When it comes to Andrew Bird, I would say I’m late to the party. Definitely a lot of my friends are very familiar with Andrew Bird. For me I started hearing about him about 4 months ago or so and gradually I’ve been very intrigued and impressed with what he’s been doing. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Andrew Bird – he is a fantastic musician from Chicago that utilizes loops, violin, vocals and whistling to create great pieces of music with emotional melodies. He sometime performs completely solo, and sometimes he performs with a full band.
I wanted to do some research about the gear he’s been using. I’ve been asked a few times about certain pieces of equipment he uses.
The best photo of his board is a little out dated, but does show some important factors to his board that he uses today
Line 6 DL4 Delay/Looper x2
Schroeder Blister Agent
Boss PS-5 Pitch Shifter
Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail
Boss TU-2 Tuner
Boss OC-2 Octave
Boss GE-7 Equalizer
He uses the Line 6 DL4s for looping. One DL4 is used is for his pizzicato style playing (plucking) and the other DL4 is for his arco style (bow) for the violin. I’m assuming there is a splitter (possibly Boss LS-2) this is off shot that can route to those DL4s. According to a few interviews, each DL4 goes to their specific amps for each style of playing.
Like I mentioned that was an outdated shot, but I found this more recent shot.
With this board he has 2 Schroeder Blister Agent as well as a MXR 10 Band EQ replacing the Boss GE-7. When searching around the web, there has been a lot of questions regarding the silver custom box he has. This is the Schroeder Blister Agent which is no longer in production and only a few (less than 30) were ever made. It’s a high headroom distortion pedal. Pedal includes a sag filter (which has the ability to accentuate swirly style effects – and probably sounds great with this spinning speakers mentioned below), and has a notch filter to accentuate different frequencies.
One of the big pieces to Andrew’s sound is rotating speaker system, which is the Specimen Janus Horn Speakers by Ian Schneller. He controls the speed with a Ernie Ball Volume Pedal.
To understand how this works, check out this video where Andrew is playing around with his speakers for the first time. You can really start to hear the effect around the 1 minute mark.
If you’re curious about Andrew Bird, check out A Room for London performance on January 28, 2012! Let me know what you think by commenting below!
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10 years ago
Thank you so much for taking the time to put together this thoughtful and meticulous breakdown with links and everything to the different pedals in Andrew Bird’s board! I am trying to figure out which pedal he uses to make the violin sound almost like an african imbura. He mentioned in an interview that he has a custom pedal that does this. Do you think he was referring to any of the pedals that you wrote about in the post? Or do you have any ideas about who the maker of this custom pedal might be? Thank you so much!!!
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