Dipped In Tone Dipped in Tone

It’s the most wonderful time of year: the “year in gear” season is finally upon us, and we’re celebrating with this special in-person episode of Dipped In Tone. Zach and Rhett gang up at Zach’s place to rundown the best of the best of musical excellence and oddities in 2023.
The guys start in with their favorite stompboxes. Rhett tips his hat to Old Blood Noise Endeavors’ Beam Splitter, Hologram’s Chroma Console, and Universal Audio’s 1176 pedal, which he runs as a hard-clipped overdrive. Some might say it sounds s****y, but as Zach notes, “Shitty is pretty in the mix!” Zach’s “boring” picks include the Nobels ODR-1, his collection of new Tube Screamer variants, and the Poly Beebo. Along the way, they talk about the magic of going back to old gear they’d written off in their younger days, and dig into the root causes of Zach’s discomfort with more experimental playing approaches.

Rhett sings praises for the new Orange OR30 and remembers its early 2000s predecessor, the AD30, and he and Zach agree on the superior, “8K” quality of Two-Rock’s current offerings over nearly every other amp on the market. Out of this year’s axes, Rhett favors both Fender’s Vintera II ’60s Bass VI and the Mexican-made Jason Isbell Custom Telecaster, plus the Collings 470 JL—Julian Lage’s signature. Zach spotlights his PRS SE Silver Sky, and a gorgeous Gibson Custom Shop 1959 ES-335 Reissue.

Be sure to stick around for the end, when the duo call out the year’s biggest disappointment in gear, which Zach describes as “baby’s first modeler.”

Big thanks to StewMac for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://stewmac.com/dippedintone to get 10% off!

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00:00 Introduction and In-Person Episode
01:21 Year in Gear Discussion
03:15 Shifting Focus to Patreon
04:14 Sponsorship and Gift Ideas
05:34 Tube Screamers
06:02 Old Blood Noise Beam Splitter
08:28 Reevaluating Gear
10:36 Nobels ODR-1
12:57 Hologram Chroma Console
16:23 UA 1176 Pedal
19:45 Poly Beebo
25:06 JHS NOTAKLÖN
26:05 Two-Rock Classic Reverb
45:40 Discussion about the quality and vision of boutique amps
46:10 The appeal of vintage-style amps and custom builds
47:35 The Orange OR30 amp and its unique characteristics
48:30 The versatility and appeal of amp modeling plugins
49:53 The Fender Bass 6 and its unique features
52:39 The PRS Silver Sky SE and its value for the price
56:29 The Collings 470 JL and its exceptional sound and playability
01:01:16 The Gibson 1959 reissue custom shop 335 and its quality
01:02:46 The Fender Jason Isbell Telecaster
01:05:42 Disappointment with the Fender Tone Master Pro amp

This episode of Dipped In Tone features Rhett flying solo with veteran jazz guitarist Oz Noy. Born in Israel, Noy started gigging at age 13, and 37 years later, he’s still going strong as a celebrated live musician—including a 17-year run at New York City club The Bitter End.
Noy explains that he grew up with a foot in both jazz and rock music worlds. The former taught him intricate playing, while the latter schooled him on tone and sound. “I was playing heavy metal on one hand,” he says. “On the other, I had a hollowbody guitar and I was playing bebop.” When he moved to New York, he was “shellshocked” by how advanced and impressive the jazz music scene was. Noy played in a trio, so to fill out his sonic palette, he began leaning on effects as “almost another instrument.” Not all of it has been intentional—he found a signature sound thanks to a happy accident with a tremolo pedal while gigging in Japan.

While he still loves old, loud Marshalls, Noy says Two-Rock amplifiers have radically changed his approach, and he even uses Fender combos on the road. But aside from running his amps into a Universal Audio OX, Noy explains why he’s still not impressed with digital amp solutions.

Noy’s most important advice for players? “You gotta go out of your house and play live,” he says, explaining why it doesn’t cut it to just home-record clips for Instagram or YouTube. And while he sings the praises of his favorite modern jazz players, he tells Rhett why he thinks that rock and blues guitar-playing haven’t evolved much since the ’70s: “There’s nobody that took it to the next level or invented something new.”

Big thanks to StewMac for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://stewmac.com/dippedintone to get 10% off!

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On this week’s Dipped In Tone, Rhett and Zack are joined by contemporary jazz guitar legend Adam Levy, the thoughtful, soft-spoken accompanist known for his work with Norah Jones and his own jazz trios. Levy’s new book, String Theories, which he co-authored with fellow sideman-to-the-stars Ethan Sherman, collects a series of tips, challenges, and reflections for guitarists to deepen their playing.
“I need it to sound like Solomon Burke is singing,” Levy says of his style and philosophy, centered on leads and mid-register tones. His formative playing experiences were on a Gibson ES-335, and Zack and Rhett wonder why the semi-hollow remains Levy’s go-to over, say, a Les Paul or T-style guitar. “[We] kind of put guitars in buckets: ‘This guitar does this, this guitar does that,’” says Levy. “But a lot of it is just what you do with your hands anyway. I feel like the instrument itself is maybe just a third of all that stuff.”
Levy says that as the years go on, he gets “more like myself” when playing. A piece of that, he says, is stepping back from guitar music altogether. “Go on a guitar fast for a month,” he says. Levy says that removing the distractions of analyzing for specific tones and gear can create a clearer relationship to music. “All you can really notice is, ‘What’s the mood? How does it make me feel?’” Similarly, Levy warns of the dangers of overanalyzing your playing: “A little bit of reflection can go a long way,” he says, but “you don’t want to get so reflective that you shut yourself down.”
Finally, the trio dips a high-class vintage rig complete with a Gibson ES-125 with a floating wooden bridge—which shocks a sense-memory out of Levy. “It’s beyond, ‘I can hear that guitar,’” laughs Levy. “I can smell that guitar.”
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Big thanks to Sweetwater for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://sweetwater.com for all your musical gear needs.
Subscribe, like, and leave us a comment
Sign up on our mailing list: http://eepurl.com/iaCee5
Support us on Patreon for access to our discord server and other perks! https://www.patreon.com/dippedintone
MERCH: https://teespring.com/stores/dipped-in-tone
Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/dippedintone
 
Dipped in Tone is:
Rhett Shull  https://www.rhettshull.com/
Zach Broyles / Mythos Pedals  https://mythospedals.com
Premier Guitar https://www.premierguitar.com/

Zach goes it alone on this episode to interview session guitarist, 6-string storyteller, and prominent YouTuber and online guitar instructor Tim Pierce. As a player, Pierce’s guitar has spent decades at the top of the charts by way of songs by Bon Jovi, Goo Goo Dolls, Phil Collins, Madonna, Dave Matthews Band, Bob Dylan—whose recent Shadow Kingdom features the guitarist holding down the rhythm—and so many others.
Pierce discusses his biggest influences and favorite guitar sounds, seeing ZZ Top in their early stages “at their finest”—“I was floored”—and tells how he learned how to play rhythm guitar “on the job.” He also shares advice for crafting excellent guitar parts.

These days, Pierce says his session work is mostly for friends and family. Instead, he focuses on his popular YouTube channel, where he posts interviews, tips, and more. It’s a passion for the guitarist, and he and Zach get deep into the nuts and bolts of his YouTube life—from how many thumbnails can he makes for each episode (a whole lot) to how he comes up with his ideas for videos.

“I did one thing for decades,” Pierce says of his life as a guitarist for hire. “That I knew I could do … I just wanted to be a recording guitar player.” About 15 years ago, he says he reevaluated his goals and says he “discovered some people who were doing business online” who inspired him to give YouTube a go. “It just seemed like something, with all my limitations, that I could pull off.” After a decade doing full-time sessions and building his online presence, Pierce eventually switched to becoming a full-time YouTuber.

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Big thanks to Sweetwater for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://sweetwater.com for all your musical gear needs.

Sign up on our mailing list: http://eepurl.com/iaCee5

Support us on Patreon for access to our discord server and other perks! https://www.patreon.com/dippedintone

Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/dippedintone

Dipped in Tone is:
Rhett Shull https://www.rhettshull.com/
Zach Broyles / Mythos Pedals https://mythospedals.com
Premier Guitar https://www.premierguitar.com/

Rhett and Zack kick off the episode with a chat about which video games they’re loving and Rhett’s cross-country adventures with his wife before Eli Lester, owner of Two-Rock Amplification, joins them for an in-depth exploration of his amp-building philosophies.
Lester walks Rhett and Zack through his origins in amp-building, repairing instruments and amps in the back room of the shop where he gave guitar lessons. He played in rockabilly bands and had an affinity for old ’50s and ’60s Cadillacs that needed work, but he couldn’t afford to pay someone to fix them up, so he had to learn to do it himself. In his freshman year of college, he’d buy old amps and rent books from the library to figure out how to repair and mod them. Eventually, his voracious fandom of Two-Rock amplifiers helped him connect with the brand’s founder, Bill Krinard.

On Two-Rock’s building philosophy now, Lester says his approach is more about feel more than sound. “We build them for the artist, not the audience,” he says. Two-Rock’s obsession with delivering high-fidelity sound goes into every piece of the amp; Lester says each part is manufactured to spec in California, and part of the brand’s high price tags is thanks to how well they treat their employees. “We’re all tinkerers and geeks,” Lester grins.

Later, Lester explains how they design high-wattage amps that don’t blow your eardrums, and how Two-Rock is “tipping their hat” to Dumble-style amps. Building amps for a job is indeed hard work, but Lester wouldn’t have it any other way: “I just get to build my dream guitar rig, that’s all I do.”

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Big thanks to Sweetwater for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://sweetwater.com for all your musical gear needs.

Sign up on our mailing list: http://eepurl.com/iaCee5

Support us on Patreon for access to our discord server and other perks! https://www.patreon.com/dippedintone

Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/dippedintone

Dipped in Tone is:
Rhett Shull https://www.rhettshull.com/
Zach Broyles / Mythos Pedals https://mythospedals.com
Premier Guitar https://www.premierguitar.com/

Josh Scott drops in to chat about all things JHS, going back to his early days doing debunking deep-dives into vintage gear—“I love the mythbusting element of this stuff,” he says. “I love telling people … this is not witchcraft…. The tech of a Big Muff is from the ’50s.”
He continues: “I know that we need to feel magic. I like it too.… But I love that element of proving simplicity of all this stuff and making it digestible to younger players and taking the chaos out of decisions. So, for me, that’s where the collecting started happening. Everything I’d ever heard anyone say about a pedal, I immediately needed to find the pedal and see if it was true.”
And while the trio have plenty of inside-baseball stuff to cover, from how they’ve approached their YouTube content to how they tackle endorsement cold calls to branding—“products are not that important in the long term. Brand is more important than products.” But Josh is here to talk about his relaunch of the Ross brand and his YouTube documentary about the brand. The story, he says, is “more important than the pedals even. I just love the stories and stuff. The pedal circuits were the easiest part of the whole thing. It’s awesome to have worked so hard and to see the impact that just a good story has. We got inundated with messages … saying, ‘Man, I cried about pedals.’”

“I just really love the history element,” he says later, “so much that it feels like this really natural piece of being able to tell those stories and then move the story forward … One of my favorite things to do is taking some classic thing and replicating it perfectly. Like, I love the science of that.”

Subscribe, like, and leave us a comment!

Big thanks to Sweetwater for sponsoring this episode. Head to http://sweetwater.com for all your musical gear needs.

Sign up on our mailing list: http://eepurl.com/iaCee5

Support us on Patreon for access to our discord server and other perks! https://www.patreon.com/dippedintone

Follow us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/dippedintone

Dipped in Tone is:
Rhett Shull https://www.rhettshull.com/
Zach Broyles / Mythos Pedals https://mythospedals.com
Premier Guitar https://www.premierguitar.com/