My Year of Discontinued Pedals
My Favourite Pedal is Being Discontinued
Last month I found out the EHX Superego was being discontinued. When I'm at the office, I've been listening to music on my old iPod nano. It's got a reasonable amount of space, but isn't the infinite playlist my colleagues seem to enjoy (Spotify, YouTube music, etc). I have a lot of albums on there I really like. But I've been listening to a lot of Slow Clinic, an ambient/drone artist, and the one who really got me interested in guitar-based ambient music.
Our Forgotten Future, "Indefinite Ends"
In the summer I picked up a Boss RC-1 looper and RV-6 reverb pedal, and these were what really opened things for me in terms of the little experiments I've been playing with. My amp has a spring reverb tank, which sounds great, but doesn't let me get the big, expansive reverbs you hear from artists like Our Forgotten Future. The RV-6 handles that nicely, either with Hall reverb, or Shimmer with the tone all the way off (often described online as a "dark ambient wash"). But one thing it can't do is a reverse reverb, which I've been more and more liking the sound of, particularly on Slow Clinic's album "St. Andrew's Day".
So as a lot of shops were having Black Friday sales at the end of November, I went looking for options. I looked into the EHX Holy Grail Max (which has spring, hall, plate, and reverse reverb), but saw that the store had Turnip Greens (a dual pedal that combines the EHX Soul Food and Holy Grail Max) for...$3 cheaper? A quick Google search, and yup, discontinued, so they must be blowing it out. Which is all right. I actually only have one drive pedal (a BD-2), and the Soul Food is a Klon-type drive, more mid-focused, so I got something new there, too.
So I got the Turnip Greens. And I've been enjoying it both purely for its reverse reverb, as well as something I can put early/first on my board, to have reverb both early in the chain, as well as last (the traditional approach). The Soul Food (drive) side of the pedal has been a nice bonus. Fiddling around with it, I was quickly able to dial in some of those honking bridge pickup tones you hear on 50s and 60s blues records. A happy surprise.
More sounds open up. This year has been adding one pedal after the other, enjoying the new range of sounds that each allows. At this point, it feels like I have a lot of ground covered. I've made a lot of dopey little test recordigs to get a feel for how things sound, for how I want to sound. And some of my experiments have actually turned into compositions I've fleshed out for classical guitar. Which is great, but now I've got a goal for 2026: record and release some actual music.