Shaping Your Sound
Playing guitar is an expression of yourself. Whether strumming your acoustic or rippin’ phrases on your electric you play to be inspired and say something with your musical voice. For some it’s guitar, cable, amp and some a board replete with multiple overdrives, delays, fuzzes, etc and for others it’s a modelling unit of some fashion. All of these tools get the job done and well when we use them properly.
Options are great and plentiful these days. A warm tube amp at a moderate volume and a small compliment of pedals can cover most of the tones we seek- smooth overdrive, massive crunch, splatty fuzz, and delays awash with modulated repeats. Take the sample board we built out here at Rusty’s. We used a small On-Stage travel board, five Strymon pedals and the Strymon Zuma R300 to power the incredible range of tones afforded by Strymon’s technology.
Our signal chain is straightforward with the Sunset Dual Overdrive covering our medium to heavy gain needs or if we choose the option of a JFET or a Treble Boost into the other side of the pedal to stack them or run in parallel into the Mobius, with twelve modulation machines to choose from: Chorus, Flanger, Rotary, Vibe, Phaser, Filter, Formant, Vintage Trem, Pattern Trem, Autoswell, Destroyer, Quadrature. These options can be accessed via the three toggle footswitches or like all of our V2 Strymon devices, programmed to work with your MIDI controller for scenes using all the pedals on your board simultaneously per song. We followed the expression trail to the El Capistan, tape delay unit to give us the chance for some cool slap back, saturated tape ebbing delays and some hip vibe before we enter the surfy to studio plate ethereal reverbs and soothing tremolos of the Flint. With the option to add an expression pedal one can adjust the speed of the tremolo warble or the depth of the cavernous reverb, your choice with the Strymon line of pedals opening up a realm of new tonescapes to explore.
Bring yourself to Rusty’s and try out our pedals to assemble your personal tone arsenal. We’ll have the tubes warm and ready to make sonic pictures.
