I LIKE DIRT

John presents a guided tour of the key elements on his current rehearsal pedalboard, stacked with pedals that wound up on the new Chili’s album Unlimitedlove.

IBANEZ WH10 AND BOSS CE-1 CHORUS ENSEMBLE

“I used a lot of the same things – the same Ibanez wah-wah pedal, the old one. And the same old Boss chorus pedal, the Chorus Ensemble.”

BOSS DS-2 TURBO DISTORTION AND SD-1 SUPER OVERDRIVE

“Normally, I would use the DS-2. But I also used the SD-1 – it’s less distorted. It’s not a super-extreme kind of distortion, but it can give you a powerful tone.”

MXR SUPER BADASS VARIAC FUZZ AND CUSTOM BADASS ’78 DISTORTION

“There was definitely a lot of MXR stuff on the album. They gave me a bunch of pedals early on. I used their fuzz tone quite a bit, not just for solos, but sometimes even for guitar parts for choruses or whatever. And a distortion pedal of theirs, too.”

MXR REVERBS

“That was on almost all the time [at rehearsals – the album features real room reverb]. It’s one of those things that comes from me being an engineer – I don’t think I used to be very conscious of room sounds, but now they’re very important to me to give some sort of sense of space to what you’re recording. And so it’s very subtle. It’s a very short room sound, but I just like to hear the guitar that way. The other is set for a more long kind of reverb.”

MXR DYNA COMP

“Sometimes the Dyna Comp was just exactly what I needed in terms of getting the right amount of sustain on clean things, and having a more Taffy-like kind of sound. I’ve loved the Dyna Comp ever since I was a little kid. I was a big fan of Adrian Belew when I was a youngster, and he had one of those on, like, all the time back in those days in the early 80s.”