Chicken Salad on Trower....

[duhvoodooman***]

Or is it Trower on Chicken Salad? In any case....

You oldsters here who lived the music of the 70's--and you younger Fretters who've listened to it since--might get a kick out of this. As I posted in the "Have You Heard?" forum a couple of days back, I recently picked up a double CD of Robin Trower's classic albums Twice Removed from Yesterday and Bridge of Sighs. If you're familiar with Trower's music, you know that he was known for a heavy Strat neck tone played through a Univibe pedal, an early phase-shifting effect with a characteristic sound originally made famous by Jimi Hendrix. But on his first couple of solo albums, Robin used the Univibe on almost everything!

I was listening to the titular tune from Bridge of Sighs in the car the other day and thought to myself, "I'll bet I could reproduce that sound pretty closely with that Danelectro Chicken Salad vibrato pedal!" So I fooled around some over the weekend, and was amazed at how close to Trower's signature tone I was able to get. Basically, it's just a matter of playing my Strat on the neck p'up through the UK '70s amp model on my AD30VT, adding in a good dose of overdrive a la ZYS and the Chicken Salad with the speed and intensity both set up around 2 o'clock. Check out THIS LINK to a brief clip I recorded to demo this "Trower tone". It may not be exact, but it's not too bad for a $25 pedal, IMO!!

The clip starts out with the clean Strat neck p'up/UK '70s amp model combo, then adds the ZYS distortion (position 5 on the gain/bass boost dial), and then the Chicken Salad over the top of that. It ends with what I hope sounds pretty familiar to Trower listeners....

[M29]

That was sweet duhvoodooman! Nice playing too! That ZYS is one versatile pedal. I have been spending money left and right lately but I do want to get one down the road Both together they really nail that Trower sound. I have never heard a Chicken Salad pedal until now, I will have to take a listen to one.

Very nice indeed!!

M29

[Tone2TheBone]

That rocked my ears Voo. What color is that chicken salad pedal? Does it contrast nicely against the yellow of the Zonkinator? Very cool clip!

[sunvalleylaw]

Cooooool! Nice to hear you playing with your stuff! A talented man you seem to be!

[SuperSwede]

Very nice clip DVM! Always a pleasure to hear that ZYS drive

[Jimi75]

A shop nearby has the complete mini pedal series.
I have tried the tuna and the chicken salad and both were amazing pedals. You can't go wrong with them.

[duhvoodooman***]

A shop nearby has the complete mini pedal series. I have tried the tuna and the chicken salad and both were amazing pedals. You can't go wrong with them.

I agree. At the price that most of the Danelectro mini-pedals go for, they're an amazing value. The two main knocks on them that I've seen are the plastic construction (esp. the tiny & delicate control knobs) and reliability issues. As far as the former goes, though the pedal casing is plastic, it's quite thick & substantial. You could probably stand on the casing without breaking it, though I don't plan to try! The knob issue has been addressed by Danelectro by including a plastic guard that clips over the front of the pedal and protects them. Still, I wouldn't consider these "road-worthy" pedals, but they're great for home use or some light gigging.

Reliability-wise, I guess the jury is out. I have four of these pedals now (reverb, flanger and octave-down, in addition to the vibrato), and one of the four didn't work correctly when I received it. I've read of similar experiences by other buyers, so initial build quality could be better. But problems with new pedals are easily resolved by returning them for replacement (or being sent a replacement without returning the original, as happened to me!). Of greater concern to me is how reliable these pedals will be with use. And I haven't had any of them long enough to judge that.

I have read a couple of comments about "tone-sucking" by these pedals, but I really haven't found this to be a significant issue. The causes of high frequency loss due to a pedal's circuitry loading the pickups is so well known and understood, there's really no excuse for serious tone-sucking in modern pedals. It can be solved for a few cents in the design of the input circuitry.

[marnold***]

Just so you know, DVM, your Trower clip inspired me to bust out my Digitech EX7 and try to dial in that tone with its Univibe model. I got pretty close, but I've got to do some EQ tweaking.