Dan Steinhardt co-presents That Pedal Show with Mick Taylor, and this introduction is almost entirely superfluous because if you are reading Guitarist then you most certainly also count yourself as one of their YouTube channel’s 424,400-odd subscribers.
You might also know him as the man behind GigRig, building pedalboards for the stars – hello, Ed O’Brien – and supplying top-tier pro kit for pedal obsessives.
As such, he gets his hands dirty with a lot of effects pedals, so we grabbed him for quick chat to give us his top five, from the past five years.
1. Chase Bliss Mood MKII
Type: Ambient multi-effects
“Okay, so the first one is the Chase Bliss Mood MKII – and if the original Chase Bliss Mood had been made in 2020 I would have said that. But, thankfully, the Mood MKII came out in 2023!
What I love about this pedal is that it puts you in a very different place as a guitar player
“What I love about this pedal is that it puts you in a very different place as a guitar player, right? So many of us work so hard at trying to play a certain way and we all need to do that and find our own voice. But you plug into this thing and it just starts creating sounds that put you in a very creative space.
“You can absolutely master it and find out exactly how it’s doing that, or you can just plug in and have fun. And there are a lot of pedals that have done this in the past – whenever we bought our latest multi-effect, and we’d sit down and plug in and go through the presets, and there’d always be some wild and wacky things in there, and they are fun but relatively pointless.
“But the thing about the Mood is that the soundscapes that it creates are firstly so inspiring and secondly, sound flipping awesome.”
2. Keeley Halo Andy Timmons Dual Echo
Type: modulated dual echo delay
“Lots of guitar players are defined by their gain-staging (stacking sources of gain such as multiple drive pedals), and Andy Timmons’ gain-staging is as good as they come. But there have been things that he’s always achieved with his delays, these otherworldly effects… and the name Halo is just perfect – people have been having a go at (replicating) it for a long time.
“Andy hasn’t been that secretive about exactly how he’s done it, but it’s been a very hard thing to try to replicate. In fact, I introduced Andy to Robert Keeley back in the day because Andy had asked who’d be a good fit (to make a signature delay for him). Robert is a dear friend and he is a genius.
“But also, I know Andy’s standards: there’s no compromise with Andy Timmons on anything, right? That’s why he is the player that he is. His motto is ‘the best sound on the day, wins.’ It took them years of working together to get these sounds dialed in.
“It’s my favorite compact delay pedal. Sonically, it’s astonishing. You plug in, turn it on and there it is – there’s the Andy Timmons sound. But if you dive a little bit deeper in it, there are so many other things in there that it can do. It’s so clever.”
3. Jam Pedals Delay Llama Xtreme
Type: Analog delay
“I love Jam, they are the best people. I love their build philosophy; their passion for sound is just as good as it gets.
“The smaller version of the Delay Llama was already great, but the Delay Llama Xtreme adds the modulation in – but then it does these amazing things where it will automatically halve the delay speed or double the delay speed, throwing it up or down on octave. And it does these random steps in there, so it almost becomes like a pseudo harmonizer – and all this in an analog delay.
“Now, there are pedals that do similar things, but something about the Delay Llama Xtreme (is that) there’s a quality to it that’s just so organic and fun.
“It doesn’t take long to get your head around the UI of it and so you can just use it as a straight-sounding, awesome analog delay pedal with beautiful modulation on the trails. Or you can just go trippy with it. It’s really, really fabulous.”
4. ThorpyFX Heavy Water Dual High Headroom Boost
Type: Dual boost
“I think this started life as the boost side of the ThorpyFX Dane (overdrive and boost) and then they added another boost to it. I thought, ‘What the hell is heavy water?’ But I plugged it in and the richness of the boost just has a clarity to it that is completely dynamic off the volume control, so beautiful. So that in itself is winning.
“But when you combine the boosts together, and you get the stacking of the gain stages, you get this really beautiful, organic drive sound. You know, every time that we’ve used it, it’s always made things sound better.
“If you’re the sort of player that has a Deluxe Reverb, a simple amplifier you’ve turned up with a bit of reverb in there or whatever, and you’re just looking to punch it a bit… in those situations, overdrive pedals really might not be the answer. This thing, though, if you plug it into an amplifier that’s working (turned up a fair bit) it’s far out – absolutely wonderful.”
5. Cunningham Amps Dual Range Fuzz RCA Germanium
Type: Fuzz
“I’ve got to throw a fuzz in here. There’s an amp company in New Zealand called Cunningham and they sent us a bunch of stuff to try. We really like fuzzes and we have them on the (That Pedal Show) show a lot. We try to look at as many different fuzz variants as possible – and there are loads.
“But when we plugged this Cunningham Dual Range Fuzz in, it’s just that instant connection. It sounds great with humbuckers and single coils and is made by someone who really cares. As soon as you take it out of the box, there’s an aura around the thing – you can just tell every little detail is looked after.
“Build quality is second to none. But we have pedals through with amazing build quality that might sound fine, but this is my favorite fuzz pedal in recent memory. It sounds absolutely killer.
“Because it’s made by a company that makes amps, they know how to put these things together using awesome components. But there’s obviously someone there who is a great guitar player, too. Because there’s no way you end up with a fuzz like this that hasn’t come from a great guitar player.”
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