NAMM 2017: Outlaw Effects announce two new pedals
A new micro tremolo and overdrive for 2017.
Outlaw Effects have announced two new mini stompboxes, the Rocker Box Tremolo and Deputy Marshal Plexi Distortion.
The Rocker Box is an optical tremolo pedal that offers players rich and natural sounding tremolo effects. A Bias control adjusts the tonal complexion of the sound wave delivering everything from smooth and polished trem to the looser, non-symmetrical waveforms of vintage tube amps. Depth and Speed controls offer the ability to further fine-tune the effect.
The Deputy Marshal captures the sound of Plexi-era British tube amps that defined the classic rock era. Standard Gain, Tone and Volume controls allow the player to dial in his or her distortion tone with precision. A Bright/Normal toggle switch offers even more versatility, with beefed-up highs just a flick of a switch away. As with the Rocker Box, the Deputy Marshal offers true bypass operation.
Both pedals retail for $60 and will begin shipping in February 2017.
Summer NAMM 2016: Outlaw Effects introduces four new pedals
These compact pedals could solve all of your pedalboard woes.
Micro effects pedal company Outlaw Effects has introduced two new power supplies and two new micro pedals.
The Power Supplies
The Kerosene (MSRP: $79.00) micro power supply helps users streamline their pedal boards by eliminating individual power cords/wall adapters. With eight 9V DC outputs each offering 300mA of current, and 2000mA of overall output, Kerosene has plenty of fuel to burn.
The Iron Horse (MSRP: $89.00) tuner/power supply features eight 9V DC outputs, two of which offer 500mA and the other six providing 100mA. The integrated tuner boasts a large 1 5/8" x 1 1/8" easy-to-read LCD display. Your signal is muted when tuning, and True Bypass switching retains the purity of your signal when the tuner is not in use.
Kerosene and Iron Horse each include eight 550mm DC connector cables, allowing the user to power a wide assortment of pedals and two 200mm polarity converter cables, making it possible to power pedals that require a positive-center.
The Pedals
The Lasso Looper (MSRP: $99.00) is a compact-sized 24 bit, 44kHz looping pedal lets you build multiple layers of guitar sound into rich sonic creations. Lasso Looper features a generous 10 minutes of recording time and unlimited overdubs, and allows users to record, playback, overdub, stop and delete all at the touch of a single, easy-to-use footswitch.
The Six Shooter II (MSRP: $45.00), is a new and improved version of the company's popular Six Shooter tuner pedal. This precision, compact-sized chromatic tuner is suitable for a wide range of instruments. The Six Shooter II features a quicker response time and more accuracy than its predecessor, and boasts a larger LCD screen (1 3/16" x 2").
Review: D'Addario Pedalboard Cable Kit
Does D'addario's custom patch cable kit solve Mark's pedalboard problems?
With the explosion in popularity of pedalboards in the last five or so years, the amount of pedalboard accessories available has also experienced rapid growth. Once the territory of boutique brands such as George L, custom patch cables kits have now gone mainstream. The Pedalboard Cable Kit is D'Addario's first foray into custom cables and retails at £54.99, a price that falls in line with similar kits from Diago and Evidence Audio.
What do you get?
The Pedalboard Cable Kit includes 10 feet of instrument cable, ten right angled jack plugs, a cable cutting tool and a small screwdriver for attaching the cable to the plugs. The cable seems rugged, as do the jack plugs, and the entire package is incredibly well made.
Why use custom patch cables?
As you can see from the above photo, my pedalboard is neither huge nor particularly complicated, yet using a mix of pre-made patch cables and short instrument cables has left it pretty untidy. When putting together a board using pre-made cables, you are constantly having to make compromises. Either the cables won't quite stretch to where you want the pedals to sit on the board and you have to move them closer together, or the pedals are too close and you end up with excess cables underneath the board. As you can see from my board, this means you often end up with cables all over the place, often interweaved with power leads. The underside was even worse...
How does the D'addario Pedalboard Cable Kit work?
Making patch cables with the Pedalboard Cable Kit is really simple. First, plan how long you need the cable to be. I did this by placing the jack plugs in to the in and out sockets of my pedals and then laying them out on the board in the positions I wanted them in. This allowed me to accurately gauge exactly how long each cable would need to be. I then cut each cable to the desired length using the supplied cutting tool. Attaching the cables to the jack plug is also very easy. Simply unscrew the small screw on each jack plug and feed the cable into the plug until it stops. Tighten the screw back up, and the connection is complete. When making up the cables for my board, I only had one instance where the cable did not work first time, and this was solely down to not feeding the cable in far enough before tightening the screw. This was easily resolved by untightening it, feeding the cable in further and re-tightening. The connection between the cable and plug feels solid and as convincing as any pre-made patch cable.
The Results
As you can see from the above photo, my pedalboard ended up being much tidier once the custom patch cables were in place. I no longer had to use the instrument cable to go from one row to another, and could avoid power cables crossing audio cables. There was no longer excess cable underneath the board, meaning that it now sat truely flat on the floor. Aesthetically and functionally, a massive improvement.
You may also be able to spot that I am still using a single pre-made patch cable due to there only being five included in the Pedalboard Cable Kit. While five will probably be enough for most users (it seems to be the norm for this type of kit) it would be incredibly useful to include one or two more pairs of jack plugs, or at least make these available to purchase separately.
My only other criticism of the kit would be the size of the jack plugs. While this wasn't a huge inconvenience for my board, I did have to shuffle the Soul Food and Echoplex pedals to accommodate the fairly chunky jacks, and I would imagine this becoming trickier on bigger and more complicated boards.
The Verdict
The D'Addario Pedalboard Cable Kit is a really neat product. It provides a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution to tidying up compact pedalboards. My only reservations are that the size of the angled jack plugs may prove difficult to accommodate into bigger and more complicated setups. Still, for the average user, this kit is a vastly better option than buying a bunch of individual (and fairly useless), pre-made patch cables.
8/10 - Mark
The Gear of ArcTanGent: Bear Makes Ninja
A look into the unique and bizarre set ups of the bands responsible for pushing effects driven music into new territories. In this episode we take a look at Bear Makes Ninja's resident Jagmaster wielding tap dancer.
Over the last 3 years ArcTanGent Festival has been responsible for uniting some of the most interesting guitar music being made. Technically there have probably been more effect pedals in one place over the ATG weekend than there are in a Boss Factory.
Following another amazing year of ATG I caught up with some of the most brilliant bands playing the festival and had a chat with them about their weird and wonderful gear.
Bear Makes Ninja make quintessential British Math-Rock. Their classic 3-piece format allows each instrument to shine in its own completely unique way. Their quirky rhythm section is as off kilter as it is solid, and gives the effect crazed guitar enough room to flail wildly about in a refreshingly poppy fashion.
I hooked up with James, the band's Jagmaster wielding tap dancer, and asked him a few super nerdy questions about his set up...
Walk me through your pedal board. What goes into what?
Firstly, the board itself....I made it from a wooden pallet! I took inspiration from Pedaltrain and this crazy thing I saw online with the holes to tidy the cables away. It's the third one I've made so far and seems to be holding together nicely! I plan on painting it soon too.
Set up wise, I have the guitar going into a Behringer Compressor. This stays on permanently and just neatens up my tone a little bit, providing a bit more clarity and punch and it sustains really well too! I've had a few Behringers and have been replacing them as time goes by. They're great for anyone wanting an introduction to pedals without the high costs, but tonally some of them do suffer when compared to higher priced pedals.
From the compressor into my TC Electronics Polytune 2. I find that having the compressor first just helps the tuner to be a little more accurate, cutting tuning times down a little. The polytune is great, nice and accurate with a screen that I've never had problems reading from. It also has a power in AND out, meaning that I can power more pedals from this too!
I currently have an Artec Powerbrick, which I've mounted under the board, which powers the 8 pedals I have on there at the moment, but I feel I will have to upgrade this at some point soon!
Next, we go from the tuner and into the EHX Pitch Fork. This is a great little octave pedal, I'm using it mostly on the 1 up and 1 down setting, allowing me to play 3 octaves at once, which is great for single note riffage! It's one of the best octave pedal I've played in terms of tracking and you can even plug an expression pedal into it so you can pretty much use it like a digitech whammy!
The Pitch Fork then goes into a Nux Mod Core. I bought this a couple of years ago for about £30, mainly because it has ton of effects, which are really tweakable with the addition of a 'deluxe' switch, which essentially doubles the amount of effects on the pedal by adding extra beats and sweeps in the effects. I'm using the Phaser setting at the moment in a couple of tunes. I just wanted to play around with a few different noises and on my tight budget this was a great find!
The NUX goes into a Behringer Digital Reverb. This is one of the first pedals I bought, again because it had the most effects to experiment with for the cheapest price. I tend to use the Cave setting the most, but the Room setting is nice too. The 'Space' setting is my favourite, which adds octaves to the reverb. Mmmm octaves! I'm aiming to replace this pedal soon though as I've noticed that whilst it was a great introduction for me into Planet Verb, it seems to suck a lot of tone from the original guitar sound, compared to others I've tried more recently. My favourite so far is the Line 6 Verbzilla, which I think the Behringer is based on as it has a lot of the same effects, but there's so much more clarity and warmth with the Line 6.
Next up is another Behringer. This one has been my favourite and probably the most important pedal on my board. It's called an 'Ultra Shifter Harmonist' and the setting I bought it for is called 'Trem Bar'. With this, you can make your guitar sweep up or down an octave, or any note in between at a whole range of speeds, from siren-slow, to pretty much instantly. For a mere £35, it's provided me with loads of fun and although the other settings aren't really that great tracking-wise, sometimes that can provide an interesting, crapped-out sort of effect in itself! It's the pedal I mostly get asked about after we play at gigs.
From there is a Boss Mega Distortion, which gives me loads of distortion, but not too much that it goes into chuggy metal territory. I wanted a distortion that was nice and clear when playing 4, 5, or 6 note chords with high gain and this does the job well! For recording, I use a Wampler Slostortion, which is a bit more difficult for me to use live, but is a tad more versatile and has a bit more clarity in tone.
The last pedal is a Boss RC-30 Loopstation. This I use for live looping some guitar parts and also as a riff bank. I'll record ideas into it and save them on it's memory for practice sessions etc. You can also plug it into a computer and load samples onto it, or copy your saved loops onto your computer. Last Halloween, we loaded horror movie themes onto it and played them in between songs at a show we played!
Interesting tones are so often the result of stacking rather than a single stomp box. Is there a selection of pedals that you find stack especially well to create something unusual?
I've been using the Trem Bar setting on the Harmonist with the pitchfork for some meaty 3 octave sweeps and the Reverb and Mod Core pedals stack up nicely to create a 'Phasey cave' sound. Both of these feature quite a bit on the newBear Makes Ninja album we've just recorded and hope to release in March next year.
What is your choice of amplification, what led you to this choice, and how do you make it your own?
My current amp is one I've had for many years. It's a 100w Laney TF300 Valvestate combo, but I wasn't quite getting the power I wanted from the single 12" speaker that was supplied, so I bought a Kustom 4x12 cab and started running the combo through that. It was loads louder and clearer now, so I had no need for the single 12" speaker and promptly chopped it out, effectively making it a head unit and ultimately taking up less space in the van/car/train/bus/ferry! I then painted the wood I had used to make a new shell and fitted it with some old denim and some handmade glow-in-the-dark knobs! Ahhhh, pretty!
My favourite feature of this amp, and probably the reason I haven't upgraded yet is the 'Vibe' switch on the far right. I have no idea of the technicalities behind this switch, but it just makes everything more better! Without it, the distortion sounds fuzzy, but with it on, it's a lot tighter, and it just makes the cleans a lot fatter sounding too!
I did borrow a mates Marshall JCM 900 for a while, which was awesome so when I have the pennies I may have to invest in something with valves!
What is your choice of guitar, how did you come to play that guitar, and what makes you stick with it?
The Jagmaster has been my long time guitar of choice. It was a present for my 16th birthday, back when I worshipped grunge! I've had many guitars since, including a more recent remake of this model, but nothing has compared so far! I can't really pinpoint it as its half rusted out, half replaced, knocked and banged about, but I guess it's the feel of it. I've bought higher priced guitars that I thought would be similar, only to be disappointed and return to this one! The next guitar I hope to try out is a Vintage Modified Squier Jaguar HH. It's the closest thing I can find to my Jagmaster as Fender don't even make a version!
I mainly use the neck pickups on this guitar and I find the factory fitted humbuckers on this model produce a nice thick bluesy tone, whilst the bridge pickups have clear mids and highs without being too raspy.
