The ferocious guitarist—and singer-songwriter and bandleader—has a brand new rig for 2023. Check it out!
Two months ago, Lindsay Ell released her latest single, “Sweet Spot,” plus she’s on the way to issuing a new album, following up 2020’s Heart Theory. And for the tour leading into her next record, she’s also got a passel of updated gear since her 2018 Rig Rundown. No surprise, since there’s always something new happening with Ell—whether it’s touring under her own banner or with Shania Twain, scooping up Canadian Country Music Association awards, or serving as a judge on Canada’s Got Talent.
When it comes to guitars, Ell’s 6-string tastes run to the classics and custom-builds, and she’s got her signature OD aboard, so let’s take a look.
Brought to you by D’Addario XS Strings.
Play Mary Kaye
“I’m a Strat girl,” Lindsay Ell attests. And this one, a Fender Custom Shop ’56 Strat in aged shell pink, was a gift from Keith Urban. It’s got jumbo frets and has become a studio and road favorite.
Stitched-Up Heart
On her last Rig Rundown, Lindsay was touring with several Strats that she had handpainted. This tour, she’s continuing the tradition with this funky-beautiful Fender Standard Strat she calls “Just Another Girl.” Note the humbucker-and-two-single-coils combination, and, of course, the stitched-up heart.
Paint It, Blue
The backside of Ell's Fender Standard Strat that wears the title of popular track from her 2017 album, The Project.
High-Flying Strat
Ell was asked by John Mayer to play in the video that announced the release of his PRS SE Silver Sky, the lower-priced version of his signature Paul Reed Smith model. This is the guitar she played in that video.
Lil’ Red
This vintage, all-stock Gibson Melody Maker from the 1960s was also a gift from Keith Urban—a thank you for opening dates on his spring 2023 tour.
Ultra, Man
This Fender Ultra Strat, in an aged ash natural finish, is currently Lindsay’s main go-to onstage. This hot rod is outfitted with Fender’s noiseless single-coil pickups. Elle’s guitars are strung with a variety of sets, including green DR Strings (.010–.048s0, Stringjoys (.095–.048), and D’Addario .010–.052s and .011–.052s. Her picks are D’Addario heavies.
Mahogany Marvel
Ell’s main acoustic is a custom-built Rockbridge OOO made of mahogany by Brian Calhoun in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s a major switch for this longtime Martin player.
Amp Duo
Ell plays through a pair of amps: a Vox AC30 head and a Ceriatone Overtone Special. That’s a Furman power conditioner beneath the pair of heads.
Cute Cabs
The AC30 hits a 2x12 with Celestion Greenbacks and the Ceriatone slams a 1x12 Dr. Z cab with a Celestion Gold speaker.
Lindsay Ell's Pedalboard
Lindsay’s pedalboard contains a PolyTune 3 Noir, a Wampler Ego Compressor, a Ceriatone Centura Professional Overdrive, a signature Siren Etana drive, Vertex Ultraphonix OD, an MU-FX Micro-Tron III filter, an Arion Stereo Chorus, a Providence Chrono Delay, a HardWire RV-7 Stereo Reverb, and a Strymon Zuma power supply.
Dabbling with Digital
In addition to her trad tube amp-and-pedalboard combo, Lindsay also has a Neural DSP Quad Cortex on tap that has modeled tones of her amps.
- What the Ell? How to Make the Most of 4 Chords ›
- What the Ell? How to Write Your First Song ›
- What The Ell? Lessons I Learned from Recreating John Mayer’s 'Continuum' ›
- Backline Gear of the Pros - Premier Guitar ›
PG contributor Tom Butwin demos seven direct boxes — active and passive — showing off sound samples, features, and real-world advice. Options from Radial, Telefunken, Hosa, Grace Design, and Palmer offer solutions for any input, setting, and budget.
Grace Design m303 Active Truly Isolated Direct Box
The Grace Design m303 is an active, fully isolated DI box, delivering gorgeous audio performance for the stage and studio. Our advanced power supply design provides unbeatable headroom and dynamic range, while the premium Lundahl transformer delivers amazing low-end clarity and high frequency detail. True elegance, built to last.
Rupert Neve Designs RNDI-M Active Transformer Direct Interface
Compact design, giant tone. The RNDI-M brings the stunning tone & clarity of its award-winning counterparts to an even more compact and pedalboard-friendly format, with the exact same custom Rupert Neve Designs transformers and discrete FET input stage as the best-selling RNDI, RNDI-S and RNDI-8.
Telefunken TDA-1 1-channel Active Instrument Direct Box
The TDA-1 phantom powered direct box uses high-quality components and classic circuitry for rich, natural sound. With discrete Class-A FET, a European-made transformer, and a rugged metal enclosure, it delivers low distortion and a broad frequency response. Assembled and tested in Connecticut, USA, for reliable performance and superior sound.
Hosa SideKick Active Direct Box
The Hosa SideKick DIB-445 Active DI delivers clear, strong signals for live and studio use. Ideal for guitars, basses, and keyboards, it minimizes interference over long runs. Features include a pad switch, ground lift, and polarity flip. With a flat frequency response and low noise, it ensures pristine audio.
Radial JDI Jensen-equipped 1-channel Passive Instrument Direct Box
The Radial JDI preserves your instrument’s natural tone with absolute clarity and zero distortion. Its Jensen transformer delivers warm, vintage sound, while its passive design eliminates hum and buzz. With a ruler-flat response (10Hz–40kHz) and no phase shift, the JDI ensures pristine sound in any setup.
Radial J48 1-channel Active 48v Direct Box
The Radial J48 delivers exceptional clarity and dynamic range, making it the go-to active DI for professionals. Its 48V phantom-powered design ensures clean, powerful signal handling without distortion. With high headroom, low noise, and innovative power optimization, the J48 captures your instrument’s true tone—perfect for studio and stage.
Palmer River Series - Ilm
The Palmer ilm, an upgraded version of the legendary Palmer The Junction, delivers studio-quality, consistent guitar tones anywhere. This passive DI box features three analog speaker simulations, ensuring authentic sound reproduction. Its advanced filter switching mimics real guitar speaker behavior, making it perfect for stage, home, or studio recording sessions.
Learn more from these brands!
Delicious, dynamic fuzz tones that touch on classic themes without aping them. Excellent quality. Super-cool and useful octave effect.
Can’t mix and match gain modes.
$349
Great Eastern FX Co. Focus Fuzz Deluxe
Adding octave, drive, and boost functions to an extraordinary fuzz yields a sum greater than its already extraordinary parts.
One should never feel petty for being a musical-instrument aesthete. You can make great music with ugly stuff, but you’re more likely to get in the mood for creation when your tools look cool. Great Eastern FX’s Focus Fuzz Deluxe, an evolution of their très élégantFocus Fuzz, is the sort of kit you might conspicuously keep around a studio space just because it looks classy and at home among design treasures likeRoland Space Echoes, Teletronix LA-2As, andblonde Fender piggyback amps. But beneath the FFD’s warmly glowing Hammerite enclosure dwells a multifaceted fuzz and drive that is, at turns, beastly, composed, and unique. Pretty, it turns out, is merely a bonus.
Forks in the Road
Though the Cambridge, U.K.-built FFD outwardly projects luxuriousness, it derives its “deluxe” status from the addition of boost, overdrive, and octave functions that extend an already complex sound palette. Unfortunately, a significant part of that fuzzy heart is a Soviet-era germanium transistor that is tricky to source and limited the original Focus Fuzz production to just 250 units. For now, the Focus Fuzz Deluxe will remain a rare bird. Great Eastern founder David Greaves estimates that he has enough for 400 FFDs this time out. Hopefully, the same dogged approach to transistor sourcing that yielded this batch will lead to a second release of this gem, and on his behalf we issue this plea: “Transistor hoarders, yield your troves to David Greaves!”
The good news is that the rare components did not go to waste on compromised craft. The FFD’s circuit is executed with precision on through-hole board, with the sizable Soviet transistor in question hovering conspicuously above the works like a cross between a derby hat and B-movie flying saucer. If the guts of the FFD fail to allay doubts that you’re getting what you paid for, the lovingly designed enclosure and robust pots and switches—not to mention the pedal’s considerable heft—should take care of whatever reticence remains.
Hydra in Flight
Just as in the original Focus Fuzz, the fuzz section in the Deluxe deftly walks an ideal path between a germanium Fuzz Face’s weight and presence, a Tone Bender’s lacerating ferocity, and the focus of a Dallas Rangemaster. You don’t have to strain to hear that distillate of elements. But even if you can’t easily imagine that combination, what you will hear is a fuzz that brims with attitude without drowning in saturation. There’s lots of dynamic headroom, you’ll feel the touch responsiveness, and you’ll sense the extra air that makes way for individual string detail and chord overtones. It shines with many different types of guitars and amps, too. I was very surprised at the way it rounded off the sharp edges made by a Telecaster bridge pickup and AC15-style combo while adding mass and spunk. The same amp with a Gibson SG coaxed out the Tony Iommi-meets-Rangemaster side of the fuzz. In any combination, the fuzz control itself, which boosts gain while reducing bias voltage (both in very tasteful measure) enhances the vocabulary of the guitar/amp pairing. That range of color is made greater still by the fuzz’s sensitivity to guitar volume and tone attenuation and touch dynamics. Lively clean tones exist in many shades depending on your guitar volume, as do rich low-gain overdrive sounds.
The drive section is similarly dynamic, and also quite unique thanks to the always versatile focus control, which adds slight amounts of gain as well as high-mid presence. At advanced focus levels, the drive takes on a fuzzy edge with hints of Fender tweed breakup and more Black Sabbath/Rangemaster snarl. It’s delicious stuff with Fender single-coils and PAFs, and, just as with the fuzz, it’s easily rendered thick and clean with a reduction in guitar volume or picking intensity. The boost, meanwhile, often feels just as lively and responsive—just less filthy—lending sparkle and mass to otherwise thin and timid combo amp sounds.
Among this wealth of treats, the octave function is a star. It works with the fuzz, drive, or boost. But unlike a lot of octave-up effects, you needn’t approach it with caution. Though it adds plenty of the buzzing, fractured, and ringing overtones that make octave effects so wild and distinct, it doesn’t strip mine low end from the signal. The extra balance makes it feel more musical under the fingers and even makes many chords sound full and detailed—a trick few octave effects can manage. With the fuzz, the results are concise, burly, and articulate single notes that lend themselves to lyrical, melodic leads and power chords. In drive-plus-octave mode, there are many hues of exploding practice-amp trash to explore. The boost and the octave may be my favorite little gem among the FFD’s many jewels, though. Adding the octave to boosted signals with a generous heap of focus input yields funky, eccentric electric-sitar tones that pack a punch and are charged with character in their fleeting, flowering state.
The Verdict
It’s hard to imagine adding extra footswitches to the Focus Fuzz Deluxe without sacrificing its basic elegance and proportions, and without elevating its already considerable price. Certainly, there would be real utility in the ability to mix and match all three excellent gain modes. On the other hand, the output level differences between fuzz, drive, and boost are pretty uniform, meaning quick switches on the fly will shift texture and attitude dramatically without delivering an ear-frying 30 dB boost. And though it’s hard not be tantalized by sounds that might have been, from combining the fuzz and/or boost and drive circuits, the myriad tones that can be sourced by blending any one of them with the superbly executed octave effect and the varied, rangeful focus and output controls will keep any curious tone spelunker busy for ages. For most of them, I would venture, real treasure awaits.
Why is Tommy’s take on “Day Tripper” so hard? And what song would Adam Miller never play with him? Plus, we get Adam’s list of favorite Tommy Emmanuel records.
We call guitarist Adam Miller in the middle of the night in Newcastle, Australia, to find out what it’s like to play with Certified Guitar Player, Tommy Emmanuel. Miller tells us just how famous Tommy is in Australia, and what it was like hearing him play from a formative age. Eventually, Adam got to open for Emmanuel, and they’ve since shared the stage, so we get the firsthand scoop: Why is Tommy’s take on “Day Tripper” so hard? And what song would Miller never play with him? Plus, we get Adam’s list of favorite Tommy Emmanuel records.
Adam’s newly released trio album, Timing, is out now.
Plus, we’re talking about new recordings from Billy Strings and Bryan Sutton, as well as Brooklyn Mediterranean surf party band Habbina Habbina.
Peavey Electronics announces the Decade preamp pedal. The internet and social media have been abounding with chatter about the current recording secret of the modern-day guitar gods – the Peavey Decade practice amp.
The discontinued amp has reached unimaginable demands on the secondary markets. So much so that small pedal builders have made attempts to capitalize and duplicate the proprietary designs themselves. Tone chasers can now rejoice as the Decade preamp pedal now brings those highly sought after tones back to market in a small, compact footprint.
Guitar players will find a single input, single output preamp pedal straight forward and easy to navigate. Faithful to the original Decade circuitry (circa 1980), the control layout will be identical to the original amplifier. The GAIN section features PRE and POST controls. PREGAIN sets the gain of the input circuitry. POST GAIN sets the gain before the out. Built off the legendary Peavey Saturation patent, the new, switchable SATURATION allows tube-like sustain and overload at all volume levels, suitable for bedrooms, rehearsals, stadiums and apparently, those very expensive recording studios. The traditional BASS, MID, and HIGH equalization controls provide the tone shaping enhancements any guitar should require. Upgraded pedal features include an internal 24v supply from the standard 9v supply/battery and worldwide EMC/FCC compliance approval.
To learn more, visit online at www.Peavey.com
Street $199.99 USD