What are your four ‘must-have’ pedals? That is what we ask our guests to share with you in our Four On the Floor podcast segment. We can thank Andy for making our eyes glaze on Instagram with all the great pedalboards he posts and due to his exposure to so many fantastic pedals, his choices are worth paying attention to. If you are not familiar with Pedalboard Of The Day do yourself a favor and check them out. He gave us a fantastic interview too! You can hear the episode for yourself right here. Check out these choices for his Four On The Floor.
1. 1981 – DRV Drive V3
“I feel like everyone has a comment about it. Whether it’s a clone, it’s not a clone. I don’t really care. It sounds really good. I reached out to Matt Hoops and he sent it over and I was just really curious about what it was all about. I have the number three version. So it’s white, but the three colored stripes there, the blue, yellow and red. Everyone says it’s a RAT clone and maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, I don’t really care, but it sounds really, really good. And I use it essentially as my clean tone. A lot of people probably will use it as a distortion pedal, but really is the sound of my clean guitar. It has this like really beautiful setting at like the game at barely above zero and it has this breakup tone. It cuts the bass frequencies in the amp, but in a really nice way. It brings out the single coils of a Stratocaster—At least I feel that way.“
Check out the 1981 – DRV Drive V3
2. Chase Bliss Audio – Thermae Analog Delay / Pitch Shifter
“I think it’s one of the most brilliant pedals ever made. It’s kind of like, I don’t know, Joel is just at another level. I think it would be unfair to be a pedal builder. I have maybe I’m hyping up too much, but I just feel like he, he gets it and, or he just has some kind of like magical ability. I just pedal is just nuts. I just find that every time I’m in a creative rut, this is like the thing I turn on. If you turn on the off, all those like pitch effect things, even just the analog delay just has this kind of warmth to it. It’s kind of, it’s like textural. I dunno, it’s kind of like, at least for me, I feel that it’s not just like, you’re hearing it, that you’re kind of like being a part of the sound and it just it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s so damn expensive, but everyone should experience that. There may at least once in their life, it’s just, it’s just so fantastic.”
Check out the Chase Bliss Audio – Thermae Analog Delay / Pitch Shifter
3. Hungry Robot – Wardenclyffe Modulator
“Essentially it’s kind of like this weird modulation, low-fi vibrato circuit with a weird kind of delay reverb that’s always on the edge of self-oscillation and it’s just so hauntingly beautiful. It’s like another one of those pedals that takes you where I feel like it’s writing the song for you.”
Check out the Hungry Robot – Wardenclyffe Modulator
4. Adventure Audio – Dream Reaper
“It’s this really cool fuzz that has like this gated option and it sounds very, synthy. If you kind of have low output pickups, your notes die in this really beautiful way where like they die like it with a velcro-ish sound. And for whatever reason when you pair it up with any vibrato circuit, it just sounds like the distorted old VHS, like that same kind of like warm kind of chewy saturation. There’s no other fuzz pedal that pairs up with any kind of a vibrato and sounds that way. I actually had posted a clip on my, uh, my Instagram account of just that sound. This pedal has a different feedback option that you can send back into the pedal. And I wish they would just replace that and put like a vibrato circuit into the pedal where I could turn on the fuzz and then turn on the vibrato part of it cause it’s just amazing.“
Check out the Adventure Audio – Dream Reaper
Huge thanks to Andy for being a guest on our show and please check out Pedalboard Of The Day We wish him continued success!