TYBS#28
This entry of TYBS probably won’t be of interest to those who aren’t guitarists. Though it does give a “behind the scenes” look into how musicians achieve the cornucopia of sounds you hear live or on record. I’ll try to be clear without being long winded but, for guitarists, one of the huge parts of playing is the ability to modify your sound.
These are what pedals are for. From the chunka chunka riffing made by distortion, the expanding or undulating sounds achieved by modulation or the thickening effects that come with delays, effects pedals are like tools for making sonic punctuations or just conveying a mood.
They’re also called stompboxes or stomps for no other reason than they resemble little candy-colored metal boxes with knobs, they’re lined up on the floor in front of the player and, to activate, you press your foot down on them.
I only know one guitarists who doesn’t have them. But it’s more than a fair bet that every band you have a CD of that has a guitar player in it uses pedals. Yes, even Hale, even Parokya ni Edgar. Heck, I’ve even seen Stella Ruiz plug into an Acoustic Simulator and sing “What If God Was One of Us?”
In a day or so I’m going to be trading two stomps -- a Digitech DF7 Distortion Factory and an X-Series Turbo Flange -- for a BOSS ME-50 Multi-Effects Unit. These aforementioned two units were my first forays into buying pedals. They were both second hand. They were great. I had hours of fun, made several songs and sonic sketches with them. Plus they were really nice to look at in the morning, like nubile teenage girls in pastel skirts.
Since each of them performs just one thing, their operation is idiot proof. Well, for the most part. I used to carry these little scraps of paper per effect with my personal circular notations for knob settings. My girl called them “kodigos.” I would pull them out at gigs whenever the song changed. It was a bit embarrassing but until I memorized them I didn’t want to risk the bad sound from wrongly turned knobs.
Eventually I expanded my pedal chain until they got to be six units long. In any case, I’m trading these two for the ME-50 (22 distortions? Yipee!) exactly because my chain is too long. Any guitarist will tell you that single pieces of stomps are great for playing around with, but are a pain in the neck when setting up in a live situation. My six pedals chain takes up a minimum of three to five minutes to set up, fiddle around with and adjust enough to fit the venue and the amp they have. Breaking it down is an even bigger pain. Especially if the next band in line is breathing down your neck.
The ME-50 will radically reduce this agony and the distress of hauling these little babies to a gig (I’ll just have to bring the ME-50 and a wah). That, and I’ll still retain the knob-based kalikot factor of the original stomps. I hate sifting through digital menus, see.
I’m all excited to get it and get some fiddling around done. With this acquisition only four of my single stomps will remain. Here’s a description of what they do and how I use them.
This entry of TYBS probably won’t be of interest to those who aren’t guitarists. Though it does give a “behind the scenes” look into how musicians achieve the cornucopia of sounds you hear live or on record. I’ll try to be clear without being long winded but, for guitarists, one of the huge parts of playing is the ability to modify your sound.
These are what pedals are for. From the chunka chunka riffing made by distortion, the expanding or undulating sounds achieved by modulation or the thickening effects that come with delays, effects pedals are like tools for making sonic punctuations or just conveying a mood.
They’re also called stompboxes or stomps for no other reason than they resemble little candy-colored metal boxes with knobs, they’re lined up on the floor in front of the player and, to activate, you press your foot down on them.
I only know one guitarists who doesn’t have them. But it’s more than a fair bet that every band you have a CD of that has a guitar player in it uses pedals. Yes, even Hale, even Parokya ni Edgar. Heck, I’ve even seen Stella Ruiz plug into an Acoustic Simulator and sing “What If God Was One of Us?”
In a day or so I’m going to be trading two stomps -- a Digitech DF7 Distortion Factory and an X-Series Turbo Flange -- for a BOSS ME-50 Multi-Effects Unit. These aforementioned two units were my first forays into buying pedals. They were both second hand. They were great. I had hours of fun, made several songs and sonic sketches with them. Plus they were really nice to look at in the morning, like nubile teenage girls in pastel skirts.
Since each of them performs just one thing, their operation is idiot proof. Well, for the most part. I used to carry these little scraps of paper per effect with my personal circular notations for knob settings. My girl called them “kodigos.” I would pull them out at gigs whenever the song changed. It was a bit embarrassing but until I memorized them I didn’t want to risk the bad sound from wrongly turned knobs.
Eventually I expanded my pedal chain until they got to be six units long. In any case, I’m trading these two for the ME-50 (22 distortions? Yipee!) exactly because my chain is too long. Any guitarist will tell you that single pieces of stomps are great for playing around with, but are a pain in the neck when setting up in a live situation. My six pedals chain takes up a minimum of three to five minutes to set up, fiddle around with and adjust enough to fit the venue and the amp they have. Breaking it down is an even bigger pain. Especially if the next band in line is breathing down your neck.
The ME-50 will radically reduce this agony and the distress of hauling these little babies to a gig (I’ll just have to bring the ME-50 and a wah). That, and I’ll still retain the knob-based kalikot factor of the original stomps. I hate sifting through digital menus, see.
I’m all excited to get it and get some fiddling around done. With this acquisition only four of my single stomps will remain. Here’s a description of what they do and how I use them.
ROCKTRON ZOMBIE DISTORTION
A cabinet of rectified Mesa/Boogie amplifiers is probably one of the most sought after and in your face tones for distorted guitar. To achieve it though you have to pile these amps onto one another until they’re the size of several refrigerators. A power chord through such a stack can only be described as visceral.
The Zombie is like a mini-me version of this set up that channels the rectified sound without you having to be Billy Howerdel or Tony Iommi with an Egyptian ransom of slave/roadies to build the stack for you. I’m still not sure what “rectified” means but you’ll know it when you hear it. You can feel it in your guts with some pressure on your heart, palpable and redolent of brawn.
I actually got this one delivered to my door through local gear distribution MGD Inc. (http://www.mgdonline.com/) and their delivery system, barring mishaps, is right on the money. I started with digital distortion and the analog sound that the Zombie makes leaves that completely in dust. If digital distortion is iced candy then the analog Zombie is a Haagen Dazs.
Trust me, you’ll feel like a steel god with one of these at your feet. The tag line even reads: “You will swear your sound gets right up and walks out of your cabinet!” It’s not very subtle (though at some of the lowest settings it can achieve a fairly okay overdrive sound) so I use it for those theatrical macabre moments, mayhem crescendos, trippy noise and just straight up havoc.
DANELECTRO WASABI FORWARD/REVERSE DELAY
Delays are all about repetition and as such enables a guitarist to seem to have a twin playing alongside or just achieve a general spacey quality especially when used in conjunction with distortion. You can play with delay pedals all day long and be a happy camper. I did. Twice.
It’s like guitar ganja depending on how you use it and, boy, are there dozens of ways. Even Perry Farrel and Dave Navarro (vocalist and guitarist respectively for now defunct Jane’s Addiction) said in one interview that they used delays pedals so differently when they first formed that they had fights about it.
The Wasabi Delay, while not the most accurate stomp when it comes to the precision of its knobs, is likely one of the warmest sounding units out there. Surfing around the local gear sites I found a pic of Manuel Legarda (Wolfgang) with one of these at his feet. Hmmm, at least I bought it before I saw the pic.
Though the reverse function is close to useless with a horrid, audible ticking, this stomp has a calming, soothing effect on clean that makes me feel like I’m back in Puerto Princesa staring out at a sea with the waves coming in for high tide. On distortion it just sings with a very feminine spirit.
I usually use it to convey everything from arctic desolation, harmonics that sound like ticking clocks, the sound of dripping water, wind-shorn landscapes, muted or sharp footsteps, the straight up doubling that adds grandness to octave riffs and echolalia that brings a sustained creepiness or mystery to otherwise bland riffs.
BOSTON ENGINEERING EQUALIZER
This is a pretty cheap equalizer but dependable enough. Boston Engineering is a pedal manufacturer under Behringer that make affordable, reverse-engineered counterparts of expensive BOSS pedals.
How expensive? I bought this for P1400. A real BOSS equalizer would cost me around P4000 plus. It’s almost the same though: six sliders per frequency band, like you see in the graphic equalizer of any media player on your PC.
Anyway, equalizers are used to further shape the sound coming out of your wah and distortion (along with a volume control for boost). Sliding the bands this way or that can net you some nifty, genre-specific feels. I remember them in visual metaphors: a lopsided smiley face for modern metal, a spiked heartbeat for shimmering but sharp chord voicings and a wave crest for in-your-face bridges and solos.
DUNLOP ZAKK WYLDE CRYBABY
If you play guitar, you must play wah. So a few months back I plopped for this unit after thorough net research, testing a few brands (Morleys suck, the BOSS PW-10 is as complicated as an Inspector Gadget erm gadget) and pestering my friend Junji (Lerma, the uber cool guitarist for The Radioactive Sago Project and Trip M) on SMS.
This is the second item I got shipped from MGD and the unit was totally without flaws. It was heavy, too. But if it’s built to take Zakk Wylde’s biker boot then I’m sure I won’t have to worry about it breaking before I do. It’s also the only stomp I own with no knobs on it.
While I tried to use it on my own I soon suspected that I was missing out on a lot of techniques so, after an intense lesson with Junji, I quickly expanded on the ways of Wah Fu. Aside from its usual and prominent use in porn film soundtracks this wah is very throaty when combined with distortion. It’s got a voice that would probably not be far from a banshee or a mechanical roar that sounds very close to a mythical beast like the Devil of the Pine Barrens.
I found that this one really doesn’t go just cry wah (though it CAN do that with the right timing and technique) but mostly adds sustain that approximates a note all but hanging forever in the air. That and a very evil low end that sounds somewhere between a horde of very big, very angry locusts and a ravishing siren who, when she opens her mouth, bears the voice of a tsunami.
If I could fire off pinch harmonics as fast as Wylde does I’m sure I could make this thing scream like Holocaust prisoners but for now I am content with the amount of “I sound better than I actually am” stuff I’m getting out of it.
This is the only pedal I haven’t used live yet -- mostly because I’m still enjoying it at home and want to get a real feel for it. But am confident that this wah can actually replace some of the modulation I’m using in a few songs just for the swelling, rise and fall factor. Now it becomes more than just interesting.
~ 30
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