zoom b1

The Zoom B1 is the first pedal I ever owned. I got it as a Christmas present one year and it was a staple for a long, long time. It's only a basic multi-fx pedal, but there's still a lot of depth to it. I was pretty young and didn't really know what effects were, but I was able to learn a lot by messing around with it. I found out that I really liked fuzz, that short delay with long repeats is really fun, that delay and reverb is a sublime combo, that phaser is wild, that octave up+down is the core of Battles's sound, that fuzz+delay does the shoegaze thing or is great for flowing psychedelic solos, that chorus is really corny—and about a million other things. I discovered what I like and don't like about effects, what I wished the limited one- or two-parameter effects could do, things like that. It was a good entry point, for sure. It's still fun to keep around since there's some really gnarly, noisy tones I can get out of it based on the auto-wah. It also has a serviceable flanger, phaser, and tremolo that I can pull out if I ever so choose, since I'm definitely not enamored with those effects to spend $100+ on a separate pedal for each. I only took it off the board recently because I was spending too much time mucking about with it and I wanted to work on being a better straight-up musician and develop a stronger understanding of how to get the most out of the other gear I have.