Into another

Stacking or cascading, whatever you call it, it's the employment of two pedals in clipping your signals. In this instance, I'm putting the harsher distortion first (immediately after the guitar) followed by the overdrive. The effect of leading the harsher pedal into the milder unit is that of smoothening. It brings grizzly responses down to a more acceptable territory in terms of presentation. Tones become more acceptable to non-guitar audience for that matter. Which pedal setting should be marked higher is up to your liking. The clear outcome here is that you cannot resign in saying the overdrive subdued your overall intensity because this is exactly the intention. Do note the increase in background noise/ hissing when employing two or more pedal simultaneously which will be compounded by your single coil pickups' humming. The cure- noise gate, which will be mentioned in a later episode.

Flashback: Zoom 510

The pedal you see here is Zoom's 510 Dual Driver which is a decade old. Back in 1998, the manufacturer released its 5XX series of pedals & these easily became the most affordable multi-FX unit in the market. I first bought the 505 but deemed it unnecessary 6mths later as I do not employ the modulation & time-based effects modules in it & I still don't today- I'm basically a guitar+amp person (because nothing should get in the way of good tone). The 505 was promptly sold away & the 510 made it into my set up as it is truly the unit which complemented my playing style; I'm particular about drive/ distortion more than anything else when it comes to guitar.

The 510 enabled me to activate a pair of drive modules simutaneously, it was the device which triggered my understanding of a cascading drive concept which liberated my playing tremendously because more drive means:

• less effort needed for picking: less lethargy = less mistakes
• harmonics can be triggered easily

However the trade off here is the increase in background noise & single coil pickup hum; which Zoom duly addressed by incorporating a noise reduction feature. So the 510 triggered my interest in noise reduction as well.

However, the 5XX series evolved to become Zoom's G-series today simply because of its waning popularity- players still deem the rotary control ('knob' to the rest of us) a critical pedal feature as this enables immediate authority when it comes to tweaking.