GT-3 Guitar Effects Processor
Episode Transcript
Most guitar players will tell you, if you want to get better, then you have to get with other musicians and play. Often, that turns into starting a band, or at least joining one. As the 2000s were getting underway, in the basement of my good friend Tony’s condominium, he and I started a band. We had jammed together once in his college apartment a few years prior, during our senior year, and we always talked about doing more of it. Perhaps we were having a quarter-life crisis, but we finally decided to get serious and play. (Well, somewhat serious, as we were always a couple of goofs.) Tony on drums, me on guitar, our friends Diego on lead guitar and Okem on bass, and we were officially a band.
While we were deciding on a name, I decided that I wanted to upgrade my guitar rig. At the time, I owned a wah pedal (see Episode 3 for more on that), a Boss distortion pedal (Episode 1), and a Korg ToneWorks AX100G multi-effect pedal. The ToneWorks is a fun little unit but I wanted something more. Then I got an idea - what if I combined all three of those? Like Voltron! Enter the Boss GT-3 Guitar Effects Processor.
My name is Wright Seneres and this is Effect Pedal. This is a podcast and art project dedicated to guitar effect pedals. In the universe, there are countless numbers of these pedals, creating an infinite number of sounds, and opening up worlds of possibilities for guitar players.
The GT-3 combines 32 Boss effects, including 12 distortions and overdrives, as well as choruses and flangers, into one unit with dozens and dozens of presets. Notably, it includes something Boss’s parent company Roland calls a “Composite Object Sound Modeling” preamp, which emulates a number of famous guitar amplifiers in history. It also has a great variety of simulations of different pickups, speaker cabinets and guitar synthesizers. It was first released in 1998 as a low-cost alternative to the GT-5, and has since been discontinued and replaced by the GT-6 and other GT models. Like other Boss stompboxes, it’s constructed with a rugged metal case that would do well at a monster truck rally if it had wheels. It could win a demolition derby if you could drive it. It’s as solid now as the day I got it.
I got my GT-3 one evening after a tuna fishing trip Tony and his wife Laura took me on. I didn’t catch anything on the tuna boat, but I reeled in this beast of a multi-effect pedal on eBay. It’s a pleasing deep blue color with yellow Cheez Whiz color letters. It has seven foot switches, an expression pedal, a scroll wheel, an LED display, and twenty buttons. Twenty buttons! The seller lived a few miles from me, so I picked it up in person and raced home to plug it in. It was like that movie Pleasantville, when the picture goes from black and white to color.
The ever-large palette of sounds that the GT-3 provided was just what I needed as our little band was beginning, which we called the Modes. I could do more things at once with the GT-3, customizing the footswitches for individual parts of songs. One of the songs we covered in that band was “Lucky” by Radiohead, and with the GT-3, I could get a nice delay effect for the intro, which is actually played where the strings are attached to the headstock: footswitch one.
I could get a nice clean sound with a little bit of chorus for verses: footswitch two.
I could take it to the next level with an overdrive that I liked for the solos: footswitch three.
It was just so fun to experiment and dial in just the right amount of effects for each part of a song.
After the break, our first gig, and our last jam session.
For t-shirts or art prints featuring the pedals of Season 1, visit the Effect Pedal website: EffectPedalProject.com. They make great gifts for the guitar player in your life. If you’re the guitar player in your life, then you should get them for yourself. Do it, my friend, treat yourself.
Welcome back to Effect Pedal.
The Boss GT-3 isn’t exactly historically important to anyone, but it was there for a lot of big moments in my little guitar life. Our first time playing out as the Modes was just outside that condominium basement. In Tony’s backyard in front of family and friends, we ripped through a mix of originals and covers. I organized my footswitches on the GT-3, even whole banks of sounds, in the order of our set list. It was my first time playing out, and I wanted my effects lined up and sounding good so I could concentrate on playing my best. It was such fun!
My GT-3 was there when we returned to Rider University, our alma mater, and we played some really fun shows there for our friends. It was there at Tony’s new house, when in 2007 we started a new band, The Meritocracy, and then played even more shows, including in front of people that weren’t already our friends. It was there when we made our first real recording in a real studio. It was there when I played my first ever solo show, upstairs at 3rd and Girard Bar in Philadelphia. It was there when Tony and I started another new band, Right Whale, in 2016. And it was there in 2017, in his basement, when we jammed for the last time. As would happen, life would happen, and we’d go a little while, or a long while, between jam sessions. We’d always pick up where we’d left off, like no time went by. We had that kind of musical connection. It was only a matter of time until our next time. But that next time never came.
Sadly, our quarter-life crisis in the early 2000s when we started our first band turned out to be a midlife crisis for my friend. Tony died of COVID-19 at the age of 45, early on in the pandemic. All those jam sessions with him in his basements, the shows we played – he made me a better player. He made my life better through his love and friendship and of course, the music. I will carry him with me wherever I play my guitar. But as they usually say, the show must go on, and since the GT-3 is built like a tank, the show will go on.
For a t-shirt or an art print featuring the Boss GT-3 pedal, visit the Effect Pedal website: EffectPedalProject.com. Want to hear some Meritocracy and Right Whale songs that have the Boss GT-3 Guitar Effects Processor in them? Check out the playlist on Spotify by searching “effect pedal gt-3” or in the show notes for this episode at the Effect Pedal website.
Effect Pedal is a MeteorWright production, hosted and produced by me, Wright Seneres. If you like what you heard here, subscribe to the podcast and consider getting the Effect Pedal email newsletter in your inbox. The newsletter has extra fun content for this episode, including links, videos, and other cool stuff related to Boss GT pedals curated by me. You can find that at effectpedal.substack.com. For even more fun content, Effect Pedal is on social media too at @EffectPedal. You can find links to all of that at EffectPedalProject.com. Theme music is “Lucky Day” by the Meritocracy. Special thanks to Alice Seneres and Tony Whalen.
Thank you for listening to Effect Pedal. What’s your effect?
Tune in next week for the season finale of Effect Pedal, where my head explodes.
Gear used in this episode
Fender Jaguar (1998, made in Japan), Boss GT-3 Guitar Effects Processor (1998), into Fender Princeton Chorus amplifier (mid-2000s, solid state version).
Parenthetical Studios, 2010
Bridgewater, NJ, 2016.