Pedal Line Friday – 12/4 – John Zytaruk

Today’s pedal line is from John Zytaruk (@deltaslide). If you have a pedal line (doesn’t have to be in a board) for your rig, please email me a photo, bio, description of pedals and routing to pedalline@nulleffectsbay.com . Every Friday I’ll showcase a pedal line submission. Make sure you include any links to your band or music page.

Here’s my home made pedal board (just wood and screws!) which I use exclusively for lap steel. After leaving my National Dynamic lap steel, the signal goes into an Ibanez TS7 Tubescreamer to give it a bit of an edge. This, of course, is a cheap way to get a bit of that Tubescreamer sound and I find it works very well with the lap steel to give me a musical distortion that is not too heavy and is very dynamic in terms of how one plays and attacks the strings. From there it goes into a Morley Little Alligator volume pedal. The optical circuit ensures that I always have a clean fade which is essential for my lap steel style-especially for looping. I just got fed up with the Ernie Ball pedals which invariably got dirty and needed volume pot replacements. Enough was enough-problem solved with the Morley. From there the signal goes into a Boss RE-20 Space Echo which gives me the ultra-warm tape-sounding delay that I love. This is a fantastic pedal with a huge range of sounds and options and the tap-tempo makes it easy for me to change delay times on the fly. I also use it in the studio and run sounds out of the computer through it to give tracks extra depth. In my opinion, plug-ins just can’t compete with the results you can get this way.  One can also “play” the pedal when doing that for some extra randomness and “musicality.” As far as the order of the signal route the main thing for me is to have the delay after the volume pedal. This enables me “feed” notes into the delay and then move on to other things on the steel while the previous sounds are still fading away. This is especially useful when looping-which brings us to the final stage for the signal: the Boss RC-20XL Loop Station which is an excellent looper-especially for live use. I like the fact that I can always undo the last layer added as well as the fact that it has room for eleven saved loops with a total of about sixteen minutes of sound. Oh-the whole pedalboard is powered by a Visual Sound One-Spot power source which is a great way to power a whole bunch of pedals with minimum problems.

As far as my work goes, I play mostly with my partner Collette Savard as well as with alt-hip hop artist Buck 65. You check out some of my own stuff on my MySpace  page which also has a few of the tracks I did with Buck 65. I do sessions on dobro, mandolin, and banjo and also teach a few students.

Below is a YouTube video of a Collette Savard song titled “Midnight” that would be a strong example of my lapsteel style.