Recording - July 2011 - 24

Grab Bag

A Guitar Gear

when they get hit with chords, but the ECT gave us a paradoxical combination of incredible grungy tone with clearly articulated sound. My tests on the Schecter, a heavymetal instrument with tons of bass and pickups that are already very hot, were equally delightful, with a sound that rocked the studio’s foundations. The Toneblast switch on the Schecter was simply unbelievable! The Power Struggle is an interesting box for experimenters, but the Eau Claire Thunder is Aen’s most popular pedal for a reason—in terms of sheer shred power, it simply steamrollers everything else out there into mangled scrap. Period.

other pedal they sell is usually sold before it even arrives in America). I was a bit disappointed at first, having hoped for something fancier; after all, how exciting could a volume pedal be? At this point, I’ll let Darwin explain why he dropped everything to just play with the GD20 for a half hour: “This pedal is wonderful, I like it a lot! I was a big fan of the Ernie Ball pedals, which were great until you had to replace a pot, and never liked the Morley pedals very much, they felt wrong to me. But this one is really smooth, with the throw of the pedal very much like that of a Crybaby wah, very natural-feeling. And the actual loudness curve is very similar to working the volume knob on the Strat, so one technique’s “feel” translates into the other very well.” Darwin admitted that he’d been playing without a volume pedal for years because he wasn’t happy with the offerings out there, and asked if I could be talked into letting him hold onto the GD20 after the studio sessions... “just to mess with it a bit more.” I still haven’t been able to get it back, and I don’t think I will.

George Dennis GD20 Mono Volume Pedal $163; dist. by European Musical Imports, www.europeanmusical.com A volume pedal is something many guitarists love to have handy, but because it’s such an intimate part of the player’s expressiveness, people can be very fussy about them. There are optical designs, mechanical designs, in all shapes and sizes with all manner of responses, and what might work well for one player might be hated by another. It was interesting, then, to hear Darwin go from reluctant to overjoyed in the space of a few seconds after plugging in the GD20. The George Dennis line is made in the Czech Republic and imported to the USA by European Musical Imports; there’s a whole line of George Dennis pedals, nearly two dozen of them, with a few basic stompboxes and over a dozen pedal-based wahs, overdrives, choruses, and so on. The simplest pedal of the line is the GD20, which has proven enormously popular in the USA and was the only one EMI had in stock when we contacted them (every
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RECORDING JULY 2011

HardWire SP-7 Stereo Phaser and HT-6 Polyphonic Tuner $189.95 and $139.95; www.hardwirepedals.com The HardWire pedals are a series of effects spun off from the popular DigiTech brand for discerning players who are looking for a little bit more from their effects... everything from top-end sound quality and extremely rugged construction to little touches like snap-on knob covers to prevent accidental tweaks, glow-in-the-dark pedal stickers, and hook/loop fasteners for pedal boards. HardWire sent us the two newest pedals in the line, the SP-7 phaser and the HT-6 tuner. The SP-7 is a bit more than your average phaser pedal; it’s a true stereo in/out box with true hardware bypass (a feature shared by all HardWire pedals) and seven different phaser modes selectable from a front-panel encoder, ranging from vintage sounds to very tweakable modern phase shifts. The three front-panel knobs are called Speed, Depth, and Modify, but their precise functions depend on the mode you’ve selected. The most subtle mode is 2 Stage, a 2-stage phaser where the Modify knob controls Bias; it’s beautiful and easy on the ears in an era when many phaser effects go over the top to put themselves right up in your face. The modes called 4 Stage and 10 Stage give you 4 and 10 stages of all-pass filtering, respectively, which makes the effect more pronounced; in these, the Modify knob controls Feedback. If you’re into a more modern and “effect-y” modulated phase, try the Modern and Boutique modes, 4-stage and 6-stage phasers with wideranging Feedback controls. Boutique, in particular, has very powerful Feedback that can make the SP-7 sound like a flanger at its more extreme Feedback settings. Finally, there are Envelope and Dynamic; in the first, playing dynamics triggers the start of the phase sweep, and in the second, playing dynamics controls the depth of the phase effect. The Depth control becomes a Range control, and Modify controls Sensitivity.

http://www.hardwirepedals.com http://www.europeanmusical.com

Recording - July 2011

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