We live in this golden age for guitar effects, in which everybody’s pedalboard just seems to get bigger. What was yesterday’s “spaceship” has become today’s fly-in rig – and the pedals just keep coming.
But not everyone is onboard with it. Not everyone has a desktop alert setup to inform them of the latest overdrive pedal. Jared James Nichols doesn’t.
Indeed, in a recent interview with Guitarist, he admitted that he is going in the opposite direction. Should we be surprised? This is the man who foregoes the guitar pick, who has a preference for single-pickup Les Pauls (at least as far as his signature guitars go), and he explained why this constant slew of new stompboxes was, to him at least, underwhelming.
“When I first started touring, I’d build pedalboards with a wah, tuner, fuzz and various drives on there. Things would go wrong, probably down to my own stupidity. So that pedalboard got smaller and smaller,” he says. “By the end of the tour, it would be just a Tube Screamer into the amp because I knew I could play a whole set without any problems.”
Nichols is a man who likens his guitar to a hammer. He told MusicRadar that his self-styled Blues Power approach style could be like “fighting a bear” – an art that goes takes electric blues guitar from a gentle whisper to full-bore WWE madness. Nichols performs some licks as like this was Mankind vs the Undertaker, “Hell in a Cell” set to the blues minor pentatonic scale. He also admitted that he didn’t even bother with a guitar tuner when recording his 2021 EP, Shadow Dancer.
“It was amazing because it was so raw, and if you really, truly listen to that tone you are going to hear that it is completely overtones-all-the-time," he said. "Because I was facing the amp! I was right there… In the line of fire, and that’s the tone. There are no edits. We went old-school. We didn’t even use tuners; we just tuned to each other. We tried to do something that felt real and felt raw, and more representative of how I play live.”
Little wonder that obsessing over a meticulously routed ‘board is a little too much home electronics when he wants to get down to the urgent business of actually playing the electric guitar.
“Yeah, so many people come to me and say, ‘Jared, check out this pedal. Check out this, man. Check out how clean it is and also immaculate.’ And I am sitting there and I’ve got like this old Octavia. I’ve got all this other old stuff that buzzes,” he said. “Sometimes it doesn’t really work right. But it is not that I am trying to do that for the sake of it just being old stuff, that’s just the way I like to talk, through that old gear.”
That was 2022. Not much has changed since. If anything, though, his tolerance for even the old stuff has waned.
He tells Guitarist that he might own an original Klon Centaur – i.e. the ne plus ultra of vintage/boutique/megabucks drive pedals – but he doesn’t put it on his touring ‘board anymore, and for two very good reasons.
“Something nobody talks about is the floor noise,” says Nichols. “If you have the drive past halfway with your volume down, you get all this unwanted noise. I ended up taking the Klon off. Sure, I could throw a noise gate on there, but I shouldn’t need to.
“And taking Klons on the road isn’t fun. I always have to pull it off the ’board after soundcheck and bring it with me because a Klon sitting in a club is an easy nick. But nobody is going to steal your Tube Screamer, you know?”
So that’s where Nichols is at; his guitar, an Ibanez Tube Screamer, and the guitar amp. He couldn’t be happier.
“I didn’t need all the extra crap,” he says. “Just give me a single-P-90 guitar and a Tube Screamer and I’m ready to play the Royal Albert Hall. It’s like sink or swim.”
And he has some thoughts on the guitar effect pedal industrial complex and its proliferation of the drive pedal. When there are many variations on a theme, and even more clones and clones of clones, you can’t go wrong with the classics. Nichols has had his 1982 Tube Screamer since he was 15, and it is still going strong.
“The great thing about those pedals is they’re all cool,” he says. “You can pick up a TS9 from GuitarGuitar and it does the job. Even Bonamassa will tell you that. A Tube Screamer is a Tube Screamer. It’s one of the great cons of the guitar industry. Basically, they got all these dirt boxes right the first time around.”
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