Carl
VERHEYEN
effects are before my clean amps.
The switching is seamless.
in the air while I switch. There’s no pop or anything with those Lehle foot switches.
For the dirty sound, I come off the B-side of
the pedal board after going through the three
distortion pedals and go into the Doctor Z
head. It’s a replacement for my old
Marshall. They’re becoming $5000
to $6000 for those Plexi heads.
Doctor Z made it so that if you
turn the master volume all the way
up it’s out of the signal path. It’s
basically acting like a non-master
volume amp using the power tubes
to the fullest. Then I come into one
of those THD Hotplates. That has
a direct out—I feed that to a cabinet—and it also has a line level out
that I feed into a Lexicon PCM- 41.
It’s a line level reverb, and the only
way you can get into that is by turning the speaker out into line level, which the
Hotplate does really well.
An A/B system like that is going to be organic,
whereas if you do channel switching or MIDI
or any of that stuff, it cuts off. That little mil-
Do you have any new stomp boxes in your
arsenal you could tell us about?
Yeah, there’s a really nice distortion pedal I’ve been using called
the Cream pedal by Andy Fuchs of
Fuchs Amplification. It’s kind of a
cross between a saturated Fuzz Face
type of pedal and a Tube Screamer.
It’s somewhere in the middle, which
is nice because I find Tube Screamers
sometimes aren’t saturated enough
to get that creamy tone. Fuzz Faces
are a little hard to manage for me.
They’re a little out of control. I’ve
been using that quite a bit lately.
lisecond is not organic. If I have a rhythm part
going and I’m singing, and I feel like slamming
in a little lead line, the rhythm part hangs over
Doctor Z recently got me a new Carmen Gia
head. That’s a really nice head. It’s only 18
watts, but for recording or a small blues gig
