Adrian Belew

Adrian Belew is a guitarist whose long career spans work with Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, Nine Inch Nails and Paul Simon, as well as King Crimson¹². His newest project is the super-group BEAT, with Steve Vai, Danny Carey and Tony Levin¹.

What ties the whole career together is a single idea: using effects to make a guitar sound like something else. Premier Guitar puts it plainly, that from his career launching stints with Zappa and Bowie, through the Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club, to his career defining years in King Crimson, "Adrian Belew has always been on the cutting edge of using effects for cultivating intriguing and out-of-this-world guitar tones"³.

The sound he is known for

Belew's reputation rests on guitar tones that stop sounding like guitar: a steel drum on Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love, an elephant on King Crimson's Elephant Talk, a rhinoceros on his own The Lone Rhinoceros⁸⁴. All three of those signature sounds came out of one pedal, the rare late-1970s Electro-Harmonix Echo Flanger, a bucket-brigade device that Delicious Audio describes as his "ultimate secret weapon"⁹⁴.

The other half of the equation is his hands. DigiTech's artist page on him describes a style built on:

• tapping
• pick scrapes
• bending the neck
• slide guitar techniques that are not the typical approach¹

His attitude to the boxes themselves matters just as much. Reflecting on his long relationship with Electro-Harmonix, he says:

He puts the same point more bluntly in a later Guitar World interview: "Electro-Harmonix is the one company you could make do things they're not supposed to do"¹¹. That willingness to misuse a pedal, combined with an unconventional technique, is how a guitar ends up trumpeting like an elephant.

Effects with Zappa, Bowie, Talking Heads and Tom Tom Club

Belew's first big break was rehearsing with Frank Zappa in L.A. in 1977². It was around that time, at a casual party in L.A. in 1977, that he first heard a Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus amplifier, and he told Roland he "was madly in love with it within the first two notes" he played through it². Zappa liked his playing enough to advance him the money to buy his first JC-120, and he still has it in his studio and still records with it². That amp, with its built-in chorus, has been a constant under everything else on his board.

In the late 1970s he was also a regular at the Electro-Harmonix store on 48th Street in New York, where he demoed pedals live with about eight boxes on a stand, using a MicroSynthesizer-based rig and early sampling boxes¹⁰. As he recalls of those visits:

The Echo Flanger entered his rig in 1980, and MusicRadar notes that it "performed as advertised"⁵. Its most famous result is the steel drum guitar on Tom Tom Club's Genius of Love. Guitar World reports that with the original Echo Flanger the guitarist was able to achieve a steel drum sound with his guitar, and that the single went on to become, per Belew, the most sampled song of all time¹¹. Guitar Pedal X counts the steel drum effect, the elephant of Elephant Talk and the rhino of The Lone Rhinoceros as signature sounds he evolved using the pedal⁸.

Pedals in the King Crimson years and beyond

Belew fronted King Crimson for 36 years¹, and the Echo Flanger's blend of chorus and flanging is all over those records. Guitar World calls his go-to Chorus and Flange combination, the pedal's hybrid mode, something that is "all over his King Crimson records"¹¹.

His dirt sounds have their own history. His solo track Big Electric Cat is cited by Gearnews as the best example of a Foxx Tone, the sound of the Ibanez Foox Tone Machine fuzz box¹². Today Empress Effects names him among the artists who use both the Empress Fuzz, an all-analog fuzz, and the Empress Heavy, the company's high-gain distortion and fuzz pedal⁶⁷. DigiTech says he still uses the DigiTech Harmony Man, a pitch-shifting effect, to create his unique sounds¹, and that its new HammerOn pedal is not yet on his board, though the company expects it will not be long before it is¹.

He has also shaped other makers' designs from the inside. Gig-FX's Pan-Ec echo and reverb pedal was designed with input from top players such as Belew, aiming to digitally emulate classic tape-loop echo units like the Wem Copycat and Echoplex while panning the echo smoothly left to right¹³.

Signature pedal: the DigiTech iStomp Impossible Pedal

In 2013 DigiTech announced its first iStomp Signature Artist e-pedal, joining forces with Belew to debut The Impossible Pedal¹⁴. The iStomp itself was a new concept in stompboxes: an infinitely reconfigurable pedal that can be turned into any pedal available in DigiTech's Stomp Shop online pedal store¹⁴¹⁵. MusicRadar's reviewer called it "a blank canvas to be painted on over and over again," and noted that it comes with removable stickers, some blank and some representing the downloadable pedals, that fit where the iStomp logo sits¹⁵. Out of the box it ships preloaded with the Redline Overdrive stomp so a player can start immediately¹⁶.

The Impossible Pedal was Belew's own download for that platform, made for his "impossible" sounds, and DigiTech notes that at one point he had his own signature iStomp Impossible Pedal¹. Even its iStomp icon played along: Premier Guitar reported that the icon is an impossible optical illusion "that has to be seen to be disbelieved"¹⁴.

The Echoflanger comes back

In 2026 Belew teamed up with Electro-Harmonix to bring back the Echo Flanger as a limited Adrian Belew signature Echoflanger, a pedal MusicRadar describes as a long out-of-production cult modulation pedal that Belew used to spectacular effect⁵¹¹. The reissue was created in collaboration with him¹⁷, and its controls were expanded at his request¹¹. Delicious Audio reports two heavily requested hybrid settings inspired by his own physical in-between switch tweaks on the original: Chorus + Flange and Slap Back + Filter Matrix, layering shimmering thickness with comb-filtered resonance⁹. His verdict on the pedal he has now endorsed for over four decades:

Questions