www.customboards.fi offers its services to musicians, who need help with the integration and maintenance of their rig. We import and sell top-grade effects, pedalboards, power supply units, cables and accessories. Our page also contains loads of tutorial content for building your own guitar rig.

THE IDEA was strange to begin with. Finnish A-list guitarist Mikko Kosonen called me up one morning and told me he had bought a Keeley Electronics effect pedal that was highly inspiring. Mikko had written a new song using the pedal in question and now he wanted to try every Keeley pedal available. In Mikko’s view, a pedal is an instrument, too, just like a guitar. An effect should give something back to the musician and bring out music along with it. The technical details of pedals or their “vintage authenticity”, on the other hand, do not interest him. Mikko was eager to tape Dogma-style videos of every available Keeley effect. The idea was that he would play each effect for the first time with the camera rolling. He wanted the pedal to inspire the direction his improvisation would take, instead of carefully planning each video’s musical content.

VIDEO SHOOT DAY arrived. Mikko knew he had to pick up his children from daycare in the afternoon, but we would try to record as many clips as possible before he would have to leave. Mikko had spent his previous day in a TV studio. The man was tired but used to performing under any conditions. We managed to get a whopping 18 videos in the can! We were using a sort of “shotgun method” to tape our videos. We selected an effect pedal, hooked it up, and then we set our camera and recording equipment on “record”. The resulting videos are full of aural excitement, with a good taste of danger, some mistakes and a few surprises are thrown in.

All guitar parts were recorded going through a Kemper profiling amp connected to an audio interface and then straight onto a hard disk. We used the Vox AC30 profile that comes with the Kemper. We didn’t use ambient mikes or additional reverb – all the sounds you’ll hear come straight off the Kemper. Neither audio nor video has gone through additional editing or processing, instead, they have been left raw, staying true to our Dogma ethos.

THE FIRST SIX videos from our shoot were published in October 2017 and they got a very inspired reception in Finland. The next batch of editing took a while, but here they are. Total of 18 videos with the man and his guitar struggling through effects he has never seen before, thinking about what to play, twisting wrong knobs, and doing lots of things that a ”normal” user would never find from these pedals.

I do admire Mikko’s attitude. A less experienced guitarist would have become jittery in the knowledge that the videos would be shared on YouTube, especially as he didn’t know what to expect when stepping on the pedal for the first time. But it is exactly this fearlessness that makes these videos so interesting and fun to watch.

*****

www.customboards.fi offers its services to musicians, who need help with the integration and maintenance of their rig. We import and sell top-grade effects, pedalboards, power supply units, cables and accessories. Our page also contains loads of tutorial content for building your own guitar rig.

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