The roast desk

01FEATURED TAKES

The roasts worth printing.

The takes the editors pulled for the record — one rig, one voice, one clean hit each.

Lead take

Tom Quayle
While the TC Electronic PolyTune is a fine choice for ensuring you’re in tune before you venture into the harmonic landscape, your rig's complexity begins to falter after that. The Polytone Mini-Brute can deliver a certain warmth, but paired with a pedalboard that likely lacks nuanced modulation or delay effects, you risk losing the clarity that a Wes Montgomery chord demands. For articulation and depth, consider an Analog Delay like the MXR Carbon Copy; it'll preserve your note separation without smearing the lovely voicings you'd extract from that ES-175.

Lead take

Tom Quayle
While the TC Electronic PolyTune is a fine choice for ensuring you’re in tune before you venture into the harmonic landscape, your rig's complexity begins to falter after that. The Polytone Mini-Brute can deliver a certain warmth, but paired with a pedalboard that likely lacks nuanced modulation or delay effects, you risk losing the clarity that a Wes Montgomery chord demands. For articulation and depth, consider an Analog Delay like the MXR Carbon Copy; it'll preserve your note separation without smearing the lovely voicings you'd extract from that ES-175.
While the TC Electronic PolyTune is a fine choice for ensuring you’re in tune before you venture into the harmonic landscape, your rig's complexity begins to falter after that. The Polytone Mini-Brute can deliver a certain warmth, but paired with a pedalboard that likely lacks nuanced modulation or delay effects, you risk losing the clarity that a Wes Montgomery chord demands. For articulation and depth, consider an Analog Delay like the MXR Carbon Copy; it'll preserve your note separation without smearing the lovely voicings you'd extract from that ES-175.