Gear is gifted. Tone is optional. 🔥This year, Jay and Jonathan are secretly picking pedals, amps, and maybe a few questionable surprises for each other. Behind the scenes it’s scheming, plotting, and plotting again — on camera, it’s all smiles and cranked-to-11 riffs.Wishing you all a loud rock ’n’ roll holiday season. Thanks for riding the tone wave with us this year — we couldn’t do it without you! 🔥

Crank the amps and grab your favorite mug ☕🎸—today we’re putting Browne Ethane vs Browne Protein OD head-to-head in a no-nonsense, no-solder-sniffing overdrive showdown. Same family, different flavors… but which one actually earns pedalboard real estate and which one politely gets benched?We also hit some pedal news and tip our hats to a legend, Steve Cropper. On the board:Browne Ethane OD – tight, punchy, and ready to scrapBrowne Protein OD – the crowd favorite with multiple personalitiesPlus, tube Screamer of the Day – love it, hate it, argue about it.No cork-sniffing. No bedroom volume heroics. Just guitars, pedals, opinions, and a little rock ’n’ roll chaos.Drop a comment, pick a side, and tell us which OD survives the night.

Fifty years of Iron Maiden fury and Fender/Jackson cranking the volume—so of course we had to dive headfirst into the chaos. Wampler TCD overdrive screaming, Digitech Badder Monkey on the loose, and the world’s most dangerous question: Is chasing tone just procrastination?Gretsch crashes the party with the new Synchromatic Falcon and Nashville, dripping retro swagger. And yes… we crown a Tube Screamer of the Day, because every journey needs one green box.Buckle up, tune down, and make some noise.

Welcome back to Big Shiny Tones, where Jonathan Lindsay and Jay Leonard J plug in, turn up, and refuse to play it safe.This week we unleash the EVH 5150iii Hypersonic—the brand-new digital 5150 that everyone will be arguing about. Hype? Heresy? Hidden genius?We crank it, shred through it, and break down what’s actually going on under the hood.Dropped Dec 3.

Prepare your volume knobs.Then it’s time for an Unpopular Opinion:To relic or not to relic?Fake wear, real wear, or don’t-care? Jonathan and Jay dive headfirst into one of guitar culture’s spiciest debates… and yeah, they definitely have opinions.Loud tones. Hot takes. Zero apologies.Let’s get shiny.

The Line 6 Helix Stadium XL is back and flexing harder than a prog drummer in 7/8, the Jacob Collier GS Mini 5-String is out here bending physics and feelings, and Rigs On Trial returns with a spicy community submission from @Heni_Jimdrix. Plus, we’re unleashing the Tube Screamer of the Day—don’t ask which one, it’s probably the wrong one and that’s the point. And bringing this whole circus together is Carlo Redl, armed with the smoothest voice in the room and guitar grooves so cool they should probably come with a wind chill warning. So, get ready, buckle up and faceplant into tone paradise.

Big Shiny Tones tears into the week with a trifecta of guitar-nerd mayhem: the shimmering swagger of the Johnny Marr Signature Jaguar, built for jangly arpeggios and clean lines sharp enough to shave with; the unhinged sonic chaos of Jack White’s Troika pedal, a three-headed fuzz monster that sounds like it was wired together in a thunderstorm; and John Mayer, calmly dropping bombs from the tone-guru throne, declaring that radius doesn’t matter while the internet collectively flips its lid.

It’s guitars, it’s opinions, it’s glorious noise — Big Shiny Tones style.

BIG SHINY TONES — EPISODE 11Where we salute legends, roast gear myths, and gently bully our own pedalboards. Kirk Hammett is unloading 150+ guitars like he’s spring-cleaning a haunted mansion—yes, including that silver Gibson CEO4 SG he shredded during Black Sabbath’s farewell show. Meanwhile, Trey Anastasio has declared modern guitar music “same-y,” so he’s writing riffs on piano now, which is either genius… or the first sign he’s about to start a jazz odyssey no one asked for.Unpopular Opinion: Expensive cables? Worse than cheap cables. There—I said it. Cry about it in your $200 Mogami.And finally: Calm the Monster… calm YOUR monster!… as Rigs On Trial dives into producer/videographer, Mitchell's magic pedalboard, a shimmering labyrinth of stompboxes channeling full Bowie-in-Berlin avant-gard vibes. It hums. It hisses. It contemplates art. It may be the only pedalboard that’s ever truly asked, “What would Eno do?”

Hop in the DeLorean and crank the flux capacitor to “tone.” In this episode of BIG SHINY TONES, Jay Leonard J and Jonathan Lindsay time-travel through the legend of the Gibson Back to the Future guitar — a six-string straight outta 1985 and into your dreams. We’re talking chrome and flux with a little Huey Lewis energy.Joining the ride: the Benson Amp that could charm Doc Brown himself and the King Comp, the crown jewel of squish and swagger.

This week on Tha News, Joe Bonamassa teams up with Epiphone for a shiny new signature model—Seymour Duncans, vintage vibes, and enough class to make your wallet nervous. JAM’s rolling out another fuzz box that promises to turn polite riffs into pure chaos, and NUX is trying to convince us that looping onstage actually looks cool… jury’s still out on that one. In Unpopular Opinion, we’re doubling down: Bigsby Teles just have more swagger than their hardtail cousins—sorry, not sorry. And for Rigs on Trial, Jay’s breaking out his JAM pedalboard to see if it’s studio magic or just pedal hoarding with style. Oh, and the TS of the Day? Because every board deserves at least one green scream.

Do 5-watt amps suck? In the latest gearpocalypse, Catalinbread's Mini Fuzz is out here shrinking the Mosrite Fuzzrite's splattery '60s psych-freakery into a pedalboard bullet that turns your riffs into incense-scented chaos—because who needs room for nuance when you've got garage-rock napalm? Meanwhile, G&L Guitars just slammed the factory doors shut, auctioning off Leo Fender's late-life toys to the corporate overlords at Fender, proving once again that even guitar gods get swallowed by the beast for a quick buck. And if that's not enough existential whiplash, Strymon drops the Olivera in Big Shiny Tones episode 8, that oil-can delay wizardry slinging modulated echoes so oily and organic, it'll make your tones shimmer like a '50s lounge lizard's greased-back regrets. On top of all that, we need to know... do 5-watt amps suck?