More random thoughts on effects…

I posted thoughts on effects before, but today, when I was teaching, some more thoughts came up. I hope some of these will be interesting to you…

I do love effects. Most guitarists do… so many of us constantly change their pedalboard around, new pedals are added, old ones go back into the storing crate (or on Ebay). While that is a quite normal thing (sometimes resembling toys… its almost cute), one thing I always stuck to is: you can spend SO much time constantly changing your rig, time you could invest practicing and playing, so try to stick to something for a while…

Effects really can bring you new ideas, unleash your creativity, enable you to get sounds you couldnt usually get. I am quite glad that the old cliché “Ahh, you dont need any effects, they just cover up bad playing, the less effects, the better” almost disappeared… some players are quite legendary for their use of effects… think of Robert Fripp, David Torn, The Edge… anyway, one thing that I really recommend to try with pretty much any pedal: try all of its options!

For example, there are SO many things you can do with a good delay pedal… whether its Brian May-style layering, Nuno/Albert Lee/Yngwie-type “delay lines” (runs with notes added by a delay), or crazy stuff like the intro to PGs “Get Out Of My Yard”. I remember seeing Vai live during his “Sex & Religion” tour, and he did this whole little song with delays, had several guitars on stage, all hooked up to delays…

Now, other than just using a delay for a slapback-sound or some of that ambience-type delay, try to go extreme. Try to come up with riffs based on what the pedal does. Or, something that works with quite a few pedals like the Boss-delays or the new Satriani Time Machine Delay by Vox: turn up the feedback and then play with the delay time-knob… you can get some insane, crazy, and very inspiring sounds that way.

And that works for other pedals too! Take i.e. the Whammy Pedal. A lot of guys take that and just do the same thing they do with a whammy bar, like doing divebombs. But listen to i.e. the “chorus” of Joe Satriani’s “Searching”, or the chorus of Dave Martone’s “Four Horseman”, Bucketheads “King James” or Steve Vai’s “Touching Tongues”… where the whammy is used on just a few notes of a line, creating huge interval leaps and a crazy sound…very inspiring. You can do so much more with it too.

So whenever you get a new pedal, play around with it, dont stick with the recommendations in the manual, go wild and see what happens!

On the technical side: experiment with the placement of the pedal! Some pedals sound better in certain positions in the signal chain. A compressor is a good example… you wanna put that first into your signal chain. Or a Wah… there has been that age-long discussion on whether to put it before any distortion (thats what I do, too), or put it behind a fuzz/drive-pedal (I think thats what Zakk Wylde does, for example). Matter of taste, but you should try both. Some pedals even require a certain position to work… kinda. There are some fuzz pedals that need to be early in the signal chain, with no compressor or anything in front of it. Then again, some pedals sound even better with a compressor before it. So that is something you should try! There are some quite general guidelines like “compressor first”, or “delay and rvb into the loop”, but you can get some nice results by trying something different. As far as I know, Tom Morello puts (or used to) his Whammy pedal into the loop of his amp… I saw other guys do that too, while I would use it in front of the amp.

Effects are more than toys or little tools to make it sound “more puhrdy”… they can be musical tools that can help you to express yourself, achieve sounds you couldnt get any other way, inspire songs…
Of course, its not mandatory to use them… if you look at Derek Trucks, he plugs his guitar straight into the amp and thats that, but I recommend to try things out, experiment and you might just find something that gets you started on a new tune…