Recreating My Guitar Rig From 20 Years Ago
When I put together this week’s article, I couldn’t help thinking of our Mayan ancestors. They predicted that the world would end in the year 2012. Honestly, if they’d pushed out their prediction by about eight years, they probably would have gotten a lot more support, but that’s a whole other subject. We had a similar doomsday doctrine in my generation. I’m talkin’ about Y2K. The year 2000. The year that every computer was supposedly going to crash, when the economy was going to tank, when the world would end in flames and lava.
The main support we had for this theory was the year 2000 being such a nice, round number, plus it was the beginning of a new millennium. I don’t know about you guys, but the only millennium I’m familiar with is the Millennium Falcon.**
**Nick just explained to me that the Star Wars films are supposedly science fiction. Sure.
Now, it’s the year 2020 and the world is still standing, so we know that Y2K didn’t end up being a complete disaster.
In fact, this year marks the twentieth anniversary of something just as historically significant: my Y2K guitar rig. I've found photographs, I've collected clues, and even bought some of my old gear back so that we could take a journey together. After two decades of being a guitar pedal nut, loving guitars, loving history, running a pedal company, designing circuits and now even sitting in this room with thousands of guitar pedals, I’ve realized that it's hard to remember what my first gear was like. What was it like to purchase it? Why did I buy it?
We're going to dive into the very first gear I owned: the pedals, the amps and my first guitar. I'm going to look back at this gear as a much older, slightly wiser musician to see if it holds up.
My Y2K Guitar and Amp
The guitar in my Y2K rig was a heavily modified 1997 Mexican Telecaster Deluxe. By “heavily modified” I mean that I tried to make this a clone of Jonny Greenwood’s guitar. No regrets. Now, this guitar has been through some battles. It’s covered in bumps, nicks and scars from playing clubs and frat parties back in the day. The original strap (which I still have) has my uncle's military badge from his jacket in Vietnam pinned on it. I bought the guitar itself off a guy in a bar for $300 around ’98.
The amp I used in my Y2K rig was a Fender FM100H. The H stands for head, ‘cause it has an obnoxiously big head. I bought it on a Musician's Friend credit card that my mom gave me -- shout out to my mom, you guys! -- and it showed up on the front porch: a 4x12 cab. It scared her, it scared the dogs and I had to cram it into a Ford Ranger to go around town gigging. We’ll go into more detail on this amp later on in the article.
Now, it’s not easy living in the year 2020 and trying to remember who the heck I was in 2000. That's twenty years ago. This is two decades of life, two decades of learning new guitar riffs, tones, and techniques. Over twenty years, I heard my new favorite players and listened to music that didn't even exist back in the aughts. That’s why this article (and the JHS Show episode we based it on) was a pickle to put together. Not only do I have to reconstruct the gear from my Y2K rig, but I have to try to get into the same headspace that I was in twenty years ago, to play guitar now like I would have played it then. You can watch the JHS Show episode for yourself to see if we succeeded.
My First Pedals: 1995 - 1997
The very first guitar pedals I ever owned were weird. They were basically whatever I could find at the time, which was roughly ’95 through ’97. Around this time, I’d gotten my first guitar. I was learning how to tune the guitar, learning Nirvana riffs, Cake riffs, things like that. I found pedals in pawn shops, newspaper ads, wherever I could.
In fact, one of the very first pedals that I ever bought was a Rocktek Chorus Pedal off some guy in a local paper listing. Even though I didn’t really want a chorus pedal at the time, it did allow me to play “Come As You Are” over and over, so I stand by this purchase.
Somewhere, (probably at a pawn shop) I also got my hands on an Ibanez Soundtank TS5 Tube Screamer. I’m not sure any starter rig would be complete without one.
But the jewel of my early pedal board was definitely the Zoom 505 Multi Effects. If just for sheer efficiency, this pedal paid for itself. This pedal is important because it gave me access to tons of different sounds. I was able to flip through the presets and hear flangers, choruses, delays and compressors. I’m pretty sure I purchased this because a musician friend had told me, “You gotta have a compressor,” and this pedal literally has “compression” written on the enclosure. The Zoom 505 is like the mixed playlist of effects. It’s a seafood sampler. It's the compilation album of pedal tones, and I think that's what's good about multi effects. This was a big piece of my guitar pedal history.
And honestly, after playing it again in this week’s JHS Show episode, I don’t have any complaints. By that I mean, I could tour with this pedal and get the job done. Are there higher quality pedals in my collection now? Yes. Would it be less confusing to have a few pedals on my board instead of one gigantic pedal with a tiny button that lets me scroll through the different effect options? Absolutely. But I have to admit it: the Zoom 505 is a quality piece of gear.
Now, there was one other pedal on my early board: a Rockson AD-80 Analog Delay. White enclosure, black footswitch, solid pedal. Unfortunately, I don’t have this pedal, so I wasn’t able to demo it to see if it holds up after all these years. I’m tentatively just going to say yes, it still holds up.
My First Amps: 1995 - 2000
In 1995, I heard a Pearl Jam tape**. It rocked, and I wanted to rock, too, so I begged my mom to get me a guitar. She went to Sam's Club and came home with a Sonic Red Stratocaster guitar. I’ve actually played this same guitar on previous episodes of the JHS Show. Around the same time, Mom also bought me my first amp. Now, full disclosure: it wasn’t a good amp. It was a Synsonics GA-150. But it amplified my guitar, so it did the job.
**Yeah, I’m aware that’s the equivalent of our grandparents saying, “We used to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio during the war,” but it can’t be helped.
Around ’96, I talked a friend into trading me his Randall RG-15 amp for some CDs. It's green. It's cute. It has that nice wheat front on it. I’m a fan.
But by ’97, I needed a real amp, because I was in a band -- by which I mean, I was in a group of people who played music in a basement. We had a pretty bizarre setlist that included “Hotel California” and metal songs. But the amp was a Dean Markley DMC-42, with eight inch speakers and stereo chorus. It broke constantly; in fact, I’m pretty sure it broke the second day after I bought it. It was definitely broken when I sold it. Then I needed another amp because at that point I was in a real band that performed other places than our parents’ basements. So I got a Kustom TRT50 Tuck and Roll amp. It was a tube amp, not a solid state, which threw a lot of people off, and unfortunately it broke all the time as well.
Are you seeing a pattern here? Invest in quality gear, folks. You’ll definitely save money in the long run.
That's how the Fender FM100H comes into play. I’ve got photos of me playing a gig at a Y2K New Years Eve party in ’99 where the Kustom TRT50 is clearly visible. Based on that, I know that I got the Fender FM100H sometime in the year 2000. Honestly, I still stand by the Fender FM100H. It’s a quality piece of gear. For perspective, my guitar hero Jonny Greenwood plays one of the Fender Twin solid state amps, and it's one of the main sounds on the bends and a lot of his distortion.
My Y2K Guitar Pedals
So, we know what guitar I was playing in 2000. We know what amp I was playing. Here’s the real question: what were the pedals? Nick and I managed to replicate my exact Y2K pedal board, as shown in a photo of me performing at a songwriter showcase in Muscle Shoals, Alabama in early 2000. The pedal board itself is homemade; my Dad helped me build it with wood and a little carpet. I didn't have a real pedalboard until 2002, maybe later.
I had no idea what proper pedal order was. But I was super happy as a guitar player. I didn't care where you put your pedals. I didn't care if anyone had an opinion about it one way or the other. I just put pedals on a board and had fun, made music, called it a day. This is a soapbox I’ve been on a few times already, but seriously: don’t overthink it when you play guitar. Just have fun, and everything else will come together in due time.
By 2000, I had made a pretty solid career for myself as a professional gigging musician, so I wanted to try as many different sounds as I could. One of the first pedals I got my hands on was the Danelectro Daddy O overdrive pedal.
My first exposure to the Danelectro Daddy O sounds like something out of a rom-com, and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s late ’99, and there’s a band playing at a really swanky Mexican restaurant where a lot of us had gigs. People would come out, drink a little, eat some tacos. Just a great place. Now, I saw this guitarist playing “Comfortably Numb” and he absolutely nailed the solo. I looked down at his feet, and he was playing the Danelectro Daddy O overdrive. The rest is history.
Now here's the irony of this. I bought it, loved it and used it along with the distortion channel of the Fender FM100H amp. What I didn’t know was that the Danelectro Daddy O overdrive was actually another version of the Marshall Guv’nor. And what I couldn’t possibly have known at the time was that I would later design a pedal of my own after Marshall Guv’nor called the Angry Charlie. I think this is what the kids call “meta.”
That said, the Danelectro Daddy O overdrive is a classic, and I’d totally put it on my 2020 pedal board.
The next pedal on my Y2K board was the Danelectro Dan Echo DE-1. Basically, I walked into Counts Brothers Music in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and saw the Dan Echo. I was with my girlfriend at the time, but I couldn’t afford the pedal. So she surprised me and bought it for me. We had a good relationship. It ended pretty badly, but that’s a whole other story involving broken hearts and ripped up Pearl Jam tickets. Now, I’m aware that delay should be last in the pedal chain. All I can say is that's not what I thought in the year 2000.
The second-to-last pedal on the board is the DOD Phasor 490. I gotta be honest. I don't know where I bought it, I don't know why I bought it, but I can tell you this: I had no money. It probably cost 15 bucks and I was in a band and I thought, “If I buy this pedal, it might inspire a riff that makes me famous.” That’s what was in my mind circa 2000: $15 in exchange for fame. The jury’s still out on whether I achieved fame, but I did end up with a phaser, so I’d call it a win.
So let’s review the pedal board so far. We’ve got the signal from the guitar going into overdrive, overdrive into delay, and delay into phaser, all heading into an envelope filter, which is an auto-wah effect. The board makes no sense. Nothing made sense in the year 2000.
The last effect pedal on the Y2K board is the DOD FX25B Envelope Filter. I bought the DOD FX25B because Jonny Greenwood used it. Looking back over this article, you could make a pretty strong case that I have spent my entire career trying to become Jonny Greenwood. I got the same guitar, I modded it to be just like his, I got the Danelectro Daddy O overdrive, and then I finished the board with the DOD FX25B. The main problem with that -- aside from the fact that I will never be Jonny Greenwood -- is that he didn’t actually use the DOD FX25B. He used the DOD Envelope Filter 440. So it was pretty much a failure from the get-go.
On top of that, my band was scared of the Radiohead sound, so I never even got to use this pedal. This is seriously like a Greek tragedy.
In Conclusion
It was really fun to look back over my gear from the past, to figure out how I got this guitar or that pedal or this amp. This was the late nineties, very early 2000s, so I wasn’t being influenced by someone on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. In fact, I wasn't even on a forum. Harmony Central existed, but I didn't know anything about it. I was just downloading tabs on the internet and playing guitar with my friends and a band. I was playing gear that I saw my guitar heroes play, and buying pedals that I could afford. There wasn’t a ton of rhyme or reason to it.
But I had fun. In fact, I had a blast. Maybe I didn't buy stuff the right way, and I didn't put my stuff in the right order. Maybe my gear was weird and strange, but those years were still some of the best times in my life. Looking back at this gear, I honestly have no idea how I used it, but I know I loved it. That’s all that really matters.