General Interest

£136, notpedals.com

While there may be a disco-ball on the front of the GLTTR!, have it place you under no illusion. There is little understating how totally unsuitable this unit is for attempting some funky Nile Rogers-style chops. You’d sooner kickstart the next disco revolution by cutting a goose in half with a guitar string.

• READ MORE: Meet NotPedals.com, a marketplace that’s making boutique handmade pedals more accessible than ever

What is the GLTTR!?

First of all, it’s a pedal with an exclamation point in its name – so no, the question in the sub-heading above has not been delivered in a desperate shout, but it would be appropriate if it was. The GLTTR! is one of those things that get listed as “other” or “glitch/weird” – and it earns it. Engaging the pedal for the first time I am met with an overwhelming, incomprehensible wall of sound. As per the manufacturer’s copy, GLTTR! “generates cascading noise that evolves over time,” and “even reacts to your playing when it feels like it.”

Indeed, this is only sort of an effects pedal review – in reality, the GLTTR! is a synth in disguise. It will allow you to mix in your guitar sound, and it even distorts it for you as well, because why not. However, the interaction between your playing and the sounds the GLTTR! produces is arcane – it’s there, but it’s hardly a one-to-one relationship.

While a delay chip is the heart of the GLTTR!’s noise-generation, there are a scant few settings where your signal is repeated back to you in any tangible way. And, for the most part, you can use the GLTTR! totally on its lonesome, without anything plugged in, if you so desire. It’s a pedal that can do the job of a big pile of modular gear, in the specific setting of noisily feeding everything back into itself to create violent cochlea sandpaper – the job of the musician, in the case of things like GLTTR!, is less about playing the gear and more about shaping it and directing the flow of the output.

Image: Press

This is because regardless of what’s going on at the input stage, GLTTR!’s output resembles a Merzbow album – replete with digital, harsh pulses and totally abstract howls, as if the little delay chip in here was granted the ability to feel pain. For genres where consonance, rhythm and harmony have been abandoned, though, the GLTTR!’s controls are extremely inviting.

The texture of the noise is thick, and the various controls poke and prod the resulting oscillations in various directions– the manual describes the “!!!” control as the “most important”, however it’s how it works in tandem with the various switches – specifically the “???” switch – to give you some really varying outputs, going from low growls with occasionally digital screeches at random intervals to high, piercing screams with blasts of white noise.

The on-board LFO, when set right, will also let you dance between some varying extremes, pushing and pulling the texture of the noise in great crashing waves. At some settings it even tortures the delay chip so drastically that it simply gives up and turns off, leading to stark, sudden silences amidst the total chaos. In these moments, before the howls return, you contemplate life before the GLTTR!, life after the GLTTR!, and the gulf between these two things.

Who is the GLTTR! for?

I would heartily recommend the GLTTR! To anyone who genuinely likes a bit of noise music in their life – you could otherwise achieve a similarly three-dimensional and variable noise sound with a more in-depth modular setup, but the GLTTR! Lets you dip your toes into that world in a familiar stompbox format.

With that said, anyone who is expecting a guitar effect that’s, well, an actual guitar effect, may feel like this is unusable in most circumstances. If you turned this pedal on during a “normal” guitar set, the sound engineer will probably start trying to figure out what just exploded. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its place in a ‘band’ setting – for some alarming noises between songs, I can see the GLTTR! doing a great job too. Just keep in mind that for best results, you may need to crouch down and do some knob-twiddling on stage.

The post Emerald Ox FX GLTTR! review: “one of the most out-there ‘effects’ you’ll ever play” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Sponsored by Taylor Guitars: Once dubbed “Nashville’s hottest young player” by this magazine, Trey Hensley brings his signature blend of Appalachian grit and bluesy finesse to Taylor’s new Gold Label 517e. In this video, captured at Soundcheck Nashville, Hensley weighs in on the new round-shoulder dreadnought and demonstrates its earthy depth and warm, old-school tone.  “I’ve […]

PRS Guitars today announced the launch of the S2 Special Semi-Hollow Reclaimed Limited Edition. This limited edition showcases reclaimed and salvaged woods on one of the company’s most versatile models: the S2 Special Semi-Hollow. With each top boasting its own character and left as natural as possible, every instrument is rendered unique. Only 700 pieces will be made in 2025.

The unique reclaimed material was discovered by longtime PRS wood buyer Michael Reid.

“Wood is a crucial element to our guitar making heritage. Michael Reid, our senior wood buyer, has been my curly maple wood provider and buyer since 1980 - before PRS was officially PRS - and we still work together as partners today. The deep relationships Michael has formed worldwide with our wood suppliers are remarkable. Guitars like this are a great way to highlight some of the interesting, personal stories from his travels and musical wood understanding,” said Paul Reed Smith.

The woods featured on this model include a Peroba Rosa top, Cuban mahogany neck, and Guaribu fretboard. Peroba Rosa, typically used as siding in Brazil, was selected for the top wood. The density of this 100-150-year-old wood combined with the semi-hollow body construction gives the S2 Special Semi-Hollow Reclaimed Limited Edition a unique sound that is punchy but also warm and full. The Cuban mahogany used for the necks was purchased from Puerto Rico, and some of this wood was salvaged from trees blown down by Hurricane Maria in 2017. Finally, the Guaribu Preto fretboards are sourced from Brazil, where this wood was historically used as support beams for houses. These guitars are left Natural in color and finished in satin nitro. Any nail holes, wear, or discoloration have been left in the top wood to showcase its history.

“It is impossible to fool a good guitar player. Everyone who has a guitar made from these woods sees them as a legitimate tool for serious players, not as a gimmick,” said Michael Reid, PRS Guitars Senior Wood Buyer. To hear more from Michael Reid on these woods and how these guitars came to be, visit the PRS Guitars Blog by clicking here.

Beyond their unique wood appointments, these instruments maintain many of the S2 Special Semi-Hollow’s standard specifications, including a 22-fret, 25” scale length Pattern Regular neck and hum/Narrowfield/hum pickup configuration. A 5-way blade switch and two mini-toggles allow players to tap the humbuckers, creating twelve distinct pickup combinations.

PRS Guitars continues its schedule of launching new products each month in 2025. Stay tuned to see new gear and 40th Anniversary limited-edition guitars throughout the year. For all of the latest news, click www.prsguitars.com/40 and follow @prsguitars on Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook, X, and YouTube.

PG contributor Steve Cook takes a look at EMG’s new E-Series bass pickups—a set of slim, soapbar, active pickups that feature wide-aperture coils and ceramic magnets. The E-Series offers big lows, articulate highs, and noiseless performance, the calling card of EMG’s active pickup designs. With drop-in replacement and full compatibility with EMG accessories, the E-Series presents a serious option for modern bassists.

Shop For Your E-Series: https://www.emgpickups.com/bass/e-ser...

Positive Grid has teamed up with globally acclaimed visual artist PosterLad to present “See the Sound,” a custom, limited edition front grille designed exclusively for the Spark EDGE portable multi-channel smart guitar amp and PA.The design blends geometric vibrancy with sonic imagination to create a conversation between vision and sound.

PosterLad is the art project of internationally exhibited Czech designer Vratislav Pecka, whose exploration of bold color, geometry, and visual experimentation has earned global recognition and exhibitions in cities like New York and Paris. Highlighting the vision-sound connection in this custom design, PosterLad shares, “The eye is a symbol I revisit throughout much of my work. The colorful shapes underneath the eye are a visualization of sound waves emanating out from a central point that resembles a speaker cone. I call this piece ‘See The Sound.’”

About Spark EDGE

Spark EDGE is a multi-channel smart guitar amp & PA in one, designed for everyone seeking a portable, versatile, audio solution – from singer-songwriters and buskers, to acoustic duos and electric players. It packs 65 Watts of studio-quality sound, built-in amps and effects into a lightweight, compact unit that can serve as an amp, PA, or personal monitor.

Musicians can enjoy seamless and flexible connectivity for electric and acoustic guitars, bass, vocals, keyboards, and more, plus optional battery power (sold separately) that offers the freedom to perform anytime, anywhere.

In addition, a free companion app delivers convenient features that enhance any live performance, rehearsal and set list. These include a channel mixer; Creative Groove Looper; amp models; guitar and vocal effects; Smart Jam for playing live; and Spark AI to quickly generate custom guitar tones from simple text prompts.

Availability and Pricing

The Limited Edition “See the Sound” Spark EDGE grille is available for USD $49, while supplies last (see website for additional local pricing).

See it at positivegrid.com/products/spark-edge-grilles

Learn more about Spark EDGE at positivegrid.com/products/spark-edge.

Boutique guitars are a chance for highly skilled luthiers to let their creativity shine. Fender’s annual Custom Shop offerings are just one example of imagination gone wild.

But might this be the most beautiful boutique guitar ever built? It’s a tough title to steal, but we reckon Retablo has the credentials.

• READ MORE: At 80 years old, this is how much John Fogerty practices guitar a day

The work of luthiery legend John Page – formerly of the Fender Custom Shop, now heading John Page Guitars – Retablo is the result of thousands of hours of development (over 2,350, to be precise) over two years.

The guitar depicts – literally within its body – a crop of some of the most influential musicians from American roots music, including Sister Rosetta Tharpe, BB King, Howlin’ Wolf, and Robert Johnson.

Credit: John Page

Perhaps it’s only right, then, that a guitar of this calibre – designed by a luthier of such status – should have its own hour-long documentary. And John Page himself has come through to deliver on this.

A new documentary on John Page’s YouTube channel showcases the guitar’s painstaking design process, from the process of drafting countless sketch sheets to that of using religious imagery to elevate these musical heroes to sainthood status.

“I am not a religious person,” Page explains. “My father was a minister, and to say that my childhood soured me on it would be an understatement. But that being said, I love religious art.” He also reveals how his wife, Dana, collects religious art, and so he’s “constantly surrounded” and predictably inspired by it.

Credit: John Page

While initially intending to have each of the American roots heroes painted by someone else – his rolodex after an illustrious career would have suggested a contender in no time – after trying his own hand at painting his wife in a saintly pose, Page felt confident he could complete the entire project with his own two hands.

“If this piece was going to be a Retablo, then I decided that its creation must all be at my hands,” he explains.

Credit: John Page

Page says Retablo’s primary function is to be a work of art, but of course, it is also a fully functioning electric guitar. “The goal is to blur the line between fine art and functional craft,” he reasons.

And we’re not yet even getting into the intricacies of the materials used to build the guitar…

Retablo features a roasted African mahogany neck and body, with an African ebony fingerboard inlaid with mother of pearl and Honey Jasper TruStone, in an interpretive rendition of a Gothic cathedral’s steeple and spires.

Its headstock is overlaid with ebony, recess routed with Page’s signature and gilded in 24K gold. It also sports custom Gotoh M6 mini tuning machines, and 22 gold EVO frets and 24K gold plated strings. Both the body and neck are finished with multiple coats of Osmo Polyx-Oil, a satin hard wax finish made in Germany.

Protecting the sculptural assembly cavity is a .118” sheet of non-glare Acrylic, held in place via a rabbet in the side walls of the body by a custom-made solid brass, Gold plated trim ring, and 28 Gold plated #2 flat-head screws.

The guitar is also loaded with nineteen 1mm Soft White LEDs powered by a 3.7 volt LiPo battery, encased in the rear centre cap.

You can learn more about Retablo at John Page’s website, or settle in and watch the hour-long documentary about the instrument below:

The post With intricate LED-lit, hand-painted renditions of 9 American roots heroes and gold-plated strings, we’re calling it: This is the most incredible boutique guitar ever made appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The Way Huge Smalls Doom Hammer Fuzz will pound your ears with thick saturation worthy of high-desert riffage and dense walls of fuzz straight from a ’90s fever dream. It all began in the original Way Huge garage lab back in 1998 when Jeorge Tripps modified an op-amp-powered fuzz circuit from 1978 for the band Oranger. Prized for its less pronounced scoop, Mr. Tripps refined its design for a tighter low end and more reliable performance when played live on stage. Many years later he would craft a handful of prototypes based on that modded original—and these would be the basis for the sonic sledge now called the Doom Hammer Fuzz. Output, Tone, and Fuzz dials allow you to tailor the pedal’s velvety harmonics to your rig. Try a low Fuzz setting for the most delightful crunch.

Take up the hammer. Pound the Way Huge Doom Hammer Fuzz into your pedalboard.

It’s always darkest just before dawn…

Way Huge Doom Hammer Fuzz highlights:

• Thick saturation for high-desert riffage and dense walls of ’90s fever-dream fuzz
• Based on a modded clone of an op-amp-powered fuzz circuit from 1978Tighter low end, less pronounced scoop, and improved performance on stage
• Output, Tone, and Fuzz dials tailor the pedal’s velvety harmonics to your rig
• Delightful crunch at low Fuzz settings

Availability

The Way Huge Doom Hammer Fuzz is available now at $169.99 street/$242.84 MSRP from your favorite retailer.

Way Huge Smalls Doom Hammer Fuzz Pedal

Doom Hammer Fuzz Pedal

When Daniel Donato was 12, he heard “Paradise City” by Guns N’ Roses for the first time. He’d been living in Nashville since he was 7—his family had moved there from New Jersey, where he was born, after his father got a good-paying IT job with Davidson County in Tennessee—and he was just starting to become completely obsessed with guitars, guitar players, and guitar music. “I heard this certain part in the solo,” Donato recalls via Zoom from his perch in the back of a tour bus cruising through the mountains of Montana, “when it’s going into double time and Slash is hitting this….”

At this point, words fail and only scat, accompanied by enthusiastic hand-miming over a ghost fretboard, will do. “Doodala-doodala-didala-doodala-didala-doodala-daaahhh.…” He leans closer for a second, peering deeply into his phone screen to add, “It’s on the neck pickup,” then resumes his previous position. “I remember looping this piece of audio over and over because it was such bad-ness. It was like, how could a guitar possibly do that?”

Fast forward 18 years to 2025. Donato was working on his third full-length album, Horizons, with his band Cosmic Country at Sputnik Sound in Nashville. Two of the album’s most striking songs, “Chore” and “Down Bedford,” start out sounding like standard country tunes, but, over their considerable lengths (more than 11 minutes for “Chore,” almost 10 for “Down Bedford”), they morph into something more akin to prog or fusion, with dramatic time signature changes, dynamic shifts, and utterly commanding guitar solos. Think of Steve Morse’s work with the Dixie Dregs and you’ll be in the right ballpark. Sitting in the control room listening back to the final takes of these songs, Donato had a realization: He was reaching a level of musical energy he’d considered impossible as a preteen listening to Slash’s “Paradise City” solo. “I thought, ‘I’m kinda doing that,’” he says.

Donato isn’t bragging when he says this. There’s a big smile on his face, but his voice is infused with a humble awe that borders on disbelief. “It’s something that, at one point, I really prayed and worked hard to be able to do,” he says. “And now I could do it.”

Daniel Donato didn’t just achieve mastery of the guitar this year. His way with a Telecaster has been evident since at least his debut EP, 2019’s Starlight. But Horizons does bear all the signs of an early career milestone. It shows him finding his voice as a songwriter, somewhere in between the twang of Mickey Newbury and the grit of Robbie Robertson. And it’s the sharpest presentation yet of his own signature sound, which occupies the sweet spot where Americana, outlaw country, modern country, and jam-band music meet.

“I felt like I knew Jerry [Garcia] because I had the same desire, and he was giving me permission to do what he did, but in a way that was my own.”

Donato remains far from satisfied, however; he’s set his sights on something even bigger. “I’m still working on this one goal that I’ve had since I was 14 or 15,” he says. “You know when you can hear a single note from a player and you know who that player is? You can do that with Django [Reinhardt], with Jerry [Garcia], with Willie [Nelson], with all the greats. That’s my goal. If you can hear one of my notes at, like, 15-percent volume and know that it’s me, and that knowledge elicits a positive emotional response … that’s my number one, still.”

Funnily enough, Donato’s quest for individuality started with the video game Guitar Hero. “I loved playing it,” he says. “I loved practicing the game. And then, all of a sudden, one day I was like, ‘Man, I just want to play guitar.’ It really was that childlike and that simple.” Luckily, he already had an instrument on hand; his music-loving father, who was to become his first guitar teacher, had given it to him as a Christmas present several years earlier. Up until then, he’d barely touched it.

Dad did his job well. Within two years, Donato was busking on Lower Broadway in Nashville. And within three years, he was playing professionally with a local group called the Don Kelley Band and made it through the doors of Robert’s Western World, one of Music City’s few remaining genuine honky-tonk saloons, where his apprenticeship began in earnest.

“Robert’s is truly the home of traditional country music,” Donato explains. “When you go in, there are photos of Tom T. Hall hanging out there, of George Strait and Merle Haggard and Charley Pride. That building is where the pedal-steel guitar was invented. It’s where Willie Nelson bought Trigger. And it’s just a living testament to the spirit of that music. But what it is now is way different than what it was when I started going. It was only busy from 6 p.m. to closing, and then from 10 a.m. to 6, there would be these Western-swing bands that would play. All these musicians would pull up, park their cars right out front, and just go in”—unimaginable in today’s tourist-mobbed downtown.

“These were guys that played on the actual records that were being covered there,” he continues. “Amazing pedal-steel players and fiddle players that used to tour with George Jones and Merle and David Allan Coe and Johnny Paycheck, and they were just there playing for tips, picking into a Peavey solid-state amp and drinking a Budweiser. And I’d go see these guys every week and learn from them. Sometimes, once I’d gotten to know them, I’d go over to their houses and ask them, ‘What was that thing that you were doing over A7?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, I’m playing Em7 over A7, and that’s a substitution.’ And I’d be like, ‘What’s a substitution?’ It was all one-on-one. I travel this country a lot, I see a lot of places and people and music, and I haven’t seen a place like Robert’s, the way it was then.”

“I loved practicing [Guitar Hero]. And then, all of a sudden, one day I was like, ‘Man, I just want to play guitar.’”

Soon, Donato was taking private lessons with the likes of Brent Mason and Johnny Hiland, supplementing what he learned there with Advanced Placement music theory classes, and delving deep into the history and techniques of country music.

“Grady Martin and Hank Garland and Leon Rhodes, who played with Ernest Tubb for a long time, and Spider Wilson, the Grand Ole Opry’s house guitar player—they all played jazz,” he notes. “They loved Charlie Parker. They were copping Charlie Christian lines, and they were all doing that style on hollowbody guitars.

Daniel Donato’s Gear

Guitars

Two DGN Custom Epoch semi-hollow three-pickup T-style electrics

Fender Custom Shop Telecaster

Tangled String/Danny Davis custom 00-size acoustic

Amp

1966 Fender Pro Reverb

Effects

Universal Audio Max preamp/dual compressor

Keeley Rotary

Keeley Cosmic Country phaser

Keeley Manis overdrive
Keeley Noble Screamer overdrive

Walrus R1 reverb

Strymon Timeline delay

DigiTech FreqOut

Eventide H90 harmonizer

Dunlop expression pedal

Gamechanger Audio Plus sustain

Fender Tone Master Pro multieffects/amp modeler

Strymon power supplies

Strings, Picks, and Cables

Ernie Ball Cobalt Slinkys (.010–.052)

Dunlop acrylic picks

Mogami cables

They weren’t even playing Teles. And a lot of that history transitioned into the era of guitar players that I learned from, like Brent, who loves George Benson, who loves Jerry Reed—and Jerry Reed played with all those old Nashville jazz cats. There’s a lot of guitar players in Nashville who’ll do, say, a Phrygian dominant substitution over a dominant-seventh chord on a honky-tonk tune. And it’s truly Nashville, in a way that only like 30 people know.”

Donato announced his intention to join that lineage early on in his recording career. At one key moment in his blazing solo on “Meet Me in Dallas,” from his first full-length, A Young Man’s Country (2020), he repeats a high C major triad over F and E flat chords, a cool extension of the harmony that immediately thrills the ear. Hank Garland would be proud.

“Amazing pedal-steel players and fiddle players that used to tour with George Jones and Merle and David Allan Coe and Johnny Paycheck … were just there playing for tips, picking into a Peavey solid-state amp and drinking a Budweiser.”

The next foundational piece in the Daniel Donato puzzle fell into place when he was 17, playing regularly at Robert’s Western World while still in high school. At 7:30 one Thursday morning, his U.S. history teacher asked for a brief private audience after class. When class ended 45 minutes later, the teacher pulled three huge binders from behind his desk. As Donato remembers it, “He said, ‘I saw you last night at Robert’s with my fiancée, and I want to give you some music that I think you’ll like.’”

In those three binders were more than 200 CDs, all featuring music either by or related to the Grateful Dead. “It was 35 volumes of Dick’s Picks. It was the Jerry Garcia Band through every era. It was Jerry’s duo with [upright bassist] John Kahn. It was Legion of Mary [Garcia’s band with keyboardist Merl Saunders]. It was The Pizza Tapes [which Garcia recorded in 1993 with bluegrass musicians David Grisman and Tony Rice]. It was The Phil Zone [a collection of vintage Dead live recordings chosen by bassist Phil Lesh]. It was everything possible.”

Donato was familiar with the Dead to some degree—his mom was a fan and his uncle had dropped out of school to follow them around the country in his youth—but this was a far deeper immersion. The first disc he put on was Dick’s Picks Vol. 3, recorded at the Hollywood Sportatorium in Pembroke Pines, Florida, on May 22, 1977. “That has a great version of ‘Big River’ on it,” he says. “I played ‘Big River’ with Don Kelley, and I always loved that song. When I heard the Dead play it, I was like, ‘Oh man, this song could be more than four minutes long. It’s okay to hang on the A for three minutes on the intro.’ And that, to me, was something approaching a revelation: how you can take country tunes and kind of dance around them. I felt like I knew Jerry because I had the same desire, and he was giving me permission to do what he did, but in a way that was my own.”

There’s no question that you can hear Garcia in Donato’s style: the long conversational solos, the playful use of arpeggios, the fondness for effects pedals—like the octave, the envelope filter, and especially the phaser—whose tones hearken back to the country-rock of the ’70s. (Although Donato points out, rightly, that the phaser was at one time a fixture of mainstream country as well: “Back in the day, all the Nashville cats would have a Maestro or MXR phaser and they’d turn it to where it’s pretty much just like a level boost. It’s barely on. That’s a real old-timey, traditional use of the effect.”)

Still, the Dead’s impact on Donato goes well beyond sound or improvisational approach or even musical qualities of any sort. The example they set as performers has helped guide him toward a way of presenting himself to the world, and the marketplace. Look at his Bandcamp page and you’ll see for sale complete recordings of every concert he’s played for the last several years. It’s a tactic that feels both generously fan-centric and cannily entrepreneurial. It also makes one think of Dick’s Picks and The Phil Zone in the way it builds a mystique around the live experience.

“There’s American bands by musical nature and then there’s American bands by functionality,” Donato posits. “And the Dead were both of those. They strived to keep ticket prices low. They played venues that they didn’t care if they didn’t sell out, because they wanted everybody to get in. They would change the set list every day because they wanted to cater to the people that were in their community. And they would give away their music [letting fans tape the concerts and then circulate the tapes among themselves]. I really like that [David] Letterman interview when Jerry said, ‘We’re done with it. It’s theirs.’ There’s a free-market element to that that’s uniquely American. And it definitely informs the ethos of Cosmic Country, in a big way.”

Maker of the iconic Big Muff, Electro-Harmonix knows a thing or two about fuzz pedals. And the New York-based company is putting that expertise to good use again with its new stompbox, the Bender Royale.

Housed in EHX’s Nano-sized chassis, where the three-transistor Bender Royale sits on the fuzz spectrum is between the original vintage flavour of a two-transistor fuzz, and the more “over-the-top wall of sonic mayhem” that is the four-transistor Big Muff.

• READ MORE: Meet NotPedals.com, a marketplace that’s making boutique handmade pedals more accessible than ever

EHX’s fresh take on the Germanium MkIII version of the circuit, the Bender Royale builds on a standard control set of Volume, Fuzz and Bass, with the addition of a Fat switch which adds bass and low-mids for “tonal thickness”.

Guitarists can use the Bias knob to dial in the “sweet spot for the perfect amount of rip or leave the circuit starving for voltage”. There’s also a Clip switch which can be used to re-bias the final germanium transistor for a rougher fuzz tone.

And finally, the unit’s Treble control is an active treble shelving filter for harnessing high frequencies, while its Blend knob is available to mix wet and dry signals – great for zeroing in on the perfect level of clarity, especially when stacking other drive pedals.

Credit: Electro-Harmonix

Elsewhere, the Bender Royale features a mechanical relay true-bypass switch, with latching/momentary functionality.

The Bender Royale is available now for $149, and comes with a standard EHX nine-volt power supply.

For more information, head to Electro-Harmonix.

The post “Germanium fuzz explosion!” Meet Electro-Harmonix’s latest fuzz pedal, the Bender Royale appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

How many hours of practice per day should guitarists aspire to? Answers for this question vary greatly, with some saying serious players should be aiming to get hours in every day.

On the upper end of the spectrum, virtuoso Steve Vai recently recounted his rigorous practice regimen as a teenager, which saw him “happy if I got nine hours a day”.

• READ MORE: “AI should be putting mufflers on cars, not doing art for us”: Wolfgang Van Halen slams AI use in music

Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty doesn’t adopt quite the same level of obsession to his practice schedule, but in a new interview with CBS Sunday Morning, he details how he keeps his chops sharp.

“It just feels really good,” he says [via Guitar World]. “I like to practice, because my connection to the guitar makes me feel better. It’s a kind of therapy.

“It always takes a certain amount of time to work up to where you were yesterday. It doesn’t just start right there. You kind of sink back or something. Your muscles have to get warm again, I suppose.”

He goes on: “What’s cool about it is the next day, meaning today, you start practicing, and then you get better at something than you were yesterday. 

“That happens every single day. Sometimes, there’s a big chunk I’m trying to get better at, and sometimes it’s just some little thing. And the more you do it, the easier it gets, and the more you understand it, and you develop the actual coordination.”

But the big question: how many hours does John Fogerty actually practice per day? He answers about two or three hours.

“That’s ingrained in me, and also when I do that – that’s kind of what for other people would be their office, and their meditation space to kind of get it together to do their job.

“I’m practicing, and I do have various things I’m trying to get better at, but it also allows me to mentally and spiritually bond with the music that I love. You know, there’s always little bits of stuff that I’m not good at, and I wish I was better at some parts.”

Elsewhere, John Fogerty recently revealed the one thing that’s more important to musical success than being a good guitar player.

The post At 80 years old, this is how much John Fogerty practices guitar a day appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

With the widespread adoption of AI, artists have different levels of acceptance when it comes to its use in music. Some say it’s very much here to stay and should be embraced – like ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus, who recently called the technology “unstoppable” – while others think we should pump the brakes.

Wolfgang Van Halen, for example, hasn’t pulled any punches when it comes to his thoughts on the matter, and even goes as far as to say generative AI is “dumb”.

• READ MORE: “It’s like some terrible disease”: Bruce Dickinson blasts the use of mobile phone cameras at Iron Maiden shows

In a new interview with Springfield, Missouri’s Q102 radio station, the Mammoth leader and multi-instrumentalist explains [via Blabbermouth]: “I think generative AI is really stupid. I just think it’s dumb. I think it’s a waste of time.

“I think AI should be putting mufflers on cars, not doing art for us. But other people feel differently. That’s how I feel. I think it’s dumb. I think it’s just – I don’t know – it’s not my thing.”

When pressed on the fact that some record labels are increasingly leaning on AI, WVH responds: “Yeah, it’s lame. Well, you know why? ‘Cause it allows you to pay less people. 

“All the people at the top see the line go up because they’re paying less people to do more work with less money. It’s kind of the way – every industry is, unfortunately, like [that] at the end of the day, which sucks. It’s never really about what’s being made. It’s how quickly you can make it and shovel it out to people.”

Despite Wolfgang’s stance on artificial intelligence, it hasn’t stopped the topic of AI from entering the Van Halen world.

Last year, it was revealed that drummer Alex Van Halen had reached out to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, to analyse “the patterns of how Edward would have played something” in hopes of generating new Eddie Van Halen riffs and solos.

That touches on a whole other issue entirely, mind, as Wolfgang Van Halen has repeatedly expressed his reservations – and even refusal – to posthumously release banked EVH riffs and ideas.

Elsewhere in the Van Halen world, vocalist Sammy Hagar recently called out Alex Van Halen, accusing him of “not doing his brother’s musical legacy justice” for leaving out his era of Van Halen in his book, Brothers.

Wolfgang Van Halen is set to release his new album with his band Mammoth, The End, next month. Listen to its title track below:

The post “AI should be putting mufflers on cars, not doing art for us”: Wolfgang Van Halen slams AI use in music appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

The first time I bought a handmade, boutique pedal was in 2015. I was 19, spurred into expanding my pedalboard by effusive comments on Reddit and a desperate need to try and sound like Uncle Acid And The Deadbeats. The pedal was a Fuzzhugger Algal Bloom. It was more money than I had ever spent on a single pedal ever in my life, and I had absolutely no idea if it would even make it across the Atlantic – I crossed my fingers and, two weeks later, a package arrived at my door.

It was everything I’d hoped it would be – fuzzy, weird and beautiful. And In the decade since, that pedal has rarely left my setup, even when I went down to a mini board in a moment of misguided madness. It remained consistent throughout an ever-changing rig of different drives, fuzzes, amps and guitars. I’ve played more music through it than basically any other piece of equipment, and I owe it all to going out on a limb and ordering something weird and handmade from overseas.

• READ MORE: Earthquaker Devices Fuzz Master General review – “the full gamut of vintage-adjacent fuzz tones”

One person who really understands the unique joy of this is Alex Bray, founder of NotPedals.com. A Melbourne-based musician and pedal fanatic, he founded the storefront to stock strange and wonderful small-batch pedals – and to combat what he describes as a “monoculture” within the pedal world.

“I wouldn’t call myself a builder,” Bray says. “A lot of people think I am – I’ve tinkered a bit, you know, I got a Big Muff when I was 16, I played with that and modded it a bit. But I’m not a builder. But my friends are – people I know from all around the world, they’d make something and send it to me, and it would end up on my board. And I always said, ‘this is fucking cool, where are you selling these? How are you getting them into the hands of musicians?’”

The answer, he laments, was always the same. “‘Oh, I built a website’, or ‘I kinda put it on Instagram’, or ‘I put it on Reverb and it got lost amongst a million second-hand Les Pauls’. So they weren’t really finding a place to cut through, there wasn’t one central place where it could just be about pedals. So I built it.”

Alex Gray. Image: Press

Not… pedals??

You can easily see for yourself what Bray has built. NotPedals’ front page is full of pedal brands you almost certainly haven’t heard of, but you probably immediately want to know more about. I mean, an overdrive that has interchangeable little ‘fuses’ for different sounds? A pedal that does, er, something with a “???” switch and a “!!!” knob? A quad-BBD analogue delay with presets and tap-tempo?

It’s rare to see pedals like this all together. Of course, there are a few other places that do collect some rather out-there sounds – Break The Machine is one great example – but these don’t share NotPedal’s sole focus on the purely small-batch, handmade things.

“The really original stuff is harder for people to get into in a lot of ways,” Alex says, “unless you absolutely trawl Instagram, Reddit and Reverb all the time to find these tiny builders. And then shipping can be super expensive, too!” And so one of the things NotPedals aims to do is a good deal of that searching for you. “NotPedals is heavily vetted. I know every builder that is on there, I’ve spoken to and built a relationship with all of them. They’re all making really high-quality stuff that you can’t find anywhere else.”

Shipping and shopping

There are really strong communities surrounding these kinds of boutique pedals – but normally it’s a bit more builder-focused, with makers congregating in DIY-oriented spaces like /r/diypedals and freestompboxes.org. But as a consumer who doesn’t want to debate the virtues of leaded vs unleaded solder, your shopping experience is much more likely to be drawn in by the immense gravitational pull of the major retailers.

One of the most appealing things with the big retailers, over ordering something kitchen-table-assembled, is consistency. You know what you’re going to get in terms of shipping and tracking, and the returns process. NotPedals is aiming to bring that feeling to the small-batch boutique world, too. One of the most striking things about the platform is that shipping is free. Worldwide. For everything. When I receive my NotPedals products for review, they come with great tracking and arrive quickly.

How does it all work? Despite Alex being based in Melbourne, the warehouse where the goods are stocked is in Ohio, bang in the middle of the USA’s shipping corridor. “I didn’t really want to spend $70,000 creating a completely bespoke shipping solution. So I thought it would be better to ship it all from one central place,” Alex explains. “When I bring a new builder onto the platform, after I meet them and get to know them and everything, they’ll ship the first batch to our warehouse in Ohio – everything goes out from there.”

“I’ve had people emailing us, particularly US customers, saying things like ‘I ordered this last night, and I was having dinner tonight, and the guy rocked up with the pedal! The bigger brands have access to this really nice retail experience – smaller builders before NotPedals didn’t really have that. As a buyer and as a musician as well, I want that nice, smooth experience, just as good as buying a Boss pedal – you know that it’ll be fast and there’s going to be proper tracking. I think all the smaller builders deserve that.”

Part of this, obviously, helps the platform feel much more approachable. Regardless of the actual price of an item, no one likes to add something to their cart and then suddenly see £40 of postage slapped on top of things just to get it to you from America – this resonates with both me and Alex, given that we’re based in the UK and Australia respectively. And, in order to expand out the ease of the process to a wider range of customers and also help mitigate the impact of tariffs, there are plans to open an EU warehouse as well.

Culture Shift

Since I bought that Fuzzhugger in 2015, the pedal world has continued to grow. What’s notable is that the makers who were at one time definable as bonafide “boutique” brands – JHS, EQD, Walrus and even Chase Bliss – have become some of the biggest names in pedals, in the space, second only to brands like Boss and EHX.

“The crux of it is, there are five or six dominant brands – they make great stuff. But it’s become a monoculture,” says Alex. “The same stuff is in every post on socials, on Reddit, on anything in the guitar communities. If you go into a guitar shop, which I hate doing now, it’s the same things all over the place. There really isn’t as much originality anymore in that market, in my opinion. As an artist, I think that doesn’t really flow with the originality and creativity that’s meant to be there in music. We’re not selling fucking accounting software!”

Of course, all of these brands make awesome pedals, and it’s especially great that a lot of the more artistically-led brands, ones with cool graphics and out-there effects, have risen up to be part of the mainstream. However, as they grow they inherently change. The kinds of experiences, sonic or otherwise, that you get from a single-person operation are intrinsically different to those offered by a business operation that’s expecting to shift thousands of pedals.

An example: when I receive the Ploverdrive for review, it comes with a Nanoblocks model of a bird, a level of case-candy that’s extremely rare for anything other than limited-edition pedals from larger brands. Sonically, there’s also a lot more room for the totally out-there when you’re expecting to shift tens of units rather than thousands. Some of the pedals on NotPedals will be totally unusable for the vast majority of players – which can make them a great antidote to having to contemplate the creative possibilities of the same identical Instagram board for nth time that day.

The sound of a NotPedal

Bray’s own musical background is in punk, (as he puts it, “lots of Dead Kennedys influence, lots of really questionable band names”), but he was still keen to cater to all sonic tastes with the platform. “I didn’t want to back us into a corner where every pedal on there was wild and full-on. Overdrives and compression and so on all have their place. There are builders all over the world, who range from making subtle, tasteful germanium drives to the most fucking crazy self oscillating tremolo-Fuzz-Face-thing. I connected with a real mix of people.”

Something else Alex notes is that some advances in tech have opened some sonic foors for smaller builders. “People have really broadened out from doing modified TS9s or Blues Drivers into potentially some really high-end sonic territory. I just got a Surreal Audio Echo Sphere – the stuff this pedal does compared to what I thought was a ‘boutique pedal’ even three years ago, is right up there with, I think anything else you can get on the market – it’s an all-analogue delay with preset banks, tap tempo, subdivisions and different LFOs. It’s crazy”.

Coupled with technical advancements, Bray highlights the agility of brands like these. “They’re the jet skis vs the oil tankers. They can turn on a dime and make something fucking weird that maybe won’t sell a lot – which is great. I personally don’t want another Centaur – I want something that is going to be like the Centaur is now but in 15, 20 years.”

For Bray, this forward-looking approach is essential – as that growth continues, we need more builders who fill those niches within the boutique community – and not just the unobtanium niche. “I was speaking to JHS and they’ve been super supportive from the day I emailed them cold!” Bray says. “I just said, I’m launching this thing. You’re a pedal guy, Josh, what do you think?’ – and their point of view is that there’s probably a lot of the new guard of pedals on NotPedals right now. A lot of the brands that no one knows about yet, but in ten years, they could be another JHS.”

A deeper look

Given the variety of sounds to be had from NotPedal’s catalogue, it’s only fair that we actually get our ears around what the storefront can offer. Alex kindly agreed to ship us three NotPedals pedals to check out – the Emerald Ox GLTTR!, the Galahcore FX Ploverdrive and the Monkey Riot Pedals Rippletron. You can check out our review of the Emerald Ox GLTTR! tomorrow – and hold onto your cochleas, as it’s the wildest of the bunch.

The post Meet NotPedals.com, a marketplace that’s making boutique handmade pedals more accessible than ever appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Sitting between the original vintage vibes of a 2-transistor fuzz and the over-the-top wall of sonic mayhem that is that 4-transistor Big Muff is the humble 3-transistor Tone Bender-style of fuzz known for being punchy with a unique sonic texture. The EHX Bender Royale is Electro-Harmonix’s new take on the Germanium MkIII version of the circuit with a ton of added flexibility to bend your tone even further. From thick and smooth to brash and spitty, the Bender Royale has a range of sounds all its own.

Housed in EHX’s Nano-sized chassis, the Bender Royale builds on a standard control set of VOL, FUZZ and BASS (originally Treble <-> Bass) controls for an authentic, familiar feel. The FAT switch adds bass and low-mids for tonal thickness. Use the BIAS knob to dial in a sweet spot for the perfect amount of rip or leave the circuit starving for voltage. Switching the CLIP switch from Ge to LED re-biases the final germanium transistor to produce a rougher edge on the fuzz tone. The TREBLE control is an active treble shelving filter used to rein in high frequencies. The BLEND knob mixes between your wet and dry signals and can be especially useful for maintaining clarity when using bass or stacking other drive pedals.

The Bender Royale employs mechanical relay true-bypass switching on a soft footswitch with selectable latching/momentary functionality. Tap the footswitch for normal latch switching function or press and hold for momentary blasts of fuzzy goodness.

The EHX Bender Royale comes equipped with a standard EHX 9 Volt power supply. It is available now and features a U.S. Street Price of $149.00.

Learn more at www.ehx.com

The client stopped by the shop and selected the tonewoods from my stacks of wood, they chose a torrified bearclaw Sitka spruce top and one of the finest California laurel back and sides sets I have ever owned.
The braces on the top and back are Engelmann spruce from local trees that I felled and cut for firewood.

Bruce Dickinson has made no secret of his dislike of fans using mobile phones during Iron Maiden shows; the band have even prohibited their use for select upcoming gigs, though not all.

In a new conversation with Appetite For Distortion, the 67-year-old singer goes as far as to say he wishes the “camera on those things had never been invented”, explaining how their widespread use at concerts diminishes the experience for both the artist performing and fans alike.

• READ MORE: “He can do a lot of things people didn’t expect him to be able to do”: Dweezil Zappa thinks Wolfgang Van Halen’s success has proved wrong people who gave him a “hard time for no reason”

“It’s like some terrible disease, that people feel the need to look at the world through this stupid little device. It’s like a failing of humanity,” he explains. “You’re surrendering your senses completely to this little fascist in your hand.”

He goes on: “Put it down, put it in your pocket and look around you. Look at the people, look at the joy, look at the band, feel the emotion, feel the music. What a phone does, it cuts all of that off.

“And so I feel sad. I also feel pissed off, because as a performer, I want to perform for an audience of people that have some emotional feedback – not a bunch of Android twerps.”

Phone use at live shows has been a subject of contentious debate in recent months. One of the most high-profile bands from the rock and metal world to instate phone bans at their shows was Swedish juggernauts Ghost, with frontman Tobias Forge calling gigs with widespread phone use “deeply disconnected”.

In practice, these phone bans are achieved using locking phone pouches – with Yondr being one of the biggest suppliers – to attendees before entering a venue.

While many fans have received such phone bans well, others have voiced their concerns, for example pertaining to the ability to contact people not present at the venue in an emergency, or simply the removal of people’s freedom to choose how to remember the event.

“Many people want to share their experience and why shouldn’t they?” one fan wrote in a Reddit thread discussing Ghost’s phone ban.

As the discussion picks up steam, more and more high-profile artists are considering phone-free shows, with one of the most prominent being pop sensation Sabrina Carpenter. While she hasn’t decided to ban phones at shows yet, she recently revealed she was considering it.

Iron Maiden recently announced a new series of European shows on their Run For Your Lives tour, and while most will allow phones, there will be two phone-free shows in Paris, which will be filmed for an upcoming release.

See a full list of upcoming Iron Maiden dates via the band’s official website.

The post “It’s like some terrible disease”: Bruce Dickinson blasts the use of mobile phone cameras at Iron Maiden shows appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

Orangewood has launched the Clementine, the brand’s first semi-hollow electric guitar and its most premium guitar release to date. As Orangewood continues to expand its lineup beyond acoustics, Clementine represents a new chapter for the brand.

Designed with a comfort-first approach, the Clementine features chambered construction, solid body, solid carved maple top, and a deep belly cut for a smooth yet resonant playing experience. Its glossy maple top paired with satin-finished mahogany back and sides delivers a refined blend of textures and looks. Grover Roto-Grip Locking Vintage tuners and a Tune-O-Matic bridge ensure stability and long-term durability.

The Clementine is equipped with Seymour Duncan Seth Lover™ humbuckers, known for their warm, articulate response. A coil-split toggle alongside standard volume and tone controls provides a wide tonal range. Player-friendly features, including headstock truss rod access and an electronics backplate, make maintenance simple both at home and on tour. A retro 3-ply cream pickguard comes installed, with a bonus black pickguard for players who want to customize the guitar’s aesthetic.

The Clementine semi-hollow electric guitar is available in three finishes—Americano sunburst, Bluebird, and Evergreen—and is priced at $1,495.

KEY SPECS

• Comfort-first design: A modern semi-hollow electric guitar with chambered construction, solid carved top, and deep belly cut
• Solid wood, smooth textures: Glossy maple top with satin mahogany back & sides
• Specialty hardware: Grover Roto-Grip Locking Vintage tuners and Tune-O-Matic bridge
• Award-winning pickups: Seymour Duncan Seth Lover™ humbuckers with three-way pickup selector toggle switch; two-way coil-split toggle switch; and volume/tone controls
• Maintenance: Headstock truss rod adjustment; backplate for electronics access
• Extras: Retro 3-ply cream pickguard installed, with a bonus black pickguard to switch up your style

The Clementine is available now exclusively at orangewoodguitars.com and through select retailers. Priced at $1,495.00 with a hardcase included.

After rumours recently began to swirl surrounding a potential Fleetwood Mac reunion for JK Rowling’s 60th birthday party, the band’s representatives have set the record straight and confirmed these rumours are untrue.

The rumours were ignited after a source hinted to the Daily Mail that was perhaps on the cards. “It is going to be no-expense-spared,” the source said. “She always finds a superstar band to perform for her New Year parties so the birthday will be no different – in fact it could be bigger better than years gone by because this time it’s for her 60th birthday.”

• READ MORE: “He can do a lot of things people didn’t expect him to be able to do”: Dweezil Zappa thinks Wolfgang Van Halen’s success has proved wrong people who gave him a “hard time for no reason”
  

But now, a rep for Fleetwood Mac has called this gossip out as being “categorically false”, adding, “It’s not in the realm of the true.”

As for why a Fleetwood Mac reunion could never be on the cards, band members agree that it’s impossible without Christine McVie, who passed away in 2022.

“When Christine died, Fleetwood Mac died… We cannot replace her,” Stevie Nicks told Rolling Stone in 2024.

Drummer Mick Fleetwood made similar comments in 2023, when he told press at the 2023 Grammys [via Consequence] that a Fleetwood Mac reunion was “unthinkable” following McVie’s death.

While the band did momentarily reunite for 2019 children’s hospital benefit concert and tour in 2018-2019, Christine McVie said in 2022 that the band “had kind of broken up again”. This wasn’t due to the band’s infamous relationship dramas, instead citing health reasons, telling Rolling Stone at the time that she didn’t “physically feel up for it.”

So no, don’t get too excited – Fleetwood Mac aren’t returning any time soon.

The post “This is categorically false”: Fleetwood Mac respond to reunion rumours appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

With the spectacular success of his band Mammoth, Wolfgang Van Halen has certainly proved those who have accused him of riding on the back of his father’s success wrong.

And as a fellow child of a musical pioneer, Dweezil Zappa has his sympathies with what Wolfgang has been through.

• READ MORE: Save up to 70% on guitars, amps and effects in Thomann’s massive Guitar Days sale
  

In a new conversation on the Andertons YouTube channel, Zappa – son of legendary musician Frank Zappa – says Wolfgang has been given a “hard time for no reason”, commending him for being a “trooper” in his response to critisicm

Wolfgang has dealt with critics even since replacing Michael Anthony as Van Halen bassist in 2006. Earlier this year, he said his dad would be “disgusted” at online trolls who think they are defending Van Halen’s legacy.

It’s Wolfgang’s stoicism in the face of criticism that, among other traits, garnered Dweezil Zappa’s admiration, but also his musical skill.

“He can do a lot of things that I think people didn’t expect him to be able to do,” he says. “And I’m sure it’s not because he wanted to prove them wrong. “It’s in his blood. It’s a thing for him to just keep exploring.”

Dweezil also says the fact Wolfgang is also a musician isn’t indicative of nepotism.

“I equate it to like, let’s say my dad was a medieval shoemaker… And he was the guy that invented the pointy-toed shoe.”

“I would have to perfect the pointy-toed shoe to carry the business forward, that’s how I look at it. I’m still working on making that pointy-toed shoe be as good or better than the original.”

Dweezil also notes that it’s important to find your own voice as an artist regardless, as he found himself compelled to do in his youth. However, as he explained in an interview with Marshall in June: “I don’t think I ever really developed my own style until I went through a whole other process of learning a lot about my dad’s music.”

The post “He can do a lot of things people didn’t expect him to be able to do”: Dweezil Zappa thinks Wolfgang Van Halen’s success has proved wrong people who gave him a “hard time for no reason” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

$399/£379, walrusaudio.com

In a world where every boutique pedal builder worth their salt is seemingly getting in on the high-end DSP, it’s worth remembering that when they came along five years ago, the Walrus Mako series was a very big deal.

• READ MORE: Boss PX-1 Plugout FX review – “This is a pedal that could find a home in a lot of rigs”

It was rare enough at the time for boutique builders to invest the time, resource and ingenuity required to take advantage of the sort of high-end chips we saw in big brand modellers, even less so for them to squeeze it into such a compact form factor.

Those first Makos were a hit, and so it’s no surprise that the brand has come along with a MKII version that takes what was so successful about the originals and refines them even further. These MKIIs have been around for a while now, but today we’re checking out the updated version of one of the best of the original crop – the M1 High Fidelity Modulation Machine.

Image: Adam Gasson

Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine – what is it?

Like its predecessor, the M1 is designed to offer high-fidelity digital recreations of all your favourite modulation sounds – to the uninitiated that means chorus, phaser, tremolo, vibrato, rotary speaker, and filter sounds.

New for the M1 MKII is the addition of a flanger mode to one of the chorus settings, addressing what was a bit of an oversight on the original, but that’s not all. There are 18 algorithms in total, so three for each effect type, and there’s also been a fair bit of work done under the hood – several of the algorithms have been redesigned from the ground up to be more usable and better sounding, too.

The most striking difference between MKI and MKII is of course that two-inch OLED display that replaces the bank of fiddly mini-toggle switches. This means you can more easily access and tweak the various secondary functions as the display adjusts to reflect whatever you have to be tweaking.

Elsewhere, the layout has further been tidied up – the sides of the MKI were somewhat cluttered with stereo in and out jacks, a USB-C for software updates AND the power jack all on the sides. The sensible decision has been made here to shift the USB out the way up the top alongside the MIDI in and thru jacks.

Image: Adam Gasson

Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine – usability

One of the truly brilliant things about the Mako range is the way Walrus distilled a lot of the sounds and functionality of a bigger modeller into a compact package that, broadly speaking, put everything you needed on the pedal where any idiot (hello!) could quickly work out what he’s doing.

The worry when adding a screen to proceedings is that you’re going to, by design really, add extra functionality that will necessitate both menu-diving and manual consultation – the true nemesis of any lazy and technology-adverse guitar player.

There’s no doubt that there is an element of that with the MKII – it’s not as WYSIWYG user-friendly as the original, and you probably will need a scan of the online user guide to make sure you know what you’re doing.

At its core things are initially pretty straightforward still – there’s the big central rotary to select which type of effect you want to use, but now you’ll need to click on that knob to cycle through the three modes rather than select it with a mini-toggle.

Above you’ll find three global controls for rate, depth and lo-fi (more on that in a minute) and then you have two further ‘encoder’ rotaries that control what’s being displayed on the screen.

The left hand rotary controls the ‘parameters’ functions – which to those of us who don’t speak Walrus means things like the modulation type, the waveform symmetry, the stereo spread of the tremolo and the attack on the filter effects. There are loads; three for each position, and each can then be cycled through using our old friend the clicky knob.

The right-hand encoder is given over to the various fun bits of the ‘lo-fi’ aspect of this pedal. You can individually set the levels of various parameters like – say, tape age, saturation or noise – and then this whole gumbo can then be added to taste using the global control above it.

If all that seems like a lot to get your head around, well that’s why there are 128 MIDI-recalable presets – or nine onboard the pedal itself. You’re going to need them, because honestly who fancies messing around with all that in the heat of a gig?

One thing that hasn’t fully been fixed since the MKI is that Walrus aren’t exactly giving you a lot of help in that regard either – while the brightness of the OLED doubtlessly makes things easier to see on the fly, actually tweaking the thing is still a fiddly and fraught affair.

Image: Adam Gasson

Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine – sounds

One thing that absolutely set the original M1 apart from so many other compact modulation pedals was the variety and quality of the sounds, and there’s little doubt that the MKII version raises that bar again.

Do most of us really need three Leslie speaker sounds at our toe-tips? Surely not, but the subtle nuances that Walrus has managed to capture between the standard, moving horn and moving drum modes here are really wonderful to hear played out – especially when you start messing around with the mic-distance control.

And it’s the same story across the board, the chorus sounds are lush, deep and inviting – especially the gloriously 80s tri-chorus mode, which will have you sizing up an Armani suit with big shoulder pads in a matter of minutes. I certainly didn’t miss the replaced dual-chorus mode as a result, and the presence of the flanger here instead is very welcome. It’s a pleasantly wooshy thing that can get a bit out of hand if you’re not careful but sometimes that’s all part of the fun, isn’t it?

A good tremolo sound is one of the most sumptuous places to hang out for any guitar player, and I was particularly taken with the Pattern mode, which uses the shape and symmetry parameters to make all sorts of juddery, off-kilter throbs. Bags of fun.

As with the MKI, the secret ingredient of all this is that lo-fi mode, and the extra control and editing you can do over the various parameters now is a great way to dial in just the right amount of weird to enhance your sound without it seeming too artificial.

Image: Adam Gasson

Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine – should I buy one?

If you’ve already got an M1 MKI, I would say there are some very limited reasons to upgrade here – the sounds are broadly very similar and there was absolutely nothing wrong with them in the first place.

If the thing you liked about the original was its ease of use and simple operation, I would stand firm where you are, but if you’ve been pining for the ability to get more control and more tweakability out of your sounds, this really is a no-brainer – it offers a huge amount of editable parameters without any tedious nested menus or what have you.

If, however, you don’t own a MKI and are just after a fantastic and comprehensive modulation pedal that takes up minimal space on your board while offering you some of the very best sounds out there? This is another home run for Walrus and its Mako platform.

Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine – alternatives

If you want a similarly compact modulation pedal that isn’t skirting PS5 price territory, the Electro-Harmonix Mod 11 ($123) sounds nowhere near as good as the Walrus but it’s still pretty good and has loads of sonic options. If peerless sound is your goal and space and precise are less of an issue, then both the Strymon Mobius ($449/£399) and the Eventide H90 Harmonizer ($899/£845) are big, brilliant and, certainly in the case of the Eventide, eye-wateringly expensive.

The post Walrus Mako M1 MKII High Fidelity Modulation Machine review – “some of the very best sounds out there” appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.

‘Hopecore’ was never meant to be the point. But Evan Lo, the artist known across the digital world as Flawed Mangoes, will forever be associated with that neologism. The American musician’s early releases under the moniker – short, emotive tracks that layer swelling ambience underneath delicately-tapped, looping melodies – were swept into the burgeoning online trend for positive posting in 2023, and he found his audience snowballing as his music became a pillar of the movement.

It was clearly something that happened to Lo’s releases, rather than something he set out to do with them. Lo laughs as he tells Guitar.com that he used to find it “cringe” that people were using the term hopecore to describe his music.

Flawed Mangoes is on the Guitar.com Cover. Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com

“Now, I don’t know if I could say I’m at peace with it,” he admits, “but, I don’t care as much these days. How people want to interpret my music is up to them. I’m grateful, at least, that it was a really positive thing that got attached to it, and that was what reached so many people”.

But the word hopecore – which GQ described as “the last gasp of a less-toxic Internet” – is more applicable to content than it is music alone. Hopecore memes and edits are steeped in sentimentality and positive affirmations, with a specific trend for mixing Lo’s music underneath motivational speeches. The combination of Dramamine and Everything Everywhere All At Once star Ke Huy Quan’s joyful Oscar acceptance speech, for instance, has been viewed millions and millions of times, and there’s a related segment on Kai Cenat’s livestream that uses Lo’s track Swimming to soundtrack guests giving their own best motivational speech. Lo even got to take part in that one himself.

Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com

As a movement rooted in the deeper recesses of TikTok, fully grasping what the #hopecore tag actually means requires being ‘terminally online’. But it’s also a pushback against the bleak, inhuman feeling that pervades our post-ironic, post-pandemic, post-AI slop internet.

Regardless, Lo’s standing in hopecore does make sense when you dive into his extensive back catalogue. His earliest ‘pre-hopecore’ viral successes showcase his ability to evoke melancholic nostalgia and peaceful reminiscence with only a few layered tracks of reverb-drenched, killswitch-fitted guitar. His musical vignettes have a warmth to them that immediately takes you out of your doomscroll into at least the memory of warm summer evenings and quiet, still mornings.

“How people want to interpret my music is up to them. I’m grateful that it was a really positive thing that got attached to it”

Out on the road

When Guitar.com speaks to Lo for his cover story, he’s just home from a refreshingly offline activity: his first ever tour as Flawed Mangoes. “The shows were awesome, so much fun,” Lo says. “It’s been so long since I was in that world of live music – it was very fulfilling to reconnect with that.” His trip across the US saw him play three shows in New York, LA and his hometown of Boston. And the translation of an audience grown through viral success into bodies in a room was clearly successful, too – he had no problem selling out all three shows.

Lo and his band spent eight months of rehearsals tightening the live sound of Flawed Mangoes, as well as translating his more atmospheric material into a punchier, full-band format. “Prior to putting the shows together, I was pretty scared about that transition. I knew it was something I wanted to do, I just needed to figure out the best way to go about it. But I committed to playing with a band – I thought that would have way better energy on stage compared to me just sitting there with a looper pedal.”

The commitment to adding energy meant expanding things beyond the ‘bedroom’ instrumentation, and recontextualising the music to sit within a setlist rather than a playlist. “The songs developed their own live arrangements,” Lo says. “We were playing with the structure a lot, changing it to make it more fun to play in a live setting, and giving it more energy, and adding drums to the ones without drums. It turned out to be a really fun experience, and I think it surprised a lot of people, too.”

Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com

The intro’s over

And speaking of surprises – recent Flawed Mangoes releases have featured one in particular, and that’s Lo’s singing. Lo explains that he’s mainly just trying to make music that’s “addictive to listen to”, whatever it sounds like. “I just listen to too much music with vocals not to be inspired by that,” he says. “It’s been a really fun journey, learning how to sing and how to write with vocals.”

But tracks like Surreal don’t just add vocals. They’ve evolved the Flawed Mangoes sound into dense, heavy shoegaze with a mathy edge – too chaotic to gently bubble away in the background of an edit. But while full band stuff may be new territory for Flawed Mangoes, it’s not so much for Lo himself. “In high school I was in a math rock band, and then a jazzy indie band. We didn’t play that many shows, but we rehearsed every week, and wrote songs, and just enjoyed doing that,” he says.

“It was math rock and post rock that were the two colliding worlds for me – bands like Battles and El Ten Eleven were hugely influential. Maybe the biggest influence at the time, though, was Tera Melos. They were doing this crazy tapping along with some really heavy stuff and frantic song structures – all the math rock shit! I really liked that. That’s where I really learned to tap, and write riffs around tapping.”

“I committed to playing with a band – I thought that would have way better energy compared to me just sitting there with a looper pedal”

Producer’s mindset

After spending his high school years playing in bands, Lo put the guitar down when he was at college, finding himself drawn into electronic, producer-focused scenes. “I was more active on SoundCloud, in all these niche internet genres – I got into vaporwave at one point, and lofi – these internet producer scenes where people could release music and find an audience through the community, which was really great.”

Online music discovery, however, has changed a lot since the mid-2010s. In the heyday of vaporwave and lofi beats, microlabels were the place to go to find either an audience or new artists. “Now, it feels like people are realising it can be easier to bypass that label platform when you’re making music – it’s this even playing field. You can build your own brand, and put your own music out there.”

Of course, it’s nice cyclical synchronicity that Lo was active in these scenes – in some ways they were the precursors to a lot of today’s internet-rooted music. “Aesthetically and musically, they still have some influence on what’s popular,” Lo says. “But everything changes very fast.”

The 80s and 90s nostalgia of vaporwave has moved on into reminisces about the jungle and breakbeat soundtracks of PS1 and PS2 video games, the electronic flipside to a revival of Deftones-esque, Y2K-inspired nu-gaze. But regardless of what specific ‘era’ Lo’s music might evoke, though, he states that a “key part” of his sound is “going for that nostalgic sort of feeling – for instance, I really like what Boards Of Canada do, they’re one of my favourite artists.”

Image: Sam Keeler for Guitar.com

Cycling back

After graduating Lo returned to the guitar, because, in his words, “everything’s cyclical”. “The guitar was what ended up breaking through on social media. So then I was thinking, ‘I guess I’m back all in on guitar now’ – but having the producer’s experience and skillset was vital. Being able to mix and master all of my own music then get it out as quickly as possible has been really important for my process.”

It’s also helped him develop his sonic signatures. “On the plugin side, I use a tape emulator called Sketch Cassette all the time for the lo-fi vibe. But maybe more important than that are digital artefacts. They may sound shitty to some people, but they can be tastefully dialled in. I get a lot of them by time-stretching with non-optimal algorithms, or just by using digital pitch-shifters – they really take things to a level that the analogue artefacts just can’t!”

That’s not to say Lo doesn’t appreciate real effects pedals – quite the opposite. His most valued, he tells Guitar.com, is his MXR Dyna Comp, set to give him maximum sustain. And on the guitar side, he got pretty hands-on with his own made-in-Mexico Telecaster to install that DIY killswitch. “For whatever reason a friend of mine was stripping a J Mascis Jazzmaster for parts. We ended up taking the rhythm circuit switch from it and I thought, oh, I can make a killswitch with this!”

“I had heard Jonny Greenwood, Tom Morello and Buckethead use one and thought it was cool. So we soldered it together in their basement and cut a little hole in the pickguard with an Exacto knife, which is why it’s kinda fucked-up looking. The Tele was one I got for $350 second-hand, and it was my backup. So I didn’t care about it as much – there wasn’t much thought into it, other than ‘this would be cool’.”

“People are realising it can be easier to bypass that label platform when you’re making music – it’s this even playing field”

Hopecore and beyond

Obviously the installation of that killswitch turned out to be more than just some cool addition to a backup guitar – Killswitch Lullaby now has well over 100 million Spotify streams, and its viral success was the first step in launching Flawed Mangoes’ career into what it is now.

But it’s arguable that Killswitch Lullaby and other tracks like it, with their melancholic haziness and tightly-curated palette of layered, ambient melodies, were primed to be folded into other content – especially on TikTok, a platform that makes it easy to mash one thing into another. And so came an inevitable drive to build on those shorter pieces.

“I definitely did find it a little limiting,” Lo says. “There was this expectation to create this really specific genre. I think it’s important that I don’t restrict myself, and this is something that I still feel like I have a lot of space to grow in. I was in this one lane of instrumental, drumless guitar music – so making different stuff really helps me get out of my head, and be like, ‘I can do whatever I want, and it’ll be okay’”.

Flawed Mangoes’ new single Anthem is out now.

Words: Cillian Breathnach
Photography: Sam Keeler

The post “I think it’s important that I don’t restrict myself”: Flawed Mangoes is defying genre expectations and moving beyond ‘hopecore’ appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.