In preparation for this recording session with Doug Plank and Crossway Church I have been getting my Guitar rig in order. As you see from my previous post I added a guitar. The other recent addition is the Wiggler from Electro Harmonix. Electro Harmonix makes some great pedals and the wiggler is definitely one of the greats. The thing I love about EHX is their pedals have a certain warmth to them. They usually go from subtle to over the top and have a definate analog feel to them. If you are looking for pristine sparkly clean EHX is not the way to go but if you are looking for character they nail it. I have found that when you are mixing in the box and have access to hundreds of plug ins things get a little too clean. I tend to prefer a more organic approach to tone. The only critique I have about the EHX pedals are they tend to be a little noisy. Now there are ways around this. I find as a player I need to be more aware of rolling the volume down when I am not playing. This is becoming somewhat of a lost art with all these processors and pods etc. out on the market. Back in the day as players tried to control the noise issues they discovered that their tone changed a little at different volumes and they used it as one more tone tool in their tool bag. They also discovered the volume swell which is a technique that I would certainly like to perfect. I am still refining the volume roll off.Ok, back to the wiggler. A couple of things that are interesting about the wiggler. There is an output control at the top left. You can use this to drive your amp a little for fatter slightly knarlier sounds. Oh yeah that brings us back to one of the clutch features; Tubes, baby, tubes. The wiggler has 2 12ax7wb tubes in it to give that tone mojo that we like. It is an all tube path and it sounds lush. You also have 4 different character options for vibrato and true amplitude modulation tremolo. Not only am I excited about using the wiggler with my guitar rig but I am anxious to use it on other sounds patched out of my recording rig. Sometimes having knobs to grab onto is more vibe inducing then clicking on a mouse so I am looking for another exciting tone mangler. I will keep you posted on the results.
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