Yvette Young

Yvette Young is the guitarist, pianist and frontwoman of the math rock band Covet, a player known for an innovative and explorative fingerstyle and tapping technique, looping, and a genuine obsession with stompboxes¹. Her background is classical: early piano and violin training that she blends with modern alternative rock and post-rock sensibilities². She is also an Ibanez signature artist, and in 2025 she added a signature effects pedal to that resume, the Walrus Audio Qi Etherealizer³.

Fingerstyle tapping, loops and texture

Young's playing is built on fingerstyle technique and two-handed tapping, and looping is central to how she performs. BOSS's looping guide for electric guitarists describes her method: she loops tapping sequences and chord voicings, then plays over them with an additional guitar to help with transitions between songs⁹. For a player building a board around this style, that is the practical pattern: a looping pedal as the foundation, with texture effects layered on top.

Texture is where her pedal obsession shows. DigiTech's artist page on Young highlights the Whammy Ricochet and FreqOut as essential tools in her sonic palette², both pitch and feedback effects that push a guitar away from plain six-string sounds. She is also on the artist rosters of Horizon Devices and Demedash Effects⁵⁷.

Her stated aim with effects is melodic rather than guitar-heroic. Announcing the Qi Etherealizer, she told MusicRadar:

Covet, solo and Catharsis

Young leads Covet, the math rock band she fronts²¹. The band's story took a turn during the sessions for the 2023 album Catharsis: as Premier Guitar's rig rundown relates, she parted ways with Covet's members during the recording and had the bass parts re-done by noted touring and session bassist Jon Button¹¹. Weeks after releasing Catharsis, Young and her Covet bandmates headlined Nashville's Brooklyn Bowl, where she spoke with Premier Guitar's Chris Kies¹¹.

That same 2023 rundown later fed directly into her signature pedal. Walrus Audio shared a clip from it, filmed in June 2023, in which Young can be heard describing what her dream signature pedal would be³.

The Qi Etherealizer

The Qi Etherealizer (pronounced "chee ethereal-izer") is a collaborative creation with Young: a multi-effects pedal that combines chorus, delay, granular effects and reverb into what Walrus Audio calls "a creative playground for atmospheric exploration"¹². Guitar Pedal X describes it as designed to transform a signal from standard 6-string sounds to expansive waves of textured, and sometimes chaotic, ambience, with three dedicated effects sections (Chorus, Grain and Delay) plus a global reverb called Space, all three effects runnable in series or parallel, and each bypassable for more traditional tones¹³. Premier Guitar's press announcement notes the collaboration was over a year in the making⁴.

Each of the three effects sections can be bypassed for more traditional tones¹³.

Young co-developed the pedal, created its three factory presets, and painted the original artwork for the Terracotta finish¹⁴¹⁵. In guitar.com's review, Richard Purvis reported that the three presets "cover the basics very well"¹⁴. Young described her vision for it there:

She said the granular section in particular pushes her in an abstract direction and makes her think in a more painterly way with sound¹⁴. Her hopes for other players, in her own words on Walrus Audio's product page:

Chorus and modulation on her board

Young's relationship with chorus runs through her whole pedal history. Announcing the Qi, she wrote on a Walrus Instagram post that she was "soooo thrilled to get this one out and give ppl access to my fav chorus sounds and so many fun abstract sounds that inspire me"³. The Qi's chorus section is where those sounds live¹³.

Before the Qi, she worked with Walrus Audio on the M1 High-Fidelity Modulation Machine in 2022. She performed the Pedal Play demo for it, going, as MusicRadar's Michael Astley-Brown put it, "full midwest emo with some melancholy extended chords and shimmering mod sounds," and she even wrote a special song for the M1 and performed it in the launch video¹⁶⁶.

Drive and other pedals

On the drive side, Young uses the Horizon Devices Precision Drive with her AC30 amp. In her own words on the Horizon artist page:

She adds that "the attack knob really helps notes cut through. The gate feature is really useful too for cleaning up gainy parts"⁵, which makes the pedal pull double duty as a boost and a noise gate in her setup.

Her name also appears on Zvex's vertical-format pedals. Guitar Pedal X's Stefan Karlsson notes the Zvex vertical collection grew to four pedals with the Yvette Young Box of Rock, and that the Yvette Young editions of the Instant Lo-Fi Junky and Box of Rock Verticals made those distortion and lo-fi pedals more appealing⁸.

Across the makers whose artist pages and coverage name her, her pedal affiliations look like this:

• DigiTech: Whammy Ricochet and FreqOut, described as essential tools in her sonic palette²
• Horizon Devices: Precision Drive, used with her AC30 amp⁵
• Walrus Audio: M1 High-Fidelity Modulation Machine demo, and the Qi Etherealizer signature pedal⁶³
• Zvex: signature editions of the Instant Lo-Fi Junky and Box of Rock Vertical⁸
• Demedash Effects: artist roster⁷

News

Questions