Hi, this is Mark Marshall with theproaudiofiles.com
and guitaristmarkmarshall.com.
In this week's episode of Anatomy of Guitar
Tone, I want to talk about using a phaser
pedal in front of a distortion pedal.
I did this to simulate a little bit of a cocked
wah vibe, and for those of you that don't
know what a cocked wah is, that is when you
take your wah wah and you place it on, but
you find a fixed position to leave it in.
You might sweep until you find what a lot
of people would call the sweet spot.
Mick Ronson from David Bowie's band Ziggy
Stardust, the Hunky Dory era used to do that,
and Frank Zappa is well known for doing that.
What's cool about using the phaser pedal instead
of a wah is it goes through a couple of stages.
It doesn't just stay fixed.
I was using this ripple jam pedal.
It's actually called The Ripple.
It's a phase 45 style phaser, and it — that
means it goes through two stages of phase.
I like that because it didn't — the sweep
isn't super broad, and I placed that before
this Empress Heavy pedal, which I was using
to kind of emulate a little bit of an 80's
kind of JCM800 vibe.
I have the gate on minimal.
What settings do I have it on here...
I have it on what's called normal, which just
clamps down, but it's not super aggressive.
It's a very musical gate, I will say, on this
pedal.
I didn't have the gain up too high or anything
too fancy about it.
I was running into this Headstrong Lil King
Reverb.
[guitar with phaser on]
[guitar with phaser off]
I came about this sound recently when I was
writing a cue for a television show, and they
were requesting something with a bit of an
early to mid-80's vibe, so I was going for
kind of that big guitar sound.
Recently, I had done another video where I
talked about the placement of a phaser in
your signal chain, and I'm not going to show
that example in this video, but you can check
out my video where I place the phaser before
and after an overdrive to hear how that affects
the tonality of a guitar.
