Gear Review: The Contortionist guitarist Robby Baca on his Boss Delay and Chorus pedals

The Contortionist guitarist Robby Baca may be very young, but he’s already making a name for himself and band as part of the new wave of progressive metal acts surfacing from the States. With such a diverse sound one would think he uses a bunch of crazy gear to capture all the tones; however, Robby keeps it simple, using his clean channel, a lot of ambient progressions and the Boss Delay and Chorus pedals to beef up those melodic parts and make them shine. Here’s what he said about his gear.

What one piece of gear do you use to obtain your signature sound?
Robby: Whenever I use my clean channel I always have on my Boss Chorus and Delay. Eventually I feel I will be using a rack mount effects, but not yet.

What makes these pedals so important to your sound?
Robby: Whenever we do clean stuff or swells or anything that’s not loud and metal I feel like it adds to the ambiance. The chorus kind of detunes the sound and it makes the already shiny guitar tone even more shiny and I feel that’s very important to our sound.

What are the pros and cons about them?
Robby: The cons are that they are in fact pedals and you have to worry about stepping on them and if you notice tonight it will be a bit of a tap dancing show for all of us actually because all 3 of us use pedals. The pros are that it gives us are signature ambient sound.

Would you ever change and use something else?
Robby: I’ve been looking into the TC Electronics G-Major which the guys in Textures use, they are the ones who first showed me it on this tour. It sounds great and I feel it would be much simpler.

Check out the song “Vessel”