Excuse the long absence between posts. I've been up to my ears in life events. I've learned this year that we need to stop listening to the worrying nattering whine of confusion and fear at 3AM. That voice is never productive. And it never has your best interest at heart. What's important is to listen to the music, those notes coming from your heart. That clear harmonic resonance that is you wanting to burst forth. It's quieter so that's why it's harder to hear. It takes balls to be beautiful.
Ok life lessons over. I'm here to sell pedals. We got some new cool stuff I want to tell you about.
Caline has a great combo Wah and Volume that makes me want to go back and be a college student with no money again:
There's also a Stereo Volume pedal that even has a boost function. And I just like the way it feels under my foot. It's smooth. Not creaky like a crybaby.
Mooer put out a Phase Player wah type foot pedal. It's weird yet oddly addicting. I really like it's 3rd mode. Some mean sounding filter effect that I'm sure has a technical sonic name. I just like it cause it sounds like steroids when you rock it on the high setting with some overdrive.
Mass produced pedals are more reliable - This is a secret that boutique makers don't want you to know. The hand made stuff is more likely to go bad to human error like a badly soldered component. Mass producers have a huge incentive, time, and resources to invest in stream lining their production line, introducing quality control checks, and using methods that increase profit and consistency (and reduce defects). Typical defect rates are less than 1% for Joyo and Mooers for example. We know. We sell thousands of them.
Just as good tone for a fraction for the price - What people pay for is a name. An Ibanez Tubescreamer is iconic. I get it. But with a million tubescreamer clones and mods on the market, it's easy to understand that there are cheaper if not better options. The pedal market is weird, it likes old out-of-date things and worships them. You wouldn't buy a first generation iPhone would you? Things get better with time generally.
Save Money - Save all that money you would spend on a $150 vintage chorus pedal and pick up an honest to goodness analog one from us without all the rust and dings for less than $40 bucks. Spend that....a new guitar, or more pedals!
Pedals are toys - They're not some holy grail. Jimi Hendrix dropped in Wah and fuzz to make things weird, make his guitar sound like a machine gun, mangle his guitar beyond recognition. He wasn't precious about them. And his were certainly not True Bypass.
Bear with us as we slowly put pedals up on the site in the next few days. But as an incentive, the pedals are on sale at low low prices to get customers to purchase and then leave reviews on the site!
The Mooer Radar uses never available before studio quality IR technology for speaker cabinet sims. This technology was only available to studio musicians, and it's red hot.
And the Baby Bomb 30 is a preamp that hooks up to any 8 or 16 ohm speaker for any live or studio situations. It comes to support the much talked about Mooer mini amp series which captures the footprint of many hard to find and vintage amps in a pedal that will fit into your fist!
Both pedals discounted from what you'll find from other retailers.
The Mooer Radar uses never available before studio quality IR technology for speaker cabinet sims. This technology was only available to studio musicians, and it's red hot.
And the Baby Bomb 30 is a preamp that hooks up to any 8 or 16 ohm speaker for any live or studio situations. It comes to support the much talked about Mooer mini amp series which captures the footprint of many hard to find and vintage amps in a pedal that will fit into your fist!
Both pedals discounted from what you'll find from other retailers.
Here's 10 tips that may explode your mind about how to best make use of the pedals you have and offer new sonic ground possibilities other than the usual ol' "stick the pedal in and turn everything up til noon" way of thinking. Enjoy!
Stacking Overdrives - It always tends to amaze me that a lot of guitar players tend to use overdrive and distortion pedals 1-at-a-time-and-never-shall-that-change. They have their Tube Screamer. They have a RAT. They have a Klon.They treat them like holy relics blessing their tone. Sure you can use them that way. But you're missing out on a whole area of experimentation and fun. Stacking tends to compress the signal, dirty it up like hot sex, saturate the signal revealing new overtones. Works wonders on bass as well.
Compressors Misused - Compressors are sort of the quiet guy at the party they no one bothers to get to know, so they go home alone sad wondering why no one appreciates them. Their most obvious role is when they chicken pick spank and squish. However, there is a whole lot more to them. They can be used as sustainers. Limiters. An EQ pedal. A pre-OD boost. Think of them as guitar signal magicians.
Short Delays "Crisp" - Don't hear this sort of application of delays much. You can set up a digital delay to short time, multiple repeats, turn up the volume, no reverb to get a helicopterish kind of staccato effect that can sound massive. A kind of paradigm shift of what an electric guitar can sound like.
Barely on Effects - It's easy to turn everything up on an effect pedal. That can be satisfying. But how about turning things down to barely perceptible levels? How about adding delay, but setting the volume so low that it's almost not there at all? How about adding a dirt pedal and turning the gain all the way down? This leads to the next point...
Effect As EQ - If you turn down effects a lot of times you'll realize that a lot of pedals add a distinctive EQ. Think of the vintage Echoplex preamp, where people came for the delay and stayed for the preamp! They even made it into a pedal now.
Reverb as Infinite Tail - We all the standard reverb sounds: Spring, Room, Hall. Guitarists tend to use reverb mostly as a way to add little breathing room to their core tone. But how about thinking of reverb as a way to extend the hard spike and short tail of a guitar signal to a sort of infinite grace note. Like an ebow but more nuanced. Nick McCabe of the Verve with the wonderful Alesis Quadraverb used this to push boundaries of what a guitar could sound like - the tides of nature, groaning satellites, the infinite cosmos.
Reverse and Gated Reverb - Continuing on the reverb thread, a lot of players haven't experimented with reverse and gated reverb. A really fascinating effect that pulses and distorts especially if you add some whammy bar a la Kevin Shields of MBV. It's like turning guitar on its head.
EQ Pedals - It's shocking that a lot of players don't have an EQ pedal on their board. They're game changers, allowing you to tweak frequencies to cut through, cut off others when to stop (or encourage) feedback, boost pedals in their own right, final extreme influencers of your guitar signal, the last gate between your signal and the world hearing it.
Buffer Pedal - You'd be surprised how much a guitar signal changes as it flows through your pedal board even when all your pedals are off! Experiment: play through your pedalboard with all pedals off. Then take the input lead of your guitar out of the pedalboard and go straight into the amp. Listen. I bet you'll hear some differences. A buffer pedal is supposed to mitigate the small changes introduced from your pedals, bringing you closer to the pristine original sound of your guitar straight to your amp.
Hard Connectors - I'm a big fan of hard connectors between pedals instead of patch cables. Pedal cranks, pedal connectors - these are rock hard connections that don't twist or fray with time. Less movement = Less problems. Of course, not all pedals can be connected this way, but if you minimize the amount of cables in your rig, you're also minimizing the chance that during the gig a faulty connection will lead you to a scratchy or silent troubleshoot.
Got any tips of your own you've discovered over the years? Please share in the comments below!
Who doesn't love reverb? It makes everything better. Like hot sauce or beer. And Equipboard listed the Biyang Tri-Reverb as one of their best 5 reverb pedals, beating out many competitors priced at 2-4x the price. The Biyang has long been one of our favorite pedals, and if it didn't have such a weird Chinese name it would be a less well-kept secret!
Some people think pedal cloning is wrong. But better questions are, is it possible (or right) to patent something like a fuzz circuit? What about changing one small layout detail or swapping one chip's value, and then slapping your brand on it? Basically, especially with ODs and Fuzzes, there aren't that many ways to innovate.
Here's a useful list of many iconic pedals and their much more inexpensive clones. We carry most of them:
Just in! The Mooer Ocean Machine, a sick mad scientist delay, reverb, and looper that has more knobs than the space shuttle. A lot of interactive delays and reverbs that will inspire you. It's not just a pedal, it's an instrument.
We're based in the USA so shipping to the UK can take a while and add unnecessary cost. However you should should check out our friends at UK based Spartan Music if you're after some great value guitar pedals and gear. Click the image or here to open in a new tab.
