Unless you’ve been living under a rock you have most likely heard the sitar, an Indian instrument which creates a very complex and distinct sound derived by the use of sympathetic strings, a long neck, and gourd chamber.

The Ravish Sitar (whose name is probably a play off of the Godfather of Sitar’s Ravi Shankar) is coming to us from our fine folks at Electro-Harmonix. The task of recreating such a complex and distinct instrument is something I would consider impossible. Others have tried but let’s just say that the prize was still up for grabs, until now. After perusing even the 10 presets I was convinced that if the Sitar was going to be emulated by a guitar pedal, then it’s got to be the Ravish.

Read Gus Green full review here.

I had the pleasure of attending the 2012 NAMM Conference in Anaheim, CA. It’s a beautiful thing when a large selection of the world’s music equipment manufacturers get together to show off their goods in hopes of impressing buyers and exciting faithful followers for what’s to come. Although, buyers and manufacturers aren’t the only ones in attendance. I got reminded of this when I was jamming out on the new Dave Smith Instruments’ Drum Machine called Tempest. I looked to my right whilst in the middle of pounding out a beat and saw none other than the great Stevie Wonder standing next to me!

Celebrity sightings aside, all in all NAMM 2012 was overwhelmingly iOS-centric. So many iPads and the like. However, there was an interesting nod to the vintage and analog sounds of yesteryear as well. I am expecting a great year of new music in 2012. As always it will be fueled by all of this new and exciting equipment. – Gus Green and Paolo De Gregorio

There were some things that caught my attention and stood out as being new and noteworthy. First off we’ve got the iStomp from Digitech. We will be reviewing the pedal in its entirety soon but just a quick explanation: it’s a programmable single stomp box that requires an Apple iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch running the latest OS and a Digitech app called Stomp Shop to operate. The idea is that you buy a single iStomp pedal which is just a basic black stomp box with 4 knobs and you can program it to be any of the desired effects from the app. Some of the pedals to select from include emulations of the Rat distortion, tape delay, tube screamer, analog chorus, jet flanger, and plate reverb just to name a few. They range $5-10 and will continue to grow in number and evolution. It’s great for times when you need “that sound” but you don’t want to invest an arm and a leg considering you may not use it again for six months.

A similar iOS accessory is coming to us from IK Multimedia. The iRig Stomp is a stomp version of the already popular Amplitube iRig. It adds an attenuator, bypass switch and stereo 1/4″ IO to the feature set and is meant to be a guitar interface for iOS amp modeling software. Looks nice in its sleek black casing, and definitely more appealing for live guitar players rather than the original version.

Alesis also showcased a new and rather impressive product for iPad, the AmpDock, to be released later in the year. This product’s appeal is that it works with any guitar application out there, and allows a deeper control of your tone shaping app through 4 foot-switches, one volume-like foot pedal and 6 knobs accessible by hand. Also, the fact that it looks like some kind of futuristic Ferrari accessory is a nice touch – since we can’t afford the real thing…

On the good old “i-less” side of things, a product that blew us away was the Infinity Looper by Pigtronix (out in April). There have been many loop pedals that have been popularized over the years by one man bands and none of them have been very good at syncing with other sources. This particular looper seems to have the answer to all my loop pedal syncing woes. It allows for two independent loops with individual I/O routing as well as different options for loop length. In addition, they can be in sync, out of sync with each other or lock to MIDI time clock. It also has an AUX out for sending a feed to stage monitors. If it does what it claims to do well it will be a force to be reckoned with in the loop pedal department.

Vox is putting out a pretty extensive digital delay pedal called the Delay Lab. It is set to emulate several types of delays past and present. With emulations of the old school Bucket-Brigade style analog delay to the primitive quality of early digital delays this pedal claims to have it all with a few surprises thrown in to boot. One of them is a Space Delay with string-like overtones that add to the spacial depth. It even has a 28 second looper.

From TC Electronic we have the Polytune Mini which builds on the same technology as its bigger brother but at a third of the size – great if you have a crowded pedalboard. It features the ability to strum only once to make all of your tuning adjustments. It also allows for Drop D and Capo tunings and keeps tuning accuracy to +/- 0.5 Cents. This is a great concept and I expect to see more and more bands use this in the future.

Lastly, I want to give a shot out to one of my favorite synth manufacturers, Moog. It’s not a pedal but it’s a rad little synth. It’s a 2 Oscillator synth with the Legendary Moog Ladder Filter circuit called Minitaur. It’s aimed mainly at folks that want to add an analog bass line to their performance without breaking the bank. I checked it out personally and will say that it sounded big and fat and will retail pretty modestly considering the high-end manufacturer, Moog Music Inc.

With thousands of delay pedals available, not to mention recording plugins, choosing an effect can be overwhelming. Are you looking to add a subtle slapback or an intense rhythmic pattern?

While it’s capable of everything you’d expect from a delay pedal, Seymour Duncan’s SFX-10 Deja Vu Tap Delay truly excels at the latter. Though its sound is not as immediately glowing as an Electro Harmonix Memory Man or controls as eccentric as a Line 6 Delay, the Deja Vu’s strength lies in its flexibility and precision when dialing customized sounds into a live environment.

The Deja Vu contains all the standard delay controls (wet/dry knob, feedback, delay time) with some notable extras. A dedicated tap tempo footswitch with a ratio knob (half note, quarter note etc.) makes it unbelievably easy to adapt complicated delay settings on the fly. Meanwhile, a toggle between a true bypass mode and trailing repeats lets you kill the delay effect while letting the echoes trail off. This allows for adding anything from sweet flourishes to ringing shock waves. Finally, a feedback insert jack lets you apply a separate effects chain to the wet signal, giving you endless possibilities for customization.

Even without using the insert, the Deja Vu has some nice built-in features for shaping the delay’s tone. The pedal has a D/A blend knob which moves seamlessly from a crisp snappy digital sound to warm true-analog echo. The modulation dial moves between a few preset flanging and vibrato style effects (similar to the Electro Harmonix Memory Man). They add some interesting character to the delay, however, they aren’t labelled which is a little confusing at first.

For those who need precision delay, but don’t want to depend on using midi or backing tracks, the Deja Vu is indispensable. Sonically, it holds its own against most high-end delays, with enough tweak-ability to shine in any style of music. – Ezra Tenenbaum

The Eau Claire Thunder from Dwarfcraft Devices is the big one; big tones, big features and a big, knob laden enclosure. This pedal cranks out all manner of fuzz from the blunted, smokey kind of Sabbath style fog to the much more modern aggressive waves of noise rock bliss. The five knobs on the pedals face seem infinitely interactive and changing one leads to variations in the way they combine with each other. While some people may find this strange, it should be noted that the ECT is not a good house guest. It’s cooperating just long enough to get the job done before trashing the place and leaving through the back door. Sturdy metal construction and heavy duty foot switches de rigueur are there as expected, while the finish is kind of gum paste propaganda poster which is refreshing and punk-y.

The ECT sounds, at times, like a circular saw. It won’t be polite. It may be out to steal your woman, drink your whiskey and destroy your hearing. Housed within its die-cast enclosure, it has the unrelenting force of a Wisconsin winter storm. At its core is a standard volume, tone, gain arrangement yielding a distortion that is much less tubby and bouncy than a Muff derivative. The “Timewarp” toggle switches out two different sets of clipping diodes changing the attitude of the pedal from vintage to modern, a feature that I find almost doubles the uses of this pedal. Lost in the mix? Bump the “Toneblast” footswitch – which removes the tone stack from the circuit – and get unfiltered distortion in waves. Want to blind people with oscillating shards of noise tunable to the frequency of your choice? The ECT has got you covered with an internal feedback loop on a momentary foot switch so spin the “Feedback Tune” knob and blast away.

If all of this sounds exciting that’s because it is. While most effects out there are rehashing old designs or dragging long dead circuits up from the grave, AEN and the very small crew over at Dwarfcraft are doing it their own way. Their renegade designs command attention from all walks, and have found their way into the arsenals of some of the most creative and talented musicians and sonic experimentalists including Justin Meldal Johnson, Juan Alderete and Takeshi from Boris. If you are looking for something new and exciting we recommend you check out all of the wondrously different and exciting creations from Dwarfcraft.

The Astro Tone Fuzz by Analogman is a recreation of the long extinct Sam Ash Fuzzz Boxx. This updated clone is loaded into an MXR sized enclosure and is a bucket of rip – roaring 60’s style fuzz that is bound to make you blow your top. Clever reverse engineering and modern construction based on the original 1960’s design (with NOS silicon transistors to boot) delivers a pedal that can add grit, punch and fuzz without getting lost in a live mix: putting a stop to overblown or mushy bass. The expert fit and finish comes as no shock to anyone associated with Analog Mike’s work and modern quality components leave little doubt to the units’ sturdy-ness. Top mounted jacks always get bonus points here, especially when pedalboard space is a concern.

Running the Astro Tone through a small tube combo at home yields a sound that is organic yet aggressive. The notes swarm but retain a certain focus that allows your playing to remain articulate and intelligible. The tone knob operates over a fairly wide range and can add back some beef to your tone although the sound is anything but thin. Later at soundcheck I am plugged into a 70’s non master volume half stack and the results are devastating. This pedal adds a grunt to an amp that already kicks like a mule. While somewhat less fuzzy than before, the resulting sound is balanced and articulate and still sounds like my guitar through an amp. Somewhere between an overdrive and a fuzz lies the Astro Tone and it’s awesome. So many pedals sound noticeably effect-y it’s a relief to hear something so traditional sound so fresh.

Most engineers and producers, to allow themselves more options at the mixing stage, record guitars (electric ones in particular) with two or more microphones placed at a different distance from the sound source. Shoegazer bands are particularly famous for using this technique, which indeed can help give the guitar a more roomy and open sound (if the mics are spread across the stereo field), but can also be problematic, because of a little mysterious word called “phase”.

We are about to walk you through a quick and easy experiment you can try at home that will open your eyes about how important phase is!

1. Place two mics in front of your amp: one very close to the cone and another one about 2 feet away.
2. Record an electric guitar part, preferably distorted chords or power chords.
3. After you record, change the two tracks’s settings so that they have roughly the same volume and position them both in the center of the stereo field so that you get a perfectly mono sound.
4. Now insert a short delay plug-in on the track of the closest mic,
5. Play the two tracks back together in a loop with the delay set at 0 ms (no delay) and every few seconds increase it 5 milliseconds at a time.
6. If you have a “phase reverse” button in your DAW, experiment with that as well.

You will notice that every time you change the delay the guitar tone you get will be slightly different. Reversing the phase might have even more drastic results. That is what “phase” does to your recorded guitar sound – or any other sound source for that matter. And that delay trick is used by many producers to get the right tone from a combination of mic sources.