Hasie
Thanks all for your viewpoints, opinions, advice and the loads of information.
Where I am at currently with my guitar playing abilities and the styles/genres covered during my lessons. The pedal I believe will actually make most of the pieces sound better, is an octave pedal. Not to say that J am going to buy one, but the missus is asking for birthday gift ideas. ?
singemonkey
Hasie wrote
The pedal I believe will actually make most of the pieces sound better, is an octave pedal. Not to say that J am going to buy one, but the missus is asking for birthday gift ideas. ?
Please no. This is what I'm talking about. What you're doing is going, "Wow, this sounds amazing!" Sure. But it'd sound ludicrous if you have an octaver on every single guitar line. You'll see some seriously raised eyebrows. It's a great effect, but put it on everything and it'll sound terrible, and inhibit your learning. An octaver is most definitely a special effect.
If you're desperate to explore pedals, get a cheap 2nd hand multi-fx (those digital things are worth pocket-change after a few years) and experiment. Like a Zoom or an old Boss. Learn what you like. Don't fork out even more money on a specific pedal that will almost invariable end up gathering dust when you understand that it has no real application to the music you want to make.
daveo1977
Here's a great video by the guys at That Pedal Show:
They take four classic guitars (Fender Strat, Fender Tele, Collings 290 DC S and Gibson Les Paul) and play them through three pedals considered modern classics (Ibanez Tubescreamer, Klon Centaur and ProCo Rat). The aim of this is to talk about guitar pickups; differences in tone facilitated by the different pedals used.
Hasie
singemonkey wrote
Hasie wrote
The pedal I believe will actually make most of the pieces sound better, is an octave pedal. Not to say that J am going to buy one, but the missus is asking for birthday gift ideas. ?
Please no. This is what I'm talking about. What you're doing is going, "Wow, this sounds amazing!" Sure. But it'd sound ludicrous if you have an octaver on every single guitar line. You'll see some seriously raised eyebrows. It's a great effect, but put it on everything and it'll sound terrible, and inhibit your learning. An octaver is most definitely a special effect.
If you're desperate to explore pedals, get a cheap 2nd hand multi-fx (those digital things are worth pocket-change after a few years) and experiment. Like a Zoom or an old Boss. Learn what you like. Don't fork out even more money on a specific pedal that will almost invariable end up gathering dust when you understand that it has no real application to the music you want to make.
Thanks. I will reconsider. The multi-fx to experiment with is a great idea.
TokyoP0P
Good thread. It somehow got me both curious and hesitant about pedals.
Stoffeltoo
Don't like 'em any more. Cost lots, not worth it. I prefer clean or amp with footswitch. Just my taste
V8
Hasie wrote
singemonkey wrote
If you're desperate to explore pedals, get a cheap 2nd hand multi-fx (those digital things are worth pocket-change after a few years) and experiment. Like a Zoom or an old Boss. Learn what you like. Don't fork out even more money on a specific pedal that will almost invariable end up gathering dust when you understand that it has no real application to the music you want to make.
Thanks. I will reconsider. The multi-fx to experiment with is a great idea.
+1. Trust the Singemonkey!
Sooo many Zoom models to choose from, not sure what I'd get - probably just choose based on what I could find at the right price. Ideally, the G1/G2 stuff over the 505/707 range. Though I found a 505 (as new) for R200...can't go wrong at that money. Fun little things, punch above their weight if you are not fussed about reliability (stomp switches can give up - repairable though).
The Line6 stuff is also cool, a bit more tweakable than the Zoom - I really enjoyed my X3 Live, until I read the manual & it broke... :?
Boss stuff is usually very reliable - ME25/ME50 are useful, just fx w/o modelling crap. I found the GT-8 a bit frustrating to use, but lotsa pedal for the $.
One thing about multi-fx...read up on how placing fx in a different a order affects the sound. No rights or wrongs, just guidelines...
http://www.humbuckermusic.com/peorar.html
It's easier to visualize with actual pedals than the modelling stuff.
Ain't G.A.S great? I really should be playing guitar instead of key-taring though :-[
Hasie
Yep, G.A.S. is an issue. Sometimes I'll browse the web drooling over guitars, while I should be playing my own. It's like watching pron, while the missus is right there... ?
Being almost blind has its disadvantages. Like setting up multi-fx pedals with their tiny displays and small buttons and fine print manuals. So if I do decide to get pedals in the future, I'd choose something with two to four knobs which controls one effect, maybe two, it will just be easier for me.
EDIT: That being said, I should maybe just go try a few and see if I can read the labels of the buttons and see properly on the screen and set it up and try and keep an open mind about it.
Unfortunately for me, the birthday budget can't buy a Tokai LS. ☹
ezietsman
GAS is both wonderful and terrible. This year was especially bad. Two exciting things on the way but I've had to wait. A LONG, slow, agonising wait, and I have to wait some more because neither of the two things are within grasping distance yet and yet, my credit card is on fire. I go through these highs and lows "Awww Yisssss its gonna be awesome!!!" and "I've made a terrible mistake".
Problem with my view on pedals is that I now of course want another amplifier. Maybe this one will be the last... (whotf am I kidding...)
Wildaker
I guess I kinda align myself with the "snob-purist" group here by thinking that most people use pedals (with most pedals being drive/distortion pedals) for making sounds that would sound better if they leaned how to manage a decent valve amp and their guitar's pickup selector, and volume and tone controls—yes, the tone control is your friend too.
Having said that. I do use pedals—they're just not core to my tone. I play guitars with low-output pickups and I use a single-channel amp so I have a treble-boost (modded Ringmaster clone) to act as a line-driver that punches the pre-amp valves a little harder. I'm not lugging a Leslie around with me these days so I combine a chorus pedal with the amp's built-in tremolo ("vibrato", in Fender-speak) to create a reasonable impression thereof. I like fuzz—proper fizzy germanium-based fuzz, not "distortion"—so, from time to time, I'll put a fuzz box in the chain. And I have a wah-wah pedal that I never use for classic wah-wah effects but do use for tuning the frequency response of feedback if things are really screaming. But the pedal I use most is a tuner...
If you think your guitar, essentially, sends out a simple signal and your amp is there to make it louder (and some very good players seem to think this way), then you will need lots of pedals to get a variety of sounds. If, as I do, you see your guitar and amp as a single organism—and one that's complex and very alive—then you will probably use pedals only for special effects.
ezietsman
100% Mike. I guess the big problem that comes in usually is that valve amps, when you use them like that, are really loud, see my wall of text on the first page. This is slightly less of a problem at gigs if you want edge-of-breakup style sounds at gigs and you have something like a Princeton, Deluxe Reverb, Tweed Deluxe or an 18 watt Marshall, amps that don't have a lot of clean headroom. However, things change when you want flatout overdrive and you have a 35+ Watt amp. They HAVE loads of headroom so the volume becomes a massive problem. At home, well, yeah...
I don't know why attenuators and power scaling aren't more popular. I guess it's because pedals are cheaper ?
singemonkey
Mike wrote
If you think your guitar, essentially, sends out a simple signal and your amp is there to make it louder (and some very good players seem to think this way), then you will need lots of pedals to get a variety of sounds. If, as I do, you see your guitar and amp as a single organism—and one that's complex and very alive—then you will probably use pedals only for special effects.
Exactly.
funkadelic
Quote from: Mike on Today at 12:48:07 pm
f you think your guitar, essentially, sends out a simple signal and your amp is there to make it louder (and some very good players seem to think this way), then you will need lots of pedals to get a variety of sounds. If, as I do, you see your guitar and amp as a single organism—and one that's complex and very alive—then you will probably use pedals only for special effects.
Damn is this guy a lecturer! Best explanation I've heard so far. I'm a valve amp fan myself now but use it as in the first category above...until I get my hands on a smaller valve amp so I can test the 2nd category.
singemonkey
Note. This is wrong:
Probably why the owner is selling.
V8
singemonkey wrote
Note. This is wrong:
Child's play ?
psyx
singemonkey wrote
Note. This is wrong:
Probably why the owner is selling.
I don't even... You could have gotten a very nice amp for the money that those pedals cost...
Jayhell
My 2c:
My set-up is actually quite simple in terms of what I have and why I use them. My core sound is most def my amp (with slight reverb) and my overdrive pedal, they are usually adjusted depending on the guitar I am playing. Why not just use the amp's overdrive? Well, I don't like it, it's too heavy, instead I push the clean channel to breakup and use the overdrive to slightly drive that into the sweet spot. Then in case I need to stand out a bit during a solo I have a boost pedal, just for a bit more drive and volume. There is also a fuzz pedal, but this is usually just for messing around on or getting special effects (I could live without it). Then a tremolo just for that vintage shimmer, I use this a lot too and can't live without it, I mostly use this for single strummed chords. I also have a delay I use to add some depth to some "clean" parts and messing around (I could live without this as well). A tuner, probably the most important pedal on the board, without this nothing matters.
Since I sing using the controls on the guitar can cause confusion. I tap the bridge pickup for a softer crispier tone on some intros and and hit it into full humbucker to make the song explode once everything kicks in. My tone is usually turned down all the way on my neck pickup and I flick over to this when the fuzz comes in play for maximum hairiness. But this is all trivial too as I could probably live with only a bridge pickup with volume and toned turned all the way up. My strat is actually configured in such a way that the bridge pickup bypasses all the controls and goes straight out, I even removed the middle pickup and only use the neck pickup for the funky stuff.
I would like to say that I am not dependant on my pedals and if for some reason I don't have them available I could still manage, but I like having the options available.
singemonkey
Bearing in mind that many amps now use diode clipping preamp gain sections. So basically all it is is a built in solid-state distortion pedal. Often it's not going to match your taste.
But tube power-amp distortion... Well, there's no accounting for taste, but to my ear all amps I've heard with a driving power section sound better than any distortion pedal I've ever heard. Hi-Watts, Ampegs, Marshalls, Fenders, Orange - you name it.
But on less sophisticated amps, it's pretty hard to make it all foot switchable. Hence the guitar controls. Although I also sing, and I manage between adjusting volume and having my two pickups set at different volumes and using the toggle-switch.
ezietsman
Overdriven valve amps are a bit trickier to control. Switching from overdrive to clean always results in a volume drop. It has to. Some people don't like this (They're wrong). Also, once the amp is overdriving its power section, you don't get a lot more volume out of it by boosting it with a pedal. You can get a bit but usually one would use something like a treble booster (which is really a midbooster in most cases) that cuts away the bass and high treble. This gives the amp more signal in the midbands which results in a sound that cuts through a mix better and hence sounds louder. They usually sound "too bright" when played by themselves.
Then you get things like effects loops. These infernal things were designed so that you can put your time-based effects AFTER the distortion effects. So the obvious place to put the effects loop is after your preamp but before the phase inverter (so it is before the power section). End result? You kinda have to run the amp clean to get those effects to not be overdriven with the rest of it. So you pay the cost of 'that guitar sound' for clean reverbs and delays.
I personally tried running reverb into my dirty amp but it doesn't work well. If you want a fairly lush reverb sound on cleans and set the unit so, you have WAY lush reverb when you rack the guitar volume up. If you do it the other way around you don't get much reverb when you're playing clean. I sold my reverb pedal. Bah. Mind you, the reverb sounds fine unless you have the amp driven to hell and back. Peter Green's music features Fender reverb units running into overdriven fender amps and nobody complains about THAT sound. Not sure why people today don't like it anymore.
This effect is not so bad with a delay pedal and you may as well run a delay into a dirty amp instead of dirty amp into delay. It's basically the same thing.
singemonkey
Related to this, one of the things that makes tremolo sound way vintage on one of these amps is that the signal drives at the top of the wave and goes clean at the bottom.
