Guitar Effects Pedals

Angus McKinnon Young (born on 31 March 1955) is the lead guitarist, songwriter, and co-founder of the Australian hard rock band AC/DC. He is known for his wild, energetic performance style and schoolboy-uniform stage outfits. He was ranked 96th on Rolling Stone’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.

Young did not get into guitar-playing seriously until after the Young family moved from Scotland to Australia in 1963. He bought a Gibson SG, after seeing it in a friend’s catalogue. Until then, he had been playing on an old Höfner guitar he inherited from his brother Malcolm, due to the fact that although guitars were available, they were expensive because they were from America.[citation needed] Angus’s brother George (of The Easybeats) gave both Angus and Malcolm guitar lessons when he would come home during breaks from touring.

Prior to forming AC/DC, Young played in a local group called Kantuckee. Kantuckee’s lineup included Bob McGlynn (vocals), Angus Young (guitar), Jon Stevens (bass) & Trevor James (drums). This was the first band to record Demo takes for Stevie Wrights classic “Evie” at the request of George Young. The band split and was later called Tantrum with the following line up: Mark Sneddon, Angus Young (guitar), Jon Stevens (bass) and Trevor James (drums)

Angus Young has used Gibson SGs in various forms (his original, and the basis for his current signature model, was a 1968 SG) throughout his career. He is rarely seen with another guitar. When AC/DC played a jam of “Rock me Baby” with the Rolling Stones in 2003, he played a Gibson ES-335 borrowed from Keith Richards, perhaps one of the only times he was without an SG onstage. Young’s 1968 SG has T Top pickups. Another 1964 SG that he used on the recording of Ballbreaker, has patent # pickups. All of these are high output Alnico 2 pickups with matched coils. Angus has used Ernie Ball Slinky RPS strings for over 40 years, gauge .09 – .042 or .010 – .048

James “J.Y.” Young is a guitarist, singer and songwriter, and member of the rock band, Styx. Young began playing keyboard and piano at the age of five. He attended Calumet High in Chicago and learned to play clarinet and guitar during those years.

After the band’s initial breakup in 1983, Young released the solo albums City Slicker, Out On A Day Pass, and Raised By Wolves. He is currently the sole remaining original member of Styx, but leads the band with longtime member Tommy Shaw from the band’s hitmaking heyday; and original bassist Chuck Panozzo still appears on recent albums and at certain concerts as a guest musician.

J.Y. joined TW4 at Illinois Institute of Technology, and that band later became the first incarnation of Styx.

Young tends to write the more hard rock pieces for Styx. He is best known for “Miss America” and “Snowblind”. A glance at the album, Best of Styx shows that his songs were more popular in the band’s early days than during its years of more mainstream popularity.

JY managed the Chicago, IL based rock band 7th heaven band in 1998 along with Alec John Such of the band Bon Jovi.

Jeff Young is an American guitarist. He graduated from Musicians Institute in 1985, and is best known for his time with the thrash metal band Megadeth, appearing on the 1988 album So Far, So Good… So What!.

Jeff Young (born March 31, 1962) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and after graduating high school, he moved to Hollywood, California to attend Musician’s Institute. After graduating in 1985, Young began his career in music as a guitar teacher. Less than four years after arriving in California, Capitol Records act Megadeth inadvertently discovered Jeff. Megadeth’s new guitarist, Jay Reynolds, had commissioned Young to play all of his solos on the new album, transcribe the previous Megadeth releases and teach him everything in time for the pending tours. However, after witnessing Young decipher Poland’s solos from “Wake Up Dead” note-for-note in less than 30 minutes, frontman Dave Mustaine decided to cut out the middleman and enlist Young into the fold. Young joined the band after all music was written, and contributed half of the guitar solos to the album.

A classically trained musician from age six, Young was known to wear his guitar high , stand very still, staring intensely at his guitar while he played while the rest of the band acted much like other 1980s thrash metal bands at the time. Young also had no drug habit, instantly making him both a newcomer and somewhat of an outsider to the nucleus of Megadeth.

Jeff’s entire career with Megadeth was spent recording and touring in support of their 1988 platinum selling album, So Far, So Good…So What! While Young had joined a popular thrash metal band with a rabid fanbase, his own musical tastes were more commercial than Megadeth’s technical style.

Malcolm Mitchell Young (born January 6, 1953) is an Australian guitarist, best known as a founding member, rhythm guitarist, backing vocalist and co-songwriter for the Australian hard rock band, AC/DC. He has been with them since he founded the band in November 1973.

Though his younger brother Angus is the more visible of the brothers, Malcolm has been described as the business and brains behind AC/DC. As the rhythm guitarist, he is responsible for the broad sweep of AC/DC’s sound, and co-writer of the material who has developed many of the band’s well-known riffs. But behind the scenes, his word is said to be ‘law’ on matters such as organising when and where the band go on tour, whether to make an album or film soundtrack, and when to meet the media.

Young plays a 1963 Gretsch Jet Firebird guitar given to him by Australian rock guitarist, Harry Vanda. The guitar has the neck and middle pickups removed. For a short time, he placed socks in the pick-up cavity, to stop it from feeding back. Prior to that he used a white piece of plastic to cover the pick-up cavities

During the Let There Be Rock era, he stripped the red paint off, down to the maple top. During the Powerage era, he again removed the plastic and stuffed socks in the pick-up cavities, and also changed the bridge from a stock Gretsch trapese tail-piece, to an all-in-one Badass bridge, and put a black piece of plastic over the cavity where the original tail-piece was. This is how the guitar has been since then. Malcolm uses old Gibson 12-56 pure nickel roundwound strings.

Malcolm also owned a 1959 Gretsch White Falcon that was used during the tours that supported the albums, Back In Black and For Those About To Rock (We Salute You). But he said that after someone ‘fixed’ it, it lost the sound he liked it for, and thus got rid of it. It was sold at a rock star items website, a few years ago, along with one of Cliff Williams’s MusicMan bass guitars.

Neil Percival Young OM (born November 12, 1945, Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician and film director.

Young’s work is characterized by deeply personal lyrics, distinctive guitar work, and signature falsetto tenor singing voice. Although he accompanies himself on several different instruments—including piano and harmonica—his style of claw-hammer acoustic guitar and often idiosyncratic soloing on electric guitar are the linchpins of a sometimes ragged, sometimes polished sound. Although Young has experimented widely with differing music styles, including swing, jazz, rockabilly, blues, and electronic music throughout a varied career, his best known work usually falls into either of two distinct styles: folk-esque acoustic rock and electric-charged hard rock. In more recent years, Young has started to adopt elements from newer styles of music, such as industrial, alternative country and grunge, the latter of which was profoundly influenced by his own style of playing, causing some to confer on him the title of “the godfather of grunge”.

Young has directed a number of films using the pseudonym Bernard Shakey, including Journey Through the Past (1973), Rust Never Sleeps, Human Highway (1982), Greendale (2003), and CSNY Déjà Vu (2008), a documentary about the band’s controversial 2006 “Freedom of Speech” tour. He is currently working on another documentary about new technology for automobiles, tentatively titled “Linc/Volt”.

He is also an outspoken advocate for environmental issues and small farmers, having co-founded in 1985 the benefit concert Farm Aid, and in 1986 helped found The Bridge School, and its annual supporting Bridge School Benefit concerts, together with his wife Pegi.

Although Young sings as frequently about U.S. legends and myths (Pocahontas, space stations, and the settlement of the American West), as he does about his native country (such as in “Helpless” and “Four Strong Winds”), he remains a Canadian citizen and has never wanted to relinquish his Canadian citizenship. He has lived in the U.S. for “so long” and has stated, about U.S. elections, that he has “got just as much right to vote in them as anybody else.”

Billy Zoom was born Tyson Kindell on February 20, 1948, in Savanna, Illinois. The son of a Big Band woodwinds player, he inherited his father’s love of music. At a very young age, Tyson began playing a variety of instruments, including violin; accordion; piano; clarinet; tenor, alto, and baritone saxophones; flute; banjo; and guitar.

Upon moving to Los Angeles in the 1960s, he worked as a session guitarist while attending technical school for training in electronics repair. Billy Zoom has an insider’s reputation as an expert in the maintenance, restoration, and modification of vintage tube amplifiers, and has performed custom technical work on the amps of a host of electric guitarists and bassists.

Although best known as guitarist and founding member of punk rock band X, Zoom has also worked with rockabilly legend Gene Vincent, The Blasters, Etta James, Big Joe Turner, and dozens of other major recording artists.

In June 2008, in honor of his longevity in the world music community and contribution to the legacy of Gretsch guitars, Gretsch unveiled the G6129BZ Billy Zoom Custom Shop Tribute Silver Jet.

Nicholas Joseph Zinner (born December 8, 1974) is the guitarist for the New York rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs. He is known for his “unmistakable” wild hair, skinny physique, and pale appearance.

Since 2001, Zinner has many collaborative efforts under his belt with such acts as TV on the Radio, Har Mar Superstar, Ronnie Spector The Horrors, and Scarlett Johannson. He contributed guitar and keyboard to several tracks on Bright Eyes’ 2005 album Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, and went on tour with the band as a full member..

Zinner produced the re-mix of the track ‘Compliments’ on British group Bloc Party’s 2005 album Silent Alarm Remixed, and has remixed The Plot to Blow Up the Eiffel Tower’s song, “INRI,” on their INRI ep. Zinner has also remixed Single Frame’s song, “People are Germs,” in addition to appearing in the music video.

Additionally, Zinner is an accomplished photographer. He studied photography at Bard College and has released three separate collections of his work: No Seats on the Party Car (2001), Slept in Beds (2003) and I hope you are all happy now (2004), which features an introduction written by director Jim Jarmusch. He also studied photography in Paris, France in 2001 before meeting Karen O.

Nick is also a vegan and involved with the animal rights group, PETA. He has tattoos in different places including one of a star on his arm, and another of a heart on his finger and one on his hand. Zinner listened to metal bands while growing up, and cites Mötley Crüe and Glenn Danzig as major influences. His father, Stephen Zinner MD, is a medical professor at Harvard University and a classical piano player. Nick also used to play the violin, referring to himself as a “child prodigy.” Nick’s sister is Meredith Zinner. She is a well known actress and photographer.

As of September of 2007 “Putting Holes in Happiness” for Marilyn Manson has yet to see a release date. A remix of “Putting Holes in Happiness” by Zinner is featured in Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock as a playable master track.

Frank Vincent Zappa (December 21, 1940 – December 4, 1993) was an American composer, electric guitarist, record producer and film director. In a career spanning more than 30 years, Zappa wrote for rock bands, jazz ensembles, synthesizers, symphony orchestra, and created musique concrète works. He also directed feature-length films, music videos, and designed album covers. Zappa produced almost all of the more than 60 albums he released with the band Mothers of Invention and as a solo artist.

In his teens, he acquired a taste for percussion-based avant-garde composers like Edgard Varèse, and 1950s rhythm and blues music. He began writing classical music in high school, while at the same time playing drums in rhythm and blues bands—he later switched to electrical guitar. He was an autodidact composer and performer, and his diverse musical influences led him to create music that was often impossible to categorize. His 1966 debut album with the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out!, combined songs in conventional rock and roll format with collective improvisations and studio-generated sound collages. His later albums shared this eclectic and experimental approach, irrespective of whether the fundamental format was one of rock, jazz or classical. He was a strident critic of mainstream education and organized religion, and a forthright and passionate advocate for freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship.

Zappa was a highly productive and prolific artist and he gained wide-spread critical acclaim. Many of his albums are considered essential in rock history, and he is regarded as one of the most original guitarists and composers of his time; he remains a major influence on musicians and composers. He had some commercial success, particularly in Europe, and was for most of his career able to work as an independent artist. Zappa was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995 and received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997.

Zappa was married to Kathryn J. “Kay” Sherman from 1960 to 1964, and in 1967, to Adelaide Gail Sloatman, with whom he remained until his death of prostate cancer in 1993. They had four children: Moon Unit, Dweezil, Ahmet Emuukha Rodan and Diva Thin Muffin Pigeen. Gail Zappa manages the businesses of her late husband under the name the Zappa Family Trust.

Dweezil Zappa (born September 5, 1969) is an American rock guitarist.

In the 1980s, Zappa worked as a MTV VJ. He also recorded some solo rock albums, as well as playing guitar for other artists. Dweezil can be seen in the music video for Don Johnson’s top 40 song, “Heartbeat.” He also played co-lead guitar on Winger’s cover of Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” Dweezil has said that Eddie Van Halen was his favorite guitar player, and he began copying Van Halen’s distinctive guitar style. He also had a part in the futuristic Arnold Schwarzenegger movie The Running Man as Stevie, and gave his most famous cameo role in Molly Ringwald’s brat-pack movie Pretty in Pink as Andi’s friend, Simon.

Since the early 1990s, Zappa has been working on a piece of music named “What the Hell Was I Thinking?”, a 75-minute piece featuring guitar solos by dozens of famous guitar players. The project has suffered from numerous difficulties and has been reworked several times since the ’90s. Dweezil said in September 2004: “I started recording it on analog tape almost 13 years ago… There are probably about 35 guest guitar players on it, everybody from Brian May to Edward van Halen, Eric Johnson, Angus and Malcolm Young — it’s quite a crazy project. I’m still waiting and hoping to record Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page as some of my final guests on there.”

In the mid 1990s, Zappa voiced the character Ajax Duckman on the animated series Duckman. He also briefly appeared in the television sitcom Normal Life with sister Moon Unit Zappa and former Laverne and Shirley star Cindy Williams. He composed and performed the theme music for The Ben Stiller Show.
 
Dweezil Zappa performing on the “Zappa Plays Zappa” tour in 2006. In 2006, Zappa organized the “Zappa Plays Zappa” tour. He assembled a band of young musicians with a view to bring the music of Frank Zappa to a younger audience. The tour also features guest appearances by Steve Vai, Napoleon Murphy Brock and Terry Bozzio. The tour began in Europe in May with dates in the U.S. from June. After a break it continued in the U.S. on October 18, 2006. The 2007 version of the tour ran from July, finishing in Australia in early December, and featured Ray White as special guest. The shows ended with the promise: “There are so many songs we want to learn to play … see you next year …”

Robin Zander (born January 23, 1953, in Beloit, Wisconsin) is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for the rock band Cheap Trick.

Zander is the fourth of five children; he has two older brothers, and older and younger sisters. His father was of Dutch-German ancestry. He built and flew model airplanes, had his pilot’s license, and was a member of the Civil Air Patrol. Zander’s mother has Belgian, Welsh, and Native American ancestors.

 
Robin Zander with Cheap Trick on 26 April 1988 in Sydney, Australia.Zander reportedly was reading books by age three, and learned to play the guitar by age 12. He played with his first group, The Destinations, while in seventh grade. The next year he was with a group called Butterscotch Sundays, playing summer festivals, and after that formed a band called Robin and the Hoods. In high school, Zander sang for three years in the Madrigals, the most demanding of the three choral groups at his school, played basketball and football, and had a part-time job at a sandwich shop.