Raise your hand if you’ve ever judged a band you’ve never heard based on their pedalboards. Thought so.

Lauren Larson of Austin, TX shoe-ragers Ume is guilty of having awesome tone. She has five gain stages on her board – Speaker Cranker, Westwood, Palisades, Iron Horse, and Big Muff. Five. Gain. Stages. Each one carefully dialed-in to take Larson’s guitar from a timid whisper to a primordial and barbaric yawp at the press of a footswitch. “Step one in my sound,” says Larson, “is the Speaker Cranker. I have [it] on one-hundred percent of the time…It makes a not-so-great amp sound better.” For heavy single-note riffs, Lauren uses all three channels of the Palisades to keep up with the rhythm section. “With [the Palisades], you get power and clarity, which I really like,” she says.

The modulation and time-based section of her rig includes a pair of octaves – an Electro-Harmonic POG2 and Walrus Audio Descent, a set of Boss delays (DD-5 and PS-3), plus the Dispatch Master and Avalanche Run, which is setup for reverse delays. “There’s a sensitivity to [the Avalanche Run] that really honors the player,” she says.

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