GUITAR SHOWCASE 2022: Effects pedals are Yvette Young's palette as an inventive, and truly progressive artist. So when we met with her at the UK's Arctangent festival recently to see what she was using for her shows with Covet, we found every choice plays its part in her ever-evolving sound. And these are great choices with overdrives, modulations and some wonderful delay pedals in the mix…
Ground Control Audio Noodles
"I love any sort of gain pedal with an EQ control because I feel like if I am using relatively clean tone, I am trying to push the tubes in my amp a lot and this assists me in really shaping my tone the way I want it to.
"If I wanted extra beef I'd probably engage more lows on that one. I use this as almost a distorted sounds sometimes and I can push it really far.
"I'm using this in conjunction with the [ZVex Mastotron] fuzz a lot. I find that this gets murky and I get to push some of the mids out with this one."
Walrus Audio Juliana
"I am way too into chorus and I have to restrain myself from putting it on everything. I love it dramatically – I love using the vibrato feature and making it sound all seasick.
"I even love using it subtly in conjunction with gain. It does widen your sound a lot so I think chorus is am effective way of adding dimension and depth to any sort of tone. And i love it – you can sound like The Cure and The Police and it's great.
"It has stereo capabilities, I believe it's the newer version of the Julia. It now comes with the tap, I don't think the Julia had the tap. It does the oscillation to whatever you tap in which is great. You can choose the division too and then the type of waveform. Square waveforms are really underrated. I'm always on the sine one but the square on produces some pretty interesting sounds that sound almost like an Asian instrument or something."
Caroline Guitar Company Somersault
"I just love chorus a lot and I like having two of them. This one I use in a more lo-fi, tone knob rolled down dark way. While [with the Julianna] I want it to sound nice and sparkly, more like a traditional chorus you'd hear in '80s records.
"I recently got a Roland JC-40 and I love that thing to death. The chorus is unbeatable to me, I love it so much. I wish I could run that."
MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe and Boss DD-3
"I use the MXR a lot – it's just a beautiful sounding delay. I've got to have tap tempo. This an analogue delay but I guess with digital repeats it's nice to hear really clearly so I want one that has really nice clean repeats that are very pronounced, so I'm almost playing the delay like I'm playing an instrument.
Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run
"This is set on a more subtle delay but with this one you can do the reverse delay, or the swell which sounds beautiful. I have it on normal right now but I use it subtly to fill out solo sections.
"I used to not really do solos but these days in the new songs I am taking solos and I love using this in conjunction with some gain to make it a very rock 'n' roll stadium kind of sound.
"The reason I have two [tap temo delays] is because I don't want to have to switch that during my set. I could conceivably do that with one but it's just nicer to switch between the two. What I do even more is I stack them. So I'll tap in a triplet [on the MXR Carbon Copy Deluxe] and then a really fast eighth note kind of thing [on the Avalanche] and then it does almost like a ping-pong kind of sound. I love stacking delays.
"Even feeding them into each other it can make the delays sound more dramatic too, even if I tap them at the same tempo. I love delay, it's great – I put it on everything."
DigiTech Freqout
My friend Pete Thorn, he does a lot of gear reviews, he was super recommending this to me and I wanted to buy one too. Nowadays in my set I feel like feedback is one of those things that is really cool and fun because it's not the same thing every single time.
"You have your rock 'n' roll stage moments when you're sitting on it and it's sustaining infinitely and what I love about this is it allows you to get that feedback pretty consistently. You can choose the pitch, you can choose its onset. So I'll us it to sustain out certain sections and let it do its thing while my drummer does a solo or something. I'll use it at the end of songs to create some atmosphere, or add intensity.
"My favourite feature on it, and I haven't really used it in my set yet but I do use it on recording, is you can turn off the tone so that it's exclusively wet. And what that does is you're only playing the feedback sound and when you're doing that your tone ends up sounding not guitar-like at all, it's more akin to an EBow or an electric cello or something. It sounds really cool and it's great for adding textures and a pad to something."
Hologram Electronics Microcosm
"Two of the new songs we're playing were inspired by this pedal. I really like using the granules and how Tunnel sounds – it almost plays itself and one of the things I feel like I do a lot is I'm very verbose in my riff composition. Sometimes I just want to sustain a note and this feels it out really nicely. It takes whatever information you feed it and it generates granules. It's beautiful sounding and lush; there's reverb behind it and I use the multi-delay as well. It kind of does what I was talking about with the stacking delay thing.
The interrupt setting on this one is so fun – it's so unpredictable and it's like a crazy pinball machine. I'm such a control freak usually but I've been loving throwing something into the equation where I don't get to control what happens every time. I just let it do its thing and I'm just working with it, so having that pinball sound I'm like, ok that was a weird goofy noise that I didn't expect.
"I actually tracked something and I got every possible sound that it makes in the key the song was in, then I went and cut out the parts I really liked and I arranged it into the song that's going to be on the record. So you'll hear the glitches but that's not something that actually organically happened. That's me designing it based on what it actually did."
