"This Noise Defender is meant to be a noise gate but it actually makes it noisier": Revisiting Steve Albini's tour of his worst effects pedals

EarthQuaker Devices' Instagram recently flagged up its excellent episode of Show Us Your Junk on with the late Steve Albini taking EQD founder Jamie Stillman around his Electrical Audio studio in Chicago five year ago. As you'd expect it's funny and insightful in equal measures - especially when Albini reveals he's kept the pedals he's collected over the years that he's deemed to be significantly less than stellar. 

It's not surprising the hugely respected engineer would keep pedals that fall so short of expectation – you never know when you might need them in the studio for some leftfield sound texture. But it's hard to see how some of them would even have that unintended usability. Albini's run-through is unsurprisingly amusing, including a pair of pedals he picked up in Japan during the late '80s that he still feels were a complete waste of money.

Show Us Your Junk! Ep. 23 - Steve Albini (Shellac, Electrical Audio) | EarthQuaker Devices - YouTube

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"This is the Guyatone Noise Defender," Albini tells Stillman. "I went to Japan in 1989 maybe and I did a tour with [Japanese noise-rock band] Zani Geva as an additional guitar player. I wanted a noise gate but I didn't want to carry too much stuff with me in my luggage for weight reasons so I just bought a guitar. I didn't bring my noise-gate or my fuzz tone. So I bought this Noise Defender at a music shop in Japan.

"This Noise Defender is meant to be a noise-gate but it actually makes it noisier when it shuts off – it hisses when it shuts off. When it's open it sounds like a guitar but when it shuts off it hisses. I don't think that's intentional, I think that's just a fault but it was the cheapest noise gate in the shop so that's why I bought it."

Albini's luck didn't improve with his other purchase from the Japanese music store that day.

"They also had a fuzz tone that was the cheapest fuzz tone in the shop and it was called the Jazz Fusion pedal. As a combination, I travelled the furthest and wasted the most in terms of the percentage of value on those two pedals, of any purchase I've ever made."

Albini also goes into detail on pedals at the studio that he was a fan of too and you can check out the full episode above.