The guitar is first fed into a homemade preamp which has an active high-end boost, to allow Tom to get away with using all his other inline effects without overpowering noise. "Most of those devices are designed to take much larger input signals than even the most powerful guitars put out," Scholz explains. "If you kick up the signal in front by 3 or 4dB, and start boosting the highend at around 2kHz around 6dB per octave, you can get the signal-to-noise ratio down to a usable level.
"After the preamp," he continues, "I have a 6-band MXR Graphic Equalizer that runs on batteries-which in itself is noisier than hell, but sounds all right after it's preamped.