Edgehill’s Jake Zimmermann - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 658

Really cool pedalboard because it has these sort of hydraulic lifts. Any below this 2 and it just starts getting really quiet. Any above this 2 and it's just loud as hell. I'm Jake Zimmerman. I play guitar for Edge Hill. And we're on tour in Chicago at the Subterranean right now promoting our record Ode to the Greyhouse. This has been the guitar I've been playing most often on stage right now. It's a Shabbat Lion Special. Which is a brand that I had never heard of, and I picked it up at a guitar shop randomly, and it was like the best guitar I'd ever played, so I had to get it. I bought it at Guitars to Be Played in Nashville, which is a super underrated shop. They're filled with amazing lesser-known brands of guitars like these. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, I would highly recommend checking them out if you're ever in Nashville. Pickup-wise, it's got Lawlers in here. This is a Lawler P90. There's one of them, it's like a little more mid-scooped, sounds more like a traditional single coil, but has a higher output that I really like. And then it had a similar pickup in here that I actually took out and put in this Lawler, I think it's an Antiquity humbucker or something like that, the higher wind version of that, just to match the high output of this. Nothing really fancy going on, it's really light, it weighs like six pounds, which I like on stage. and I came with most of this wear, although I've added a good amount down here and a jig out of the fretboard just from it being on the road a short time. I play D'Addario NYXLs. I think they're 10-52s, so they're like a normal gauge up here and they're thicker down here. I play those because I find I never really need more give, and I just prefer the tighter response of a thicker string. It holds tuning better. All sorts of benefits and the NYXLs I really like because they just last so much longer and I only end up changing strings like every five to ten shows instead of every two or three which is really nice. I pretty much always have the tone rolled all the way up. I will ride the volume depending on what I'm doing usually just more as a gain control than a volume. If I want to control my master volume I do have a like a pedal here that's after my gain stages but this will be This will be like if I want to clean up my sound. I use all the pickups and tuning. It's just Standard. We have a couple songs in drop D that I'll drop it down to. Okay This is the guitar that I've played most of my time in the band. It's on like the vast majority of the records It's just recently sort of been replaced as a as the main onstage guitars because it's a little less practical It's a 1966 Fender Mustang In Daphne blue. It was in absolutely perfect condition when I bought it from Carter vintage guitars and has like Since started to look like a vintage guitar It's getting dark. Like all of these chips. It didn't have didn't have any of that in it. It was clean At that point. It's really kind of a cool specimen because it's got this bird's-eye Finish in the neck which is I've never seen one like that before Um, yeah, it's the same thing, uh, same string setup as the other guitar, 10-52 NYXL, um, I did have this, uh, bridge pickup replaced recently, just to get a little more bite out of the bridge position, um, any, uh, songs, like, on the record did not have that in there, they were just recorded with this original single coil that was in there, and I had the... Wiring switch. So the stock wiring would be like this is an independent control for each pickup that turns it on off and switches the phase Which was cool, but not super convenient for like wanting to quickly switch pickups so I had it altered so that this is the pickup selector like neck middle bridge and this is In the middle just the full humbucker and then selects a coil split. So this is this coil This is that one, if I want to go back to that more traditional single-coil Mustang sound. And this is the label I put on it. I am not playing this lap steel, but Leighton, there's a couple songs on the set for me and Leighton Switch, and I take up the bass. In this case, He does some riffage on the lap steel that his grandfather found at an estate sale. And he altered it to have these legs on it so it can just hang out here on stage, and also these v-benders. Not even v-benders, just sort of emulating what a pedal steel does, which is really fun. I have him just play through my rig, and we have some crazy sounds and delay throws and stuff that he does on that. So it's a fun little switch-up for the set. First of all, this is a pedal board made in Brazil by, I think it's Hands Custom. Yeah, there it is. Really cool pedal board because it has... These sort of hydraulic lifts, I can keep a lot of my extra supplies down here, my power supply. My My HX stomp runs on a separate power supply than this, so I have separate plugs for that. And it all just runs out of one plug on the side here that I plug into every night, which is amazingly convenient and also cuts down on a lot of technical issues or getting anything unplugged or any ground loops and stuff like that. And yeah, starting at the top of the chain here, just a standard polytune. Which is just a tuner. Then I use this freak out, which is something Leighton actually showed me. Which is a good way, we do a lot of feedback and noise in our set and sometimes it's not super appropriate to have the amps actually loud enough to naturally feedback. So this comes in handy for situations where I want to get that feel. I don't want to rip people's ears off in the front row. Then I have a J-Rocket Archer, which is just like a Klon clone. I kind of just use it as a boost. I have the gain rolled all the way down almost all the time, and the output pretty cranked. Treble, I will adjust to taste and sound check based on how the room is feeling and how much of that extra bite I want on that given night. Then we run into this Brothers AM, which I think is like a king of tone type pedal. It has all sorts of features that I don't use. I just use it as a standard. Two pedal, this side is like an overdrive. It sounds very, what I would call like amp-like overdrive. Like it's not, it doesn't sound like it's altering my tone too much. It just sounds like I turned up the amps without actually having to do them. And then this just has like a moderately clean boost. You can change the order that these run into each other. Right now I have it set up so the clean boost runs into the overdrive. So it's sort of like an added gain stage to that. I run into the OCD, which is what I used for most of my overdrive, like heavier overdrive tones. Even then, I never have the drive turned up very much. I'd rather push the amps and get it that way. Um, yeah. Yeah, great pedal. Classic. At some point in this chain, I forget where, we're running into the 1981. Which is like a rat style pedal that I used to use a ton and it's sort of being replaced more and more by the OCD now But there are still some some of our older songs where this is very essential Something practically this is that overdriven sound for that and then Probably the coolest pedal on my board is this console preamp also made by a Brazilian company I'm pretty sure a lot of Brazilian gear for some reason And it's like a Neve-style preamp that you can run really hard and get almost like fuzzed out, broken, transistor sort of sounds. So the overdrive I used pretty much for every overdrive sound on Ode to the Greyhouse. Just cranked both the input gain and the output gain really hard. And it just does a really nice job of pushing the tube amps and really just like clipping. Everything way before it gets there, and I really like the blend of this sort of unnatural sound and then how it like pushes And already pushed to them Out of there. We are running into my HX stomp Which is super handy because I it cuts the size of my pedal board in half It's already way too big so this houses like all of my reverbs and some extra delays and like some Other weird sounds that I use in this set, most of the time I just have it where these reverbs are available on and off, and then for some songs I will click to a different setting and have like a ring modulator on here or extra delays and stuff, and then the other cool thing is it has an effects loop that I run this volume pedal in, so like I was saying before, this sort of acts as a master volume to my whole pedal board. After that, we're running the Nemesis Delay, which has been broken for years, so it's been stuck on the same settings that it's been. Like, for the last three years or something, which I pretty much almost exclusively use it for this reverse delay setting. And I also, I like, I keep it on the board instead of it, or like, instead of just fully replacing it with HX0, because I like having the knobs, and I do a lot of reverb throws, or delay throws, and crazy feedback stuff on that. And that's all running after the volume pedal, so I do a lot of, like, sort of swells into the... delay so that you don't get the attack of the note but then the delay has the trails afterwards and they don't get cut off when I take the volume back down. And then lastly we have just a loop station where I have some different like noise scapes that we run during our set that I've built up. Anything where it's like we sort of wish we had extra hands on stage to make noise during a a section or to just be an extra element of chaos, I will step on that. Yeah, let it fill that space. Running like a two amp rig right now in stereo. Another nice thing about using the stop is I can have, I have sort of an always on stereo slapback going on. So this amp is like something like 20 milliseconds delayed from this amp at all times just to give it a little more width. I don't run either amp with any reverb. So that also acts as like a little more of that cushion. This is a Tone King Imperial Mark II. This has actually been swapped out recently because I had a Tone King Royalist that was stolen from our trailer, with our trailer. So if somebody tries to sell you one of those for really cheap in Nashville, let me know. But this is a great amp. They're both, both Tone Kings are doing the same job in this rig of like being the more mid-rangey, bitey amp. Like very focused sound. I have them running. I have it running volume between 2 and 3 usually, and that's right at the point where it's starting to compress. Yeah, they have this attenuator built in back here. I think they call it the Iron Man attenuator, which allows me to control the output of the amp to the speakers instead of in a volume stage, so I can run the preamp stage as hot as I want to get the sound I want and then back off the volume and not kill the audience so much and have Isaac, our sound guy, a little happier with me. It has a dual channel feature on that that I don't really use because I have already a lot of control of the pedal board. And then for the second amp, to round it out, this is just a basic Blues Deluxe, got used on Facebook Marketplace for like 400 bucks. Absolutely nothing special about it at all. I like it because it has a ton of low end and really fattens up the sound, which on its own, if I was just running this, I would want to modify or roll all that off. But in combination with the really sharp midrange of this, it really creates a full sound. Running this as low as the volume will let me go. This is a ridiculously loud amp. Um, any... Any below this 2, and it just starts getting really quiet. Any above this 2, and it's just loud as hell, so... That's one of the downsides of using it, but it sounds really good, so I still do it anyway. Yeah, EQ, all basic up the middle. Um, yeah. Yeah, just a basic, sturdy amp that never breaks. I used to be a pick snob. I'm not anymore. I use Tortex Dunlop 60mm. I will use anything orange or yellow. from this brand. It doesn't really matter to me. I've been Jake from Edge Hill. We're on tour. We're promoting our record, Ode to the Greyhouse, and we hope to see you at a show.