Kathleen Hanna

This is the most awesome thing in the world and I don't even like technical gadgets that much. It is a guitar effects box that has a built in speaker and is battery operated so you can rock your friends at the corner store if you so choose. We like to use the zoom for recording vocals. We sing though it with our Shure SM57 mics. It has a setting called "ZZTop" on it that is totally distortion-y in a majorly disgusting way and another setting called "Woman" that is massively ethereal and ridiculous. I like to think that ZZtop is supposed to be the "man" setting and it's opposite is the "woman" setting. Luckily this thing has like two hundred settings in all so it's easy to find a bunch of good ones. The zoom tends to put a lot of hiss on vocals which we sometimes like, but most times we redo them in a nice studio with better mics anyways, so it doesn't really matter. We use the zoom to decide how we want our vocals to ultimately sound (like do we want flange, reverb, distortion, compression, modulation or what) on them? That way when we are in the studio we can play our homemade recordings for to the engineer and ask her/him to create a similar, less hissy version of the effect we used. Word has it that Stereo Total also uses the Zoom on their vocals. I also play my guitar through it directly into the computer when we record at home.

" The MXR GOLDFACE distortion pedal

KATHLEEN: I have no idea why I bought this thing except that I remembered Billy from Bikini Kill buying one once so when I was looking for a distortion pedal it was the first thing that caught my eye. I buy the vintage version of this pedal which I think sounds way better than the reissue, but to be truthful they are all so different from each other even though they look the same, so if you are gonna buy one it is best to try it out first. I guess I shouldn't say that cuz I really never test them out myself since there is always some guy in the "try out" room at the guitar store playing Iron Butterfly songs really really loud and I would honestly rather have one of my arms broken that have to walk in there. (Are these guys on the pay roll of the shops? Are they spawned on a secret guitar asshole island? Why won't they leave?) I usually just check out the store return policy on used stuff before I buy it and then bring it back if it sucks. The pedals cost around $90-125." ~ LeTigre World