Pedal Power 🌸

How Guitar FX Pedals Changed My Life 🎸, or, Pedaling Up the Hill of Knowledge 🏔️

Over the last couple weeks we convened by email and then, as you’ll see way down there at the bottom, in person to discuss one of the great protected mysteries of art & letters: Keith Murray’s pedal board. We decided, what the hell, let’s blow the doors wide open on this thing. Let’s let the sunlight in. Let’s show ‘em exactly how Keith does it, and — frankly — dare them to emulate him.

Cuz honestly, guys, it ain’t the tools: it’s the carpenter. (Yes, here at S.D.I.R we will sometimes compare Keith to Jesus.)

KEITH: So Chris, last week, in our discussion of the demo for “Return The Favor,” you casually asked about my pedalboard — which effects are on there, which gets used the most, which is on there only to complete my obligations toward a corporate sponsorship, etc. At the time, I demurred, because we were there to talk about the song, and once you get me started talking about effects pedals, I’m not going to discuss any other top until I fall asleep. All guitar players just want to talk all day about effects pedals; it’s why no guitar player has ever had a healthy, long-lasting romantic relationship.

But now that I can discuss my pedals without stomping all over our examination of “Return The Favor,” I’m game. I hope you’re in a comfortable chair.

I’ll go in chronological order of circuitry — i.e., in the order that my beautiful clean guitar signal passes through these corruptive bastards.

1) First pedal on my board is just a CLASSIC, Chris. That’s the Boss TU-3 Chromatic tuner, a real workhorse in the industry. Unless your guitar player is one of those dweebs whose guitar tech does all of his tuning on one of those rack-mounted, strobing probably-Tesla-designed tuners, they’re almost certainly going to be tuning with those of these puppies. What Xerox is to the photocopying world, so is Boss to the tuning game. I probably use that — between songs — five or six times per show, but could probably stand to deploy it more regularly.

2) Then comes the MXR Phaser, the pedal I’d mentioned earlier as the tone that spurred the main guitar part of “Return The Favor.” It’s the wobbly vibe that you hear there, or the nauseous texture on the solo of “Buckle.” A phaser’s main goal is to make the listener tummy-sick. I probably use it four or five times per show, often adding it to guitar solos just to make me sound more like Billy Corgan.

3) Next up is another Boss beauty, the Metal Zone MT-2. You’ll be very familiar with this one yourself, Chris, as it is the sound I use for maybe 70% of all of my guitar solos on our demos (the other 30% are courtesy of our own Big Huff fuzz — more on that later). It’s a fairly, uh, specific sound, appealing mainly to people were learning to play guitar during the heyday of hair metal. You want to sound like C.C. DeVille of Poison fame? Yeah, no duh. Well, plug yourself into a Metal Zone. It’s a unique enough flavor that we save it for very special occasions, on final recordings. The solo of “Human Resources” features the Metal Zone. My featured solo on Andy Burrows’ “Keep On Moving On” is a nice clean (relatively-speaking) example of its sound. Anyway, I never use it live. Ever. I just like to know it’s there.

Any questions so far?

CHRIS: I think I get it! Especially the part about grabbing a comfy chair. I was standing up when I started reading this, just making some coffee in the kitchen, and sometime around the part where you mentioned C.C. DeVille, I fainted dead away! Woke up on the floor surrounded by coffee grounds and mug shards, my own fall broken by a huge vanilla sheet cake I was gonna eat for breakfast 😤. 

Anyway, I’ve draped myself across the daybed, I’ve got a bowl of espresso gelato, a couple of cloud-soft pillows, a satellite phone hooked up to a first generation Kindle, and I’m ready to read more about pedals…

KEITH: Well okay, so then we’ve got (4) the Mooger Envelope filter. It makes a noise like a Wah-Wah pedal, but without the need for the actual physical mechanism of a Wah, which tend to be large and heavy and have moving parts that will want to break if you do actually move them and just sucks. So this is essentially an auto-wah. Why not just buy an auto-wah pedal, you ask? I don’t know; shut up. I got this little tiny version of the pedal because I only use it on tiny bits of two songs, both from Lobes. You’ll hear it on the bridge of the live version of “Operator Error,” and also on the intro and second verse of “Turn It Up,” which we kind of stopped playing, so, really, I use this on the bridge of one song. Shut up.

5) Oh, here comes another MXR product. This one’s the Carbon Copy Analogue Delay. I have a second, more widely deployed delay petal later on. This one is mainly used for very short slap delay on the guitar; probably, the audience isn’t really hearing it most of the time it’s tuned on. I use it on “After Hours,” on the verse of “Rules Don’t Stop,” on the intro to “Chick Lit.” So, it’s a minor player, but it’s in the big leagues! I’m gonna guess that this also gets used maybe five times per show.

6) Next up is that other delay I mentioned earlier, and it’s yet another Boss pedal — the Boss DD6. Why do I have so much Boss crap, even though it’s kinda shitty? Well, they make tough little pedals, so the likelihood that they’ll break on the road is minimized — when the sonic quality of the pedal isn’t of great importance, I’d say just go with Boss. The tuner is a Boss piece of crap because it refuses to break and has no actual affect on the sound of the guitar. Does it tune the guitar well? Uh, I think so! 🤷  The Metal Zone can be a shitty ol’ Boss because it’s very shittiness is the point of that sound (for me, at least — I haven’t talked to anyone at Boss about their intentions with the Metal Zone). And the Digital Delay is a Boss just because that’s the first delay pedal I ever owned, and I love it. Does it sound good? Eh, I mean, not really — we always use other delays when we record. But I love it, and pretty much all of my delayed guitar parts, especially on With Love And Squalor, were written on the DD6.  The delay time on the main guitar part of “This Scene Is Dead” is based on one of the DD6’s default settings; if I used another pedal, I’d have to estimate it, and I’m a PERFECTIONIST. So, it’s always the DD6 for me. Sadly, Boss has discontinued it, and its replacement, the DD7, has different settings, and I hate it, so now I have to pay top dollar for a “vintage” DD6 any time I need a replacement. Sweet.

Any questions so far? We’re halfway there!

CHRIS: This is actually not as boring and awful as I think everybody was expecting it to be. I’m not saying me(!). I just mean everybody else. I think when everyone started reading this post they were probably like, “Fuck. My. LIFE.” You know? “Unsub. SCRIBE.” Right?

But then a funny thing happened… 

They started to really like it and get really fucking interested. And now they hope it never ends. Well, I hate to say “I told you so,” but… yeehaw! 

Actually, you know what might be fun, is an audio recording in which you walk people through the sound of each pedal, and a couple of the best pedal combinations. Or a video, or sheet music? Consider! Anyway, okay — let’s continue the tour…

KEITH: I guess I could do that. I mean, I KNOW I could do that. I own the fuckin’ pedals! But Chris, if we play them the sounds here, they won’t bother to go to their preferred streamer and listen to the song-references I’ve cited in my description, and I need this streaming money for tootsie rolls!  But I can be coerced, I’m sure, if I can be assured that tootsie rolls are coming my way, without question. 

Anyway!

7) Oh, boy, here’s a fine pedal: none other than our own Big Huff. It’s a fuzz petal — in the simplest terms, it adds a beautiful, disgusting distortion to the guitar. Oh boy. I’m a man who loves fuzz pedal. I’m looking at the collection that’s sitting below my desk as I write this, and at a quick glance I’m counting at least eight different fuzz pedals.  But only the Big Huff lives on my pedal board, because I can’t  — no, I WON’T — live without it. Actually, though, the one on my touring pedalboard is actually the original prototype pedal that was sent to my by the guy that designed the circuit. It’s an ugly little box with all the wrong knobs and switches, but the guts are identical to the circuitry of a Big Huff. My actual Big Huff, the one we manufacture and sell to the public, is too damned pretty to get stomped on and sweated near and get beer-drenched and thrown around, which is what befalls the poor pedals (and people!) that are condemned to join me onstage.

This sucker gets used through the entirety of “You’ve Lost Your Shit,” “Nobody Move,” “Buckle,” “Inaction,” and more, plus I’ll throw it on any time I’m feeling nasty. It probably gets used eight times per set.  

8) One more MXR on the board. This one’s the Micro Amp — I use it very lightly, essentially to add a tiny bit of gain to my guitar signal, now and then. I mainly use it on clean guitar parts, just to give the sound a little extra juice, a tiny bit of interesting crunch, a touch of nuance. The verse of “Rules,” all of “Lethal Enforcer,” “Spoken For,” the first half of this very song we’re theoretically talking about (“Return The Favor,” remember?) are all treated to this pedal. Basically, it’s on any time my guitar isn’t screaming loud — maybe five times per set.

9) And one more BOSS pedal, the Harmonist P6. Chris, I don’t want another guitar player onstage with us. I hate sharing the stage with other guitars. The fact that your bass kinda looks like a guitar sometimes pisses me off.  

The problem is that we have a couple of moments that involved harmony guitar solos.  I love harmony in my music, but hate it in my personal interactions with my guitar-playing peers. What a quandary. Well, BOSS to the rescue. This is a basic harmonizer — you set the key your playing in and it will add intervals of the harmony notes that fit that scale. There are more sophisticated harmonizers out there, but they’re generally bigger and fancier and more expensive and seem like they would quickly be destroyed by me on tour. To be fair, the P6 isn’t used very often — only on the guitar solos of “Human Resources,” “Sentimental Education,” and “Lucky Just To Be Here.”

10) This next pedal is the lynchpin. If I were being forced to play our set with only one pedal from my board, it would probably be this one: the ZVEX Box of Rock. Is it a little embarrassing that a fundamental ingredient in my live sound is called the “Box Of Rock?” Of course. Of course it’s an embarrassing name. But it’s also an apt name: this is the pedal that slathers the rock onto my guitar signal. It’s my distortion pedal, and I have it cranked to it’s maximum delivery of offense. This pedal appears on pretty much every song we play live. I want it on all the time, and so it pretty much is.

11) Riding down toward the tail end is the Electro Harmonix Pitch Fork. It does a few different things: one of its functions is as a harmonizer, but it doesn’t cover all of the intervals I need, so the Boss Harmonizer stays on the board. I mainly use the the Pitch Fork as an octave pedal — adding a higher or lower double to the note I’m playing. It appears in a couple of places, most notably on “Rules Don’t Stop.” I’d also use it on “Foreign Kicks” and “You Should Learn” if we ever played those. Basically, Barbara was made in a time of great interest in octaves, for me. I maybe only use this a few times per set — on "Rules,” on the second verse of “Human Resources,” that post-chorus lead on “Less From You,” and maybe a couple of other spots.

12) Wrapping it up is the ZVEX Super Hard On. Yeah, another questionable name for a great pedal. This is essentially a gain pedal, but I turn it on a very low setting, and it’s circuitry just gives signal a little tone-massage. I dunno. It’s on the whole time, but it’s probably mainly there because it has two mono lines out, so I can plug both of my amplifiers into my pedalboard without also needing a line-splitter.

CHRIS: I just think a lot of people aren’t going to want to read all these words. We should make them a video, right? I mean…

KEITH: 😏

Knee Jerks

A new section in which we offer our thoughts on a couple of recent releases.

Sez Keith: Anyone who’s talked to me about music since like 2020 has probably heard me enthuse about Magdalena Bay at length. Their 2021 album, Mercurial World, was maybe my #1 record of that year (that could be because I’m not bothering to even remember what else came out in 2021 right now, but still…). Anyway, they have a new record, Imaginal Disk, about to drop next week, and I’m getting amped. While I’ll admit that this latest single — “Tunnel Vision,” the third to be dropped in their pre-release build-up — is maybe my least favorite *song* of the three, I’ve got to give it up to these crazy bastards for their consistently dazzling production flourishes. Of particular note for me are those orchestral stabs around the two-minute mark, especially that little chromatic ascending bit. It takes some gall to explicitly reference Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” in 2024, but they make their affection for early-80s prog a feature here, rather than the project-sinking bug that it really ought to be.

Quoth Chris: Two people making modest waves right now are The Dare and Addison Rae, and I haven’t been taking them seriously; but this week I have nice things to say about both of them. People’s main complaint about The Dare — that when he’s at his very best, he sounds like tier-2 LCD Soundsystem — is not crazy, and like everyone else I’m confused that a GOAT like Charli XCX is making things with him, but haters, this new Dare track has legitimately great guitar panning, and I’m not afraid to say it (listen with headphones to appreciate the stereo effect).

I can’t tell if Addison Rae is really a music artist or if her music is a promo for a show or something, and I’m confused by GOAT Charli XCX putting her on a track, and even more confused that I *liked* her on that track, and while this new Rae single is a lackluster piece of songwriting accompanied by a clumsy attempt at a Lana del Rey video — still, I can acknowledge that the synths do sound pretty dang nice! Addison, what synths you using???

Here’s some praise with less alloy: that recent Laura Marling song is great. Also, The Smile finally got me with their latest.

Thanks, team. Go to your local guitar shop and show them what you learned here today.

🎸,

K+C