Tone

There are an awful lot of guitar effects pedals that massage, tweak, clean, or otherwise enhance the signal from a guitar's pickups before it reaches the amplifier. The Anti-Effect from Poland's Chaosound turns its back on all that goodness and tries its best to destroy the sound instead.  Read More

The sound and feel of modern music was changed forever in the late 1990s when Antares launched its Auto-Tune pitch correction technology. As well as putting some life back into flat performances, the system was also used to great effect by the likes of Cher and T-Pain to give a unique twist to vocal tracks. The company announced its intention to bring the technology to the electric guitar in May 2011, sending shivers down the spines of purists everywhere. Now Peavey and Parker have launched the first guitars to incorporate Auto-Tune for Guitar and we've had the chance to take a closer look at the former's AT-200 in action at Winter NAMM in Anaheim. The verdict: pretty impressive.  Read More

Guitarists who travel a lot and want to take an instrument along for the ride - but don't want to risk damaging that prized vintage Strat - might find themselves turning in the direction of a scaled down stand-in. Such solutions come in many different shapes and sizes - from full size instruments with parts that collapse (like Daniel Mapp's Jetson travel guitar concept) to models with a shortened neck and small bodies (such as Martin's Backpacker) to strange-looking beasts with tuners positioned in a hollowed out section of the body (like the Traveler's Speedster). Bob Wiley's Ministar guitars, though, are essentially a bunch of necks with pickups. While there is a model with a shortened 19-inch scale neck, most of the odd-looking electric, acoustic and bass guitars sport full length necks and, says Wiley, play and sound just like the big brand models, but at a fraction of the price - and a fraction of the size.  Read More

Guitarist and songwriter Peter Frampton – of Humble Pie fame – has put his name to a new Megawah effects pedal built by Gig-fx. Designed to meet his exacting specifications, the signature analog pedal features four settings to produce the established Megawah sound, but with a slightly warmer high end and more defined lower end response. Players can also choose a classic crying wah, an adjustable funky envelope wah and a variable rate autowah.  Read More

The incredible guitar virtuosity from the likes of Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson and Stanley Jordan all rely on their string-picking proficiency being registered by the instrument's pickups. These vibrations are then transformed into electrical signals and sent off to an amplifier for our listening pleasure. Using such a setup, string movement can only be read on one axis, the horizontal. The 3Dxy pickup system reads each string twice, on both the horizontal and the vertical and is said to result in a rich, surround sound effect called natural stereo.  Read More

Renowned amp design engineer James Brown will be taking a new guitar effects pedal to the Nashville Amp Expo shortly and is asking for help with final tweaking. The new TightBoost pedal offers musicians a clean gain power boost without producing unwanted distortion, and the comments from show visitors invited to try out the new pedal could well help to shape the final production model.  Read More

As well splitting a guitar input over three separate fuzz pots, the variable frequency control and resonance switch of Fairfield Circuitry’s new Four Eyes Crossover Fuzz pedal help make it one versatile fuzz box. It gives users more control over the tones produced, which range from the "extreme to relatively subtle; from super thin to ridiculously fat."  Read More

The TightDrive from Amptweaker allows guitar and bass players to take control of that all important tone and overcome any unwanted delay that can slow down the sound as it moves through an amp's circuitry. As well as LED-lit gain, distortion, volume and Tight controls the pedal also features an effects loop where onboard effects can be moved in front of or behind the TightDrive's tone modifications.  Read More