Jake Behrens

Pedals.

As people following my Instagram account know, I’ve been building my arsenal back up for playing. I thought I’d walk through my pedal setup and talk about why I chose what I chose, etc. I’ve done a lot of searching lately to come up with the choices I’ve made, so hopefully this will help someone out since rig info/recommendations for my typical genres of music (Ska/Punk) aren’t usually found online.

These are in the order I use them, so assume the guitar is first.

Preamp…

Ernie Ball Wah

I like the Cry Baby as much as the next guy, but I wanted a wah with a bit more subtlety. When I watched videos of the Ernie Ball Wah side by side with the Cry Baby, it was the general complaint…for me, it’s just what I wanted.

BOSS TU-2 Chromatic Tuner

This is standard. If you’re going to have a non-rackmount tuner, just get the BOSS one. It’s rugged, dependable, and it works perfectly. Mine is old, hence the TU-2, there’s a TU-3 now.

MXR Dyna Comp

I wanted to spiff up some of my clean tone solos. As I practice more, it’ll be less of an issue, but soft hammer ons next to loud pull offs or flat picking a repeating melody and getting more or less attack each time kill me at the moment.

The compressor pulls things together and gives a more even sound. Initially, I tried to use it to boost my distortion for leads, but the distortion compresses the signal to where the compressor really doesn’t do much boosting. It’ll pull things together a bit, but that’s about it.

So it turned out to be a wonder in disguise. Great to clean up solo work or repeating melodies. Not great for boosting. You’ve been warned! :)

Wampler Sovereign Distortion

Ok, I may be playing Ska/Punk, but I love some “oomph” in my rhythm distortion and enough gain to glam out on 80’s solos. This pedal is perfect. You can get strong overdrive tones all the way to pure metal, but it really hits the “brown” sound well and gets you close to a Marshall JCM800 head when you want to. For me, that’s what I wanted. The ability to dial it in, but not an amp-in-a-box.

JHS Banana Boost

OMG, I love this one. You might say, “It’s just a boost pedal, no big deal.” You would be wrong though. Put after my distortion, this pedal pulls my entire rig together. I’m currently using a Vox AC30 Custom Classic and its clean tone is a wonder, however, you have to turn up the channel volume and then dial back the master volume to break up the sound and saturate the tubes. No more. The Banana Boost takes care of this for me and allows me to dial in a great overdrive just from boosting the signal volume into my amp.

The other side of this pedal is that when placed after my distortion, it will not only boost the volume for solos, but it’ll help dial in a bit of treble boost as well. Funny enough, my distortion pedal has a boost switch that I could flip, but this pedal does it for me with a stomp. And if I’m not using my distortion pedal, it helps push my amp just over that breakup point.

I’m overly satisfied. It’s a freaking fabulous pedal.

Effects Loop…

Tech 21 Boost D.L.A.

My delay pedal needs were VERY specific. I wanted 1 - Infinite repeats possible, but I needed trails. Trails are where you actuate the pedal, play something, then turn it off and keep playing, but the delay keeps “trailing” on. This pedal not only does meets both of these needs, but it has a really nice grouping of dials to get the perfect mix of wet/dry that you want.

I had read that I should place delays in the effects loop, if my amp had one, and it does. This ensures that it’s the final sound that delayed and not something that the breakup of the tubes will muddle.

So what’s next? I’ve found that I’m quite the pedal whore. I enjoy the fiddling with tiny knobs to see what sound I can get. To be honest, I’d really like to get a nice reverb pedal that will do trails (so far, I’m looking at the Strymon Blue Sky) and I’d like to find a good octaver/pitch shifter to muck around with cheesy 80’s solo glitz live. Past those two “necessities,” I’d say a phaser or flanger would be fun. I have a BOSS PH-3, but I’d like to get something a bit more analog. We’ll see.