Remember back in the ‘80s when Chinese food, bags of chips and pretty much all meals not made at home had a little MSG sprinkled in to make the flavors pop out? It made us all feel fuller faster while we perceived all of our meals to be more savory and delicious. Today’s tone talk is all about the various pedals out there that enhance our tonal experience in much the same way, only without the headaches and health risks. These are the five pedals that I have had a seriously hard time turning off when they are on my board. Most of these tonal flavor enhancers compliment the amp with very little change to the core tone, but make all the difference in feel, dynamics and in some cases, fidelity.
Crowther Hot Cake
Ah yes, the proto-boutique ‘70s boosty overdrive fuzz made by a drummer from New Zealand that started it all. The Hot Cake has been a staple for this long for a reason—it magically adds girth, grit and fatness to any signal without changing the identity of the guitar or the amp. It works much like parallel processing—with the Presence and Drive set to minimum, there is no difference in tone when the pedal is engaged. On this setting, one can go past 2 o’clock on the Volume control for a preamp push either in front of other pedals, or as a maintaining-juice-caboose at the end of the pedal train. This functionality is due in part to the excellent transparent buffer the Hotcake is known for. Winding the gain up brings in a hefty harmonic distortion portion that sounds like a Class-A amp’s power section melting down. This is great for going into a clean amp when one wants some Billy Gibbons-style beef with the core tone left alone and clear enough for complex chords. The Crowther Hot Cake is still loved—if a tad underappreciated in my opinion – in this modern-day overdrive overabundance. Though it is capable of stellar overdrive and even fuzz tones, my favorite use for my old Hot Cake is as an always-on buffer and signal sweetener.
Paul Cochrane Timmy Overdrive
When talking about anything Tennessee home-grown, a few things come to mind, but Paul Cochrane’s legendary Timmy pedal always pops in there. I remember the first time I injected a Timmy into the front end of my Swart SST-30—an amp that needs no help in the signal sweetening department. Suddenly, the Lollar P-90-loaded Reverend Slingshot I was strumming started chiming and sparkling like it never had. The highs became silkier and frothed over in a tasty bubbling head of harmonics like a perfectly pulled pint. Notes bloomed and sustained without any perceivable compression squash, while managing to never interrupt or change the character of the Swart’s sweet voice. To me, the Timmy is like a high fidelity, yet transparent, harmonic enhancer that functions best as a “blanket lifter” or subtler treble booster. I remember using the Timmy to tonally match Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine’s twin towers of clean tone. I used it for that gorgeous guitar tapestry of an intro to “Days” off the second Television album Adventure.
Xotic Effects EP Booster
Growing up with East Bay Ray, Johnny Ramone and The Ventures as my big three guitar influences only really left me with one gig rig to rule them all. The pedal thing hadn’t really happened for me yet; I hated the nasally Tubescreamers and cheap Dano stompers that seemed to be the only pedals around Knoxville in the mid-to-late ‘90s, so I opted for a then-affordable knackered old Echoplex on top of a 100-watt ‘79 Marshall JMP half-stack. Luckily, everyone was into Mesa Boogies and Rocktron rack effects at the time, so this stuff was obtainable. I bought a Smurf-blue Mosrite Ventures II—just like the one on the back of the B-52s’s first album—and was in total surf-punk heaven. One thing I noticed was that even when the echoes were turned off, the tone of my Mosrite and Marshall was smoother, smokier and richer with the Echoplex in between. I later learned that the Echoplex preamp was a secret sonic sauce for Page, Van Halen and indeed my own hero East Bay Ray. It was like magic, and of course, it was always on. Fast forward many years and a little company called Xotic Effects distilled the smoking sparkling tonal magic into a tiny bulletproof box called the EP Booster. Though my old Echoplex was regretfully sold to fund my big move overseas years ago, when I want to catch my old wave of surf punk, my pipeline is an EP Booster into my Strymon El Capistan. It gets me 99 percent there with 100 percent less maintenance.
MXR Micro Amp
Here is another one-knob-wonder that I find hard to turn off once engaged: the classic MXR Micro Amp. Some folks use it to goose overdrives placed after it, some even use it in the loop for an overall volume boost. I like to place the Micro Amp at the end of the pedalboard and leave it on as a line driver—before delay and verb of course. The Micro Amp is criminally unsung and in my opinion, goes toe-to-toe with boutique boosters and transparent overdrives costing one hell of a lot more. It can even achieve a full range power amp-like breakup when dimed. If one is after a signal sweetener that won’t break the bank (and won’t break, period) get amongst the boost that Motörhead and Iron Maiden relied on decade after decade.
Death by Audio Interstellar Overdriver
When I was touring with my old aforementioned surf punk band The Cheat, sometimes the stack wasn’t the most practical rig to take in tow – particularly when NYC was on the schedule. So, I bought a second-hand Fender Vibro King with its glorious splashy tube-driven reverb unit built in. I made a go of this rig for a while, replacing the echo and gain-sustain from my Marshall and Echoplex with a glorious thunderstorm of Dick Dale verb-drench. My staccato picking became much stronger with the cleaner signal, but I did find myself missing the chime and grind of my big rig, so before a show in New York I went poking around The Big Apple in search of a pedal that would give me a bit of raw open kerrang to pad my playing out a bit.
A big silver box with punk rock-style silk-screened graphics gleamed from behind the display glass. It read “Death by Audio Interstellar Overdriver” and had my attention immediately. I didn’t have time to try it out, but bought it on looks and description alone. Now, when a pedal company boasts that their box will behave “the same way as old tube amps,” suspicious eyebrows reflexively raise up. But, I clicked it on at sound-check with the Overdrive at three and the Master just past unity and it turned my Vibro King into an old cranked non-master-volume British amp. We were listening to a lot of Wire in the van at the time and it was agreed by all that this pedal was Pink Flag guitar tone in a box. Hairy, dynamic and raw, yet defined and open. My old song-writing partner still uses my old DBA Interstellar Overdriver as a Fender-Marshall blender and an always-on Tele and Strat fattener. He won’t ever sell it back to me and I don’t blame him.