Neil Young: Effects Pedal Harvest

An electric-guitar wielding Neil Young is commonly associated with overdriven amplifiers and violent Bigsby vibrato dives. But pedal effects have long been an important aspect of Young's live guitar playing. Whether used to provide the slap-back echo on "This Note's for You" (from This Note's for You) or to accentuate the pinched harmonics heard on the solos to the legendary songs "Rockin' in the Free World" (from Freedom), "Powderfinger" (from Rust Never Sleeps), and "Like A Hurricane" (from American Stars 'N Bars), Neil Young's soloing owes as much to his aggressive picking style as it does to his selection of vintage effects pedals. As far as effects are concerned, you need one or more of the following guitar pedals to cover your favorite Neil Young songs:

• a Fender Reverb Unit - while not a pedal effect, per se, as mentioned previously, it does come with an on/off foot switch. That constitutes a pedal for our purposes. The re-issue '63 Fender Reverb unit should do the trick;
• five Strobe-O-Tuners - massive units used by Young to tune his guitar after repeated Bigsby-vibrato dives;
• a MXR M-118 Analog Delay pedal - dial in your favorite settings using the Mix, Delay, and Regen knobs, and combine with the following octave divider for crazy results;
  
• a Mu-Tron Octave Divider - set "Bass Only" in the "On" position, and "Ringer" in the "Off" position to achieve the tone heard on "Out of the Blue" from Rust Never Sleeps;
• a circa-1969 Boss Flanger - an impossible to find original Boss Flanger unit. Best bet is to pick up a used Boss BF-2 Flanger from 1985. Like most pedals in Young's set-up, the flanger effect is primarily used during extended solos;
• an Alesis MicroVerb - adjust the reverb dial to "7" in the "Large" range for the total reverb effect preferred by Neil Young; and
• a Maestro EP-4 Echoplex unit.

Rounding out Neil Young's tone is a much-modified 1953 Gibson Les Paul affectionately named "Old Black" and a custom amplifier volume modulating device called a "Whizzer". The Whizzer was conceived by Neil Young around the time of the Rust Never Sleeps album and is adapted to physically turn the volume knobs on his vintage 1959 Fender Deluxe amp between strict presets.

Each of Young's effects pedals (and the Whizzer) are remotely controlled using a switching system. The switching system has four pre-programmed settings for the Whizzer, and at least four loops for independently activating the Echoplex, Octave Divider/MXR combination, MicroVerb, and Boss Flanger effects. Check out the cool behind the scenes look at Neil Young's effects rig here.

Comments and corrections welcome.