shit to deal with.
Onstage with Shellac, Albini wields “Old Ironsides,” his Travis Bean TB500. Behind the guitarist lurks his customized amp head, which contains a Tapco/Intersound IVP Preamp and Fender Bassman, and his homemade speaker cabs.
Photo by Tim Bugbee
It’s like it creates option anxiety, and at that point, you’re just making the mix all that much longer.
Albini: Yeah, it’s not even the amount of effort that it takes. I don’t think it’s possible to make 10,000 critical decisions simultaneously and have them all be as valid as if you were to make those decisions one at a time as they came up with all your attention and full consideration. So, while you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.
I also feel like over the course of working on a record, you get acclimated to the sound that you’re listening to, and then that becomes the basis on which you make other decisions. If you pull the plug on that by changing the sound around at the last minute, then all of those predicate decisions that were made based on that original place keeper have somewhat been invalidated. And I think that’s a dangerous thing as well.
In one of the videos on the Electrical Audio YouTube page, you talk about developing your practices through an iterative process of trial and error. Is experimentation still a part of your process?
Albini: I actively question myself and verify my preconceptions or challenge my preconceptions. One nice way to do that in a kind of a programmatic way is something I stole from Bob Weston, the bass player in the band Shellac that I’m in. He’s also a fine recording engineer and mastering engineer. I read an interview with him maybe 15 years ago where he said that on every session he does, he tries to do just one thing that he’s never done before. It might be the choice of microphone or positioning a microphone or a processing choice or a routing, just something, and that seemed brilliant to me. Just a very simple way to make sure that you’re always expanding your repertoire and always expanding your knowledge base. You don’t get set in your habits. And so, I stole that, and I do that to this day.
“While you’re setting up the guitar, figure out which microphones you want to use and commit to them, and once you’ve committed to them, then that decision is made, and you can just get on with your day and you don’t ever need to re-litigate those decisions.”
Also, microphones come in over the transom. There are microphones being designed and invented every day, and we get a chance to hear a lot of those either as trial or because people want our opinions on them. They’ll send them to us to put them in use for a while and play around with them. So, I get to play around with stuff that I’ve never heard before pretty regularly, and I like to try microphones I’ve never heard before.
This has proven enormously valuable over the course of the last 15 or 20 years. My routine behaviors have changed quite a bit as a result of these little, tiny experiments that I’ve done one at a time.
With Shellac bandmates Todd Trainer (drums) and Bob Weston (bass) in view, the most legendary Harmonic Percolator is at Steve’s feet, next to his MXR Smart Gate. If you’re wondering, Albini uses a waist strap for his guitar.
Photo by Jordi Vidal
I would imagine that, making as many records as you do, that’s like constant revision.
Albini: I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.
I did an album with the group Sunn O))). Their music is really slow-moving, impossibly heavy riffs, but the sound is really minimal. It’s just two guitars most of the time. In the studio, they added a few guests. One of is Hildur Guðnadóttir; she plays the cello.
There’s an instrument that was invented for her by a friend of hers called the halldorophone. It’s an electric cello that has built into it an amplifier and loudspeaker, so it’s a self-resonating, self-feeding-back, infinite-sustain cello. It’s a super bizarre thing, but she’s an expert. There’s one in the world and I’m staring at it and I have to figure out how to record it.
The fact that I am confronted with these new and different things all the time means that my vocabulary and my skillset and my facilities are constantly being tested and improved. And that’s one of the great joys, for me anyway, of doing what I do for a living, that I do get to do these freakish things once in a while.
You use a small pedal setup as a player, but you’re engaging with different kinds of players all the time. What do you think about modern pedal technology?
Albini: The stage that we are at now, where every player in every band has a pedalboard and have this sort of a curated collection of sounds that they come up with, I actually got a preview of that in the late ’80s. The first time I went to Japan, most guitarists that I worked with had a pedalboard with a half a dozen pedals on it, and that’s how they would craft their sound. They could bring that anywhere and plug it into any amp and they’d be happy.
Something very similar is happening now in the U.S. where a lot of people are doing demo recording at home through modeling amps or through interfaces, and rather than using an amplifier for its inherent qualities, they’re kind of defeating the amplifier by using pedals as the principal source of their sound. It’s a trend. I don’t really have an opinion about it.
“I promise you, the moment you get complacent about how you do things, someone will show up with a rig that’s freakish in a way you’ve never encountered before.”
There are some people who are more adept at it than others, but it’s absolutely the case that most players in most bands now have multiple pedals that they’re using, and the songs are arranged in a way where you use this combination for this part and this combination for this part. And nothing about it seems bad to me. It’s a little more cumbersome, especially when you’re in the studio and you’re trying to track down problems. But when you see somebody who’s really put some thought and attention into it and they’re really using the pedals in an expressive way….
I did a session with Reba Myers from Code Orange. She has this really expansive pedal setup where she’s got a main soundboard where the general tone for a given song comes from, and then she’s got a kind of an expression board, which is just all the crazy shit, and she’s constantly going back and forth. She’s an example of someone who’s put a lot of thought and attention into the specifics of the pedalboard and is using it as a creative tool. I’ve seen other people where it’s kind of pro forma—like, Kiss wore funny outfits on stage, and so for a while a lot of bands felt obliged to wear funny outfits on stage.
I know some old school guys are like, ‘Plug the guitar straight into the amp, and if you can’t get it done with that, you’re not a real musician,’ or whatever. That’s horse shit. That’s just boomer shit. I’m not into that at all.
How Steve Albini Gets His Guitar Sound
How did your personal guitar sound develop over the years?
Albini: When I was in Big Black, that band was predicated on the do-it-cheap, do-it-quick, take-no-prisoners approach. That was very much the cornerstone of the behavior in the punk rock scene. Don’t try to get it perfect, just get it. So, everything about that band was done sort of extemporaneously. I made the first Big Black record on my own in my apartment, so I needed an amplifier that I could use for either guitar or bass. I stumbled onto this bizarre preamp called the Tapco/Intersound IVP. It had a clean channel and a distorted channel. I didn’t find much use for the clean channel, but the distorted channel sounded great on either bass or guitar—or great toward my aesthetic at the moment, which was a pretty brutal one.
When Shellac started, I was looking for a fatter, fuller sound than the scrabble-scratchy sound I had with Big Black. I eventually gravitated toward the Fender Bassman as the perfect tube amp for me. But when I would play just the Bassman, I missed a little bit of the bite and the sizzle from the old transistor days. So, I ended up making a hybrid setup with the Tapco IVP preamp, typically recorded direct. And then on stage, I’ll have a monitor cabinet for it that has a horn in it, so it’s like a full-range speaker, and the Fender Bassman going into a fairly bass-y cabinet, typically a 4x12 when we’re on tour in Europe and we’re using backline.
The cabinets that Bob and I made for our amps—I have two Celestion greenbacks in that, a 10" and a 12"—are based on the TL series cabinet that are the published plans that Electro-Voice made available for using their speakers in an enclosure. If you just built a cabinet along those published plans, you would end up with exactly what Bob and I use for our speaker setups.
When you record yourself for a Shellac album, do you always use the same gear?
Albini: No, it has been different on literally every session. I often use the amp that I use on stage. Often, I do not. Often, I’ll use some other transistor amp and some other tube amp as the two complement signals. It’s essentially always two amplifiers, a transistor amp and a tube amp. The transistor amp is typically being recorded direct, and the tube amp is always recorded acoustically through a speaker cabinet with microphones and stuff.
But I have used an Orange OR80. There’s an amp that was made by a company called Sam Amp, and I believe there are very few of them in the world, but I ended up with one of them, and I’ve used the Sam Amp. I’ve used the Traynor YBA-3, Traynor YBA-1, a Marshall JTM-45. I’ve used a lot of different amplifiers for the studio recordings.
The Travis Bean that I use is such an indestructible sound. It’s weird that I’m so fussy about my amp because I’ve demonstrated myself that it kind of doesn’t matter what amp I play through, I can always get something that I like out of it.
We did a tour of Japan very early in the band’s tenure, right after we started. In Japan, it’s normal practice for the venue to have a backline. Every night it was a different, quite crappy by our standards, amplifier on stage. One night, it was a Roland Jazz Chorus. I used a Guyatone amplifier several times, and other Japanese brand names that I was unfamiliar with. Every night sounded fine. As specific as I am about what I like and don’t like, I have sort of taught myself that it’s not that important and that I can zero in on what I like and don’t like about even an imperfect setup.
For pedals, do you use anything other than the Harmonic Percolator, which you’re most known for using?
Albini: I’ve used a noise gate since I first started playing on stage. For many, many years it was just one of the original old-school MXR noise gates. They’ve all crapped out and been repaired and crapped out again many times. There’s an updated version of that MXR called the Smart Gate. I switched over to that. It’s set so that I can just touch the guitar and it opens up, but if I’m not actively playing it, it doesn’t open.
The output of the noise gate goes into the fuzz tone. And the fuzz tone has been a Harmonic Percolator [made by Interfax] since, I want to say, 1986. My friend Jay Tiller from Milwaukee worked at a head shop, record shop, and pawn shop combo in Milwaukee called Record Head. When I was there one time, he said, ‘We have this cool fuzz tone this guy made here. You should try it out.’ And I loved it. So, I bought one from him, and then over the years, I’ve bought a couple more when he stumbled across them at record swap or whatever, or at guitar fairs or whatever, he’s picked them up and I got ’em from him.
I’ve referred to the Percolator as a labor-saving device, because as soon as you hit the switch, the guitar just starts playing. I don’t even need to tell it what notes or anything. It just goes, and that’s my favorite thing about the Percolator, how it’s completely unhinged using it for feedback or whatever. It will choose little melodies that it wants to play, and it’ll just whistle them for you. But you kind of need to be physically moving. I’ve noticed that if you stand in one spot, it just squeals. But if you’re moving around, if the distance between you and your amplifier changes, then the fundamental frequency changes from the physical distance, and you get these really great psychedelic melodies that it creates.
Have you played any of the Percolator clones?
Albini: They all sound very slightly different, but they’re all basically the same. Chuck Collins made a complete, meticulous resurrection of the Harmonic Percolator [through his company, Theremaniacs] a few years ago—those are absolutely perfect. They respond exactly the same way. They sound the same. Almost all the others that I have seen—people send them to me because they feel like I should pass my hands over their Percolator or whatever, I’ve had maybe six or eight others—I can’t use any of ’em. They all behave differently somehow.
I think one of the perversions of my setup is that coming out of the noise gate, the signal into the Percolator is buffered, so it sounds different if you just plug your guitar straight into it, and I never do that.
Switching picks is the fastest and easiest way to switch up your tone and attack.
Greetings, tone hounds! It can be all too easy to get lured into purchasing a new pedal, new pickups, or a new amp, while potentially overlooking the quickest (and cheapest) piece of gear we can experiment with. You guessed it: the pick! A different pick can significantly affect both tone and feel, which is why I keep an assortment on hand when working in the studio. This month, I’d like to talk about some of my favorite picks and what I like to use them for.
My main squeeze. If I had to pick just one (no pun intended), it would be the teardrop-shaped Dunlop Ultex .73 Standard. It’s been my pick of choice for over 10 years now. The Ultex material is incredibly durable, and I find I can often play an entire gig on just one pick (if I don’t drop it). The tone and attack provide good note clarity, and I find this pick works well for everything: acoustic, electric, lead, or rhythm. I don’t mind switching picks for specific things while in the studio, but live I don’t want to be bothered with that, so the Ultex is my go-to “all-’rounder.”
Specific picks for specific tasks. For electric guitar, especially for burning solos, it’s fun to experiment with smaller, thicker, and/or pointier alternatives. The Dunlop Jazz III has long been the pick of choice for Eric Johnson, who actually has his own signature version now. This type of pick can feel tiny at first, but the sharp-yet-smooth tip glides across strings with little resistance, which facilitates fast runs. At the same time, the Jazz III makes for a strong, clear attack that feels and sounds markedly different than a traditional teardrop shaped pick. In a nutshell, this style of pick can give you improved clarity, articulation, and speed for single-note runs. Because of their size, thickness, and shape, however, I do find them more difficult to use for funky rhythms or aggressive-rock rhythm-guitar parts. The Jazz III is also available in a signature John Petrucci version that’s made from Ultex. Other notable users include Tosin Abasi, Kirk Hammett, and Joe Bonamassa. Seeing a pattern? The players using these picks are known for their blistering single-note lead techniques.
Paul Gilbert’s signature pick from Ibanez is somewhere between a Jazz III and a traditional teardrop pick shape, and is another favorite of mine when I’m tracking solos in the studio. Once again, thanks to the sharp point, there is a clarity that is markedly different when using these picks. Because they are slightly bigger than a Jazz III, they also work well for rhythm guitar. They can be tough to find in the U.S., so I buy up a ton of them whenever I travel to Japan.
Traditional celluloid-style picks in a variety of thicknesses are great to have in the studio. I find they wear quite quickly, and I don’t like the feel when they get rough edges, but they do have a unique feel and tone that just works for some things—especially when cutting rhythm-guitar parts.
Dunlop’s Tortex picks are another favorite of many because of their tone and durability, as well as their smooth yet easy-to-grip texture. Electric guitarists who use them include Billie Joe Armstrong, Slash, and Jerry Cantrell. Once again, there’s a pattern here. Players using Tortex picks tend to play a mixture of rhythm-guitar parts with some lead work thrown in as well.
Nylon picks, on the other hand, have a distinctly different feel and sound, which is generally quite warm. They are very durable, too. The black 1 mm Dunlop Nylon pick was my all-around choice for many years before I moved to the Ultex.
Acoustic guitar. Nylon picks are also a terrific choice for acoustics, and I really love the sound of thin to medium nylon picks for strummed or arpeggiated parts. The nylon material seems to have an almost compressed sound, attack, and feel, and I tend to hear less distracting pick noise when recording. When cutting strummed parts using a thin nylon pick, you can use ample amounts of studio compression to get an incredibly smooth and even effect. Herco nylon picks were very popular in the ’60s and ’70s, and continue to be a great choice for acoustic guitar.
Other brands. I’ve mainly focused on the Dunlop picks I use, but there are certainly many other brands out there. Steve Clayton picks, for example, are manufactured in Oregon and have long been a favorite of guitarists everywhere. A sort of boutique pick industry has sprung up over the last couple of decades, and manufacturers such as V-Picks, Gravity, and Red Bear produce picks of all shapes, sizes, materials, and prices. Notably, Red Bear produces a Guthrie Govan handmade signature pick with unique holes to enhance grip, and a serrated-edge top for bow-like effects. They also sell for a whopping $35 each!
Bottom line: Switching picks is the fastest and easiest way to switch up your tone and attack. And even the aforementioned Guthrie Govan pick is more affordable than (most) new effects pedals. Until next month, I wish you great tone, and happy picking!
Parallel versus series routing, and how your choice impacts your effects palette.
Get in line. Series routing is the most common scheme. Generally speaking, it's simply plugging in all your effects one after another. The output of each effect feeds the input of the next effect and the result is kind of a cumulative sound. For example, imagine feeding your guitar signal into a chorus pedal and then into a delay. The signal gets modulated by the chorus and the delay then “sees" 100 percent of that modulated signal. Thus, each delay repeat will be chorused as well. Series routing is by far the easiest method when hooking up effects, and it does work great for many applications.
Parallel routing, on the other hand, is similar to adding effects when using a mixer. Imagine a mixer channel that sends its dry signal to the master bus. Most mixers have at least a couple of auxiliary sends (and corresponding returns) to patch in effects, so let's assume we patch our chorus and delay into those sends and returns. You'll want to set the effects for “kill dry" (or 100 percent wet). Turn up the aux-send knobs and you now have chorus and delay that are independent and not impacting one another, and mixed into the master bus along with the dry guitar signal.
This differs from series routing in a couple different ways. First off, your delay no longer affects your chorus, and vice versa. You'll hear the chorus when you play, but when you stop, the delay repeats will tail out with no modulation on them. Now, imagine doing this with delay and reverb. You'll hear the delay tail out more distinctly than if it was feeding into the reverb effect. Why?
Because the delay repeats will have no reverb on them! It is a distinctly different sound than series routing, but it isn't necessarily better or worse. It's just different, and it really depends on what you are trying to achieve. There is a clarity and purity to the tone of effects in parallel that can be a real bonus at times, especially when blending in lots of reverb and/or delay.
From A to D. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, only a tap off the dry signal is sent to the effects. The signal is never completely digitized like it would be if run in series through a digital effects unit. (Some effects units have an analog dry path, but many do not.) Analog to digital converters have no doubt come a long way, but it's still impossible to avoid some slight latency when using them. This is especially true if you're hooking up multiple effects in series, where the result can be a slight disconnect or lack of immediacy in playing feel.
You might be asking yourself about something like a choppy, hard tremolo effect, and if having some dry signal always mixed in would make it impossible. The answer is yes! Parallel routing only works really well for some things: notably and mainly the aforementioned delay, reverb, and chorus (or flanging). It's not really that effective with effects like tremolo, vibe, and overdrive/distortion/fuzz, but as with all things sonic, your mileage may vary.
So, just how do you achieve parallel routing anyway? Well, some amps feature parallel effects loops, which make easy work of adding at least one parallel effect to your arsenal. An effects switcher/router unit like the RJM Music Technology PBC/10 actually has four stereo-effects loops that can be switched between series and parallel, which really gives a player the best of both worlds. Other units such as the Suhr MiniMix II and The GigRig's Wetter Box (Photo 1) essentially add parallel capability to any pedalboard or amp effects loop.
I hope I was able to clarify some misconceptions about series versus parallel routing. As always, I recommend trying these configurations yourself, so you can discover what will work best for your rig. Until next month, I wish you great tone!
They’re typically simple affairs, but oh what a difference treble boosters can make.
Greetings, tone junkies! This month, I'd like to shine a spotlight on an effect that I feel is almost criminally overlooked and underrated, an effect that has been an integral part of many a legendary guitarist's tone formula. Yes, the classic treble booster! Some of the most iconic early rock, hard rock, and metal tones were created using one of these babies.
If you're not super familiar with treble boosters, they don't add distortion or clipping of their own, but instead drive guitar amps into overdrive naturally. Treble boosters originated due to necessity, because many early British guitar amps were voiced relatively dark. (Think Vox AC30 pre “top boost" models.) Anything but the brightest-sounding guitars—even Fender Stratocasters—could easily get lost in the mix.
So, a few creative designers set about making boxes that would boost the guitar signal in the mid and treble frequencies. These devices would certainly alter the tone by clarifying the guitar signal, but because they boosted the signal, too, they also caused the amplifiers to overdrive. And the results were legendary. The following are just a few of the impactful players who used the treble booster/dark amp combo to great “effect."
• Ritchie Blackmore. He's known for often using high-power Marshall amps, but so many of Blackmore's iconic recorded tones (Machine Head, anyone?) are allegedly a Hornby Skewes treble booster feeding into a Vox AC30. Blackmore has gone on record stating that he loved the tones he achieved with his Vox setup, and that he was always trying to get his Marshalls to sound similar.
• Brian May. Since the beginning, May's rig has featured a treble booster feeding into a Vox AC30's normal channel. Cranking the normal channel on an AC30, like May, typically creates an unusable, muddy tone. But when hit with the treble booster, it's time to “Tie Your Mother Down!" By using the volume control on his Red Special guitar, May could go from shimmering, edgy not-quite cleans all the way to full-on raunch and blistering overdrive. May started out using a Dallas Rangemaster and went on to use Rangemaster-style boosts built by Pete Cornish, Greg Fryer, and others.
• Tony Iommi. Black Sabbath's guitarist is another legendary player who put the Rangemaster treble booster to good use. Iommi boosted his early Laney amps into a searing, thick distortion, and the results laid the foundations for what would become known as heavy metal.
• K.K. Downing & Glenn Tipton. Both Judas Priest 6-stringers utilized a Rangemaster into the normal channel of four-input Marshall 1959 heads, and created some of the most iconic metal riffs of all time. Once again, a perfect balance was achieved by running a treble-boosted hot guitar tone into the often rather muddy, veiled tone of the normal channel on these amps.
What's in a Name? If you think about it, “treble booster" is almost a misnomer. While these devices do focus the tone in the treble frequencies, they also boost the upper midrange and make a guitar cut through the mix in just the right range. Treble boosters are also sensitive to a guitar's control settings: Rolling back the guitar volume will clean things up quickly and reveal glassy highs that really sparkle.
What I love most about these “primitive" boosts is that seemingly every well-known guitarist who used one forged a unique sonic and musical path. When Brian May played, you knew it was him. The same goes for Iommi and Blackmore. Even though the effect was similar at the core, these guitarists certainly didn't sound the same.
Playing a loud amp with a treble booster is not the same as playing a modern amp with a ton of preamp gain, or even a clean amp with an overdrive or distortion box. There's just something so unique and expressive about sending your tone over the top with a treble boost. It could just be the missing link in your tone quest! If you're a fan of overdriven tube-amp tone and if I've inspired you to explore what a treble booster can do for your rig, the following represent just a few of what's available on the market:
• Cornish TB-83, TB-83 Extra, and TB-83 Extra Duplex. Originally designed and made for Brian May in the early 1970s, these units are considered by many to be the crème de la crème of boosters. Like most Cornish pedals, they are priced at a premium. The Duplex model actually features two TB-83 units in one housing, which allows you to set different boost levels and stack them if you wish.
• BBE Bohemian. Like most treble boosts, this is a re-creation of the classic Rangemaster circuit in a simple pedal format. It's true bypass, and it won't break the bank.
• Electro-Harmonix Screaming Bird. It doesn't get much simpler than this one. You get an on/off switch and a single knob to control the amount of boost. The Screaming Bird is also a good choice for those looking for a treble boost on a budget.
Until next month, I wish you great tone!