Yannis Philippakis (Foals) pedal board

From some  of my previous postings, you may notice that I’m a big Foals fan. Truth be told.. these guys are awesome, and I’m really into what they’re doing. Foals have a unique way of creating inter-weaving guitar interplay and tension with the use of clean guitar tones and upbeat drumming. There are various aspects of the tone they create from the guitars to the amps and to the pedals. For this post, I wanted to showcase Yannis Philippakis who is the singer and one of the guitar players of the band.

Yannis primarily uses Travis Bean guitars (Travis Beans were manufactured from 1974 to 1979 and utilized a aluminum neck design) played through a Hiwatt halfstack. They like to play clean but can build up to overdriven tones. They are a fans of reverb and delay pedal to help create their sonic landscape.

Below is a shot of Yannis’ pedal line from their 2010 US tour.

Bottom row from right to left:

Boss TU-2 Tuner
Boss DD-3 Delay
Boss RV-5 Reverb (possibly a Boss RV-3 Reverb)
Electro-Harmonix Nano Holy Grail Reverb
Klon Centaur

Top row from right to left:

Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2
Empress Super Delay
Telenordia TK-23 Kompressor

Here is a older shot of the board (missing the EHX Holy Grail).

Yannis also used a vintage Echoplex tape delay on stage.

If you have a chance to see them… you need to check out Foals. Fantastic band. Here is a listing of tour dates.