Hello Effect Pedal listener, this is your host Wright Seneres. Thanks so much for your kind words and support for this podcast. If you’re an Apple Podcasts user and enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating, or even a review. Ratings and reviews go a long way in helping new people find and enjoy Effect Pedal too. You hear this from a lot of podcasts, but it’s really true. And if you’re not an Apple Podcasts user, you’re still just as awesome. You can tell your friends about Effect Pedal with the share button in your podcast app. So thanks again. And now, on with the show.

“Black guys playing heavy metal” was how Living Colour was first described to me in 1988. Until that point, I had only seen white people playing heavy metal. “Black guys playing heavy metal? Really?” I had to find out what this was all about. So I turned on MTV, and there they were. The video to their big single “Cult of Personality” got a lot of airplay around then. If you’ve ever seen the cover to their debut album Vivid, which leads off with “Cult of Personality”, then you’ve seen the image of bright red beams of light exploding out of a person’s head.   

("Cult of Personality" intro riff)

Videos of young people reacting to old people’s music were all the rage in 2020. If there was a reaction video of me in 1988, a 13-year old kid that loved music but had a lot to learn, listening to that Vivid album for the first time, you would have seen red beams of light exploding out of my head. That was by design. That description of Living Colour – Black guys playing heavy metal – is not really accurate, and missing the point. What I heard that exploded my head was their singular combination of metal, rock, soul, R&B, jazz, punk, and hip hop. And it was heavy, courtesy of a classic distortion pedal, the ProCo RAT.    

My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds, and opening up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.  

Of all of the guitarists I’ve talked about during this podcast, Living Colour’s Vernon Reid is the one who really showed me what those worlds of possibilities were for guitar players. A mad scientist’s mad scientist, constantly experimenting with guitar tones, textures, gadgets, and pedals. A never-ending quest for new sounds, new colors to use on his palette. Premier Guitar has two Rig Rundown videos on YouTube of the extensive gear of Vernon Reid. These videos, they’re like textbooks for me. I learned from him that the envelope exists to be pushed, in guitar playing, in guitar sounds, in music, and in life.  

Part of what also exploded my head with that first album was their socially conscious lyrics. I had heard some of this from white punk bands, but Living Colour was on another level. Subject matter ranging from cults of personality, urban gentrification, inequality in America, superficiality, materialism, racism and more – this was heady stuff for a 13-year old with a lot to learn, but I got an education with that Vivid album. 

The education has continued for nearly 30-plus years, as Living Colour is still as powerful, socially-conscious and sonically interesting as ever. It’s some of the best kind of lifelong learning. Unfortunately, their music is still relevant because social conditions have not changed enough for the better for Black people and other people of color. Pardon my French, but plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The more things change, the more they stay the same. So the work continues.   

After the break, from a basement in Kalamazoo to all around the world. 

For t-shirts or art prints featuring the pedals of Season 1, visit the Effect Pedal website:

Hello Effect Pedal listener, this is Wright. Thanks so much for the kind words and support for this podcast. If you’re an Apple Podcasts user and enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating, or even a review. Ratings and reviews go a long way in helping new people find and enjoy Effect Pedal too. You hear this from a lot of podcasts, but it’s really true. And if you’re not an Apple Podcasts user, you’re just as awesome. You can still tell a friend about Effect Pedal with your podcast app’s share button. So thanks again. And now, on with the show.

(Transition sound)

Most guitar players will tell you, if you want to get better, then you have to get with other musicians and play. Often, that turns into starting a band, or at least joining one. As the 2000s were getting underway, in the basement of my good friend Tony’s condominium, he and I started a band. We had jammed together once in his college apartment a few years prior, during our senior year, and we always talked about doing more of it. Perhaps we were having a quarter-life crisis, but we finally decided to get serious and play. (Well, somewhat serious, as we were always a couple of goofs.) Tony on drums, me on guitar, our friends Diego on lead guitar and Okem on bass, and we were officially a band.  

While we were deciding on a name, I decided that I wanted to upgrade my guitar rig. At the time, I owned a wah pedal (see Episode 3 for more on that), a Boss distortion pedal (Episode 1), and a Korg ToneWorks AX100G multi-effect pedal. The ToneWorks is a fun little unit but I wanted something more. Then I got an idea - what if I combined all three of those? Like Voltron! Enter the Boss GT-3 Guitar Effects Processor.

(Theme song sound)

My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds, and opening up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.  

The GT-3 combines 32 Boss effects, including 12 distortions and overdrives, as well as choruses and flangers, into one unit with dozens and dozens of presets. Notably, it includes something Boss’s parent company Roland calls a “Composite Object Sound Modeling” preamp, which emulates a number of famous guitar amplifiers in history. It also has a great variety of simulations of different pickups, speaker cabinets and guitar synthesizers. It was first released in 1998 as a low-cost alternative to the GT-5, and has since been discontinued and replaced by the GT-6 and other GT models. Like other Boss stompboxes, it’s constructed with a rugged metal case that would do well at a monster truck rally if it had wheels.

(Monster truck sounds)

It could win a demolition derby if you could drive it.

(Demolition derby sounds)

It’s as solid now as the day I got it.   

I got my GT-3 one evening after a tuna fishing trip Tony and his wife Laura took me on. I didn’t catch anything on the tuna boat, but I reeled in this beast of a multi-effect pedal on eBay. It’s a pleasing deep blue color with yellow Cheez Whiz color letters. It has seven foot switches, an expression pedal, a scroll wheel, an LED display, and twenty buttons. Twenty buttons! The seller lived a few miles from me, so I picked it up in person and raced home to plug it in. It was like that movie Pleasantville, when the picture goes from black and white to color. 

(Harp sound)

The ever-large palette of sounds that the GT-3 provided was just what I needed as our little band was beginning, which we called the Modes. I could do more things at once with the GT-3, customizing the footswitches for individual parts of songs. One of the songs we covered in that band was “Lucky” by Radiohead, and with the GT-3, I could get a nice delay effect for the intro, which is actually played where the strings...

Hello Effect Pedal listener, this is Wright. Thank you to all you awesome listeners and subscribers. If you enjoy the show, please leave a 5-star rating, or even a review, in your favorite podcast app. Ratings and reviews go a long way in helping new people find and enjoy Effect Pedal too. I’m sure you hear that from all the podcasts, but it’s really true. So thanks again for your support. And now, on with the show.

(Harp sound)

Many people have a band that they got into “before everyone else” did. But does it count if you first heard about them on MTV? Does being on a national, even international, platform like MTV disqualify them from being undiscovered? Probably. But in this case it was the so-called alternative rock show 120 Minutes, which was on relatively late at night in the 90s, so besides me, not that many people were watching. But those that were watching in the spring of 1991, like me, saw a really trippy video by a band called The Smashing Pumpkins. 

("Siva" guitar intro sound)

That video was for a song called “Siva” from their first full-length album Gish. It was a gritty, noisy-in-a-good-way, and in my opinion, underappreciated record. Besides the “psychedelic bordering on creepy” imagery in the video, what really grabbed my attention was the distortion-heavy twin guitar attack. It checked a lot of boxes for me: the riffs and solos were interesting, there were dynamic shifts from loud to quiet and back again, and the distortion itself had a really great fuzz sound.  

("Siva" guitar solo sound)

Fast forward to the summer of 1993, right after I had graduated from high school. The Pumpkins had moved on to a major label and put out their second album, a virtually flawless one called Siamese Dream. There was more polish to this album. The grit of Gish was left behind. Siamese Dream exploded. Everyone knew The Smashing Pumpkins then. Now everyone heard what I heard, that killer twin guitar attack, but still with that great fuzz distortion. That fuzz was courtesy of an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi effect pedal.  

(Sound of theme song)

My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds, and opening up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.  

In the early days of rock and roll, using cheap or damaged amplifiers and speakers with the volume cranked up created this noisy, distorted sound, with the peaks and valleys of the signal waves getting clipped off. Link Wray is famous for punching holes in his amplifier speakers with a pencil to get that sound. With an effect pedal, we can achieve that sound with electronics, and without resorting to damaged equipment. With a Big Muff, you can get that fuzz distortion sound without damaging your equipment. 

The Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi guitar pedal that I own is from around 2008, known as the Re-Issue New York City version even though it’s not actually a reissued product. And not to be confused with actual reissues from 2019, the Op-Amp Reissue or the Nano Big Muff Pi. The Big Muff dates back to the late 60’s, when legend says Jimi Hendrix bought one of the first ones at the famous Manny’s Music Store in New York City. It was in the arsenals of a lot of your favorite guitarists from the 70’s and mine, like David Gilmour from Pink Floyd, Carlos Santana, and Ace Frehley from KISS. John Lennon too. And more than just the Smashing Pumpkins in the 90s and beyond, like Dinosaur Jr., the Black Keys, and the White Stripes.  But my favorite Big Muff story is that Tony Peluso, the lead guitarist in the Carpenters, used a Big Muff for the absolutely fuzzed-out solos in “Goodbye to Love”. When you absolutely, positively need to fuzz out, don’t take it from me, take...