I remember when I first started playing guitar (especially electric), I was always trying to search the internet to see what kind of gear different musicians used to try to determine what I should do. I figured, I’d return the favor.

I have, by no means, found the “perfect tone” and I’m still working on it, but I’m satisfied with the sounds I’m getting right now. Here’s what I’m currently using (sorry for the poor quality photos and for the boring post if you’re not into this):

My Fender ’72 Telecaster Thinline Reissue. My first electric…love the big sound I can get out of a tele via the humbuckers and the semi-hollowbody is a nice feature.

My pedalboard is really simple. Here’s my signal chain:

1. I go into the Fulltone Fulldrive 2 (good drive with a nice boost feature that I use for leads and for a lot of Chris Coleman stuff).
2. Then to the Ernie Ball Volume Pedal jr (the jr is just smaller)(I do this order so that I can control the overall volume without changing the gain on the drive pedal). I use this a lot for swells and pad-type sounds.
3. I use the tuner output on the volume pedal to go to the Boss Tuner.
4. The other output on the volume pedal to go to the BBE Sonic Stomp (I use this to tweak my tone and give it some more low end and make the high’s cut through a little more).
5. Then comes the Boss DD-5 Delay. This pedal isn’t made anymore, but I love it because it has the external tap (hence, the Boss footswitch you see). Occasionally you can find one on eBay or somewhere online. I mainly use mine for dotted eighth delays, but I’ll also use it for some other stuff…
6. The Big Green is next…the Line 6 DL-4. It allows me to program in 3 delays and use the last switch to tap in the tempo. I like this stompbox because it gives me a lot of different sounding delays. I will layer a delay on this with the DD-5 and will often set the tempo on one as a quarter note and one as an eighth note to get some cool sounds (especially using the volume pedal for swells).
7. Last comes a Boss Noise Suppressor. Honestly, I don’t really know why I use this anymore…I used to use it for my Vox AC15 but now that I don’t have that amp, I don’t really need it as much. It suppresses any extra noise that comes through my amp when I’m not playing.

Here’s my Dr. Z amp that I just got about 2 months ago. It is the biggest contributor to my tone and I love this amp. It gives me a lot more balanced sound than my Vox did, accenting the lows and mids. I run it a little driven, but use the Fulldrive 2 to give my drive tones. That gives me 3 different sounds: clean through amp (with a little drive), Fulldrive on, and Fulldrive on with boost.