anyone else hate pedals?

C

CyanJaguar

New member
four months ago, when I first got into guitars, that was my thing. I wanted to have a big pedal board like the pros.

Now, I dont have a single pedal. I sold my last one (A volume pedal) today. I found that If I could not get a good sound out of my amp, no pedal would improve it.
 
Volume pedals are not in the same catagory as any other pedal IMO. If you don't have a tube amp then the volume pedal is basically useless also..imo.


But pedals do play a part. Wait till you get into a band setting and you need that TubeScreamer that sucks out your low end and sounds like shit....but now somehow fits perfectly in the mix. ;)
 
yeah i thought pedals were GOD when i first started guitar, but then i realized the only "effect" i liked was distortion. amp distortion to be exact.

i like phasers though :)
 
No no no, petals open doors that are you cannot open on your own without them. I didnt get my first petal (tube drive emulator) untill my 2nd year of playing guitar(i needed it for smells like teen spirit) and it enabled me to switch from dist. to clean and back again. i began writting things that i couldnt have created if i couldnt switch back and fourth. and there are so many different varieties...so befor you give up petals, give a few more a try. maybe your style of music just doesnt require it, or (i dont know if this is what your saying or not) maybe your looking for your petal to make your amp sound better....well thats not what there for. there for adding effects to your amps current sound, not improving the sound its self, if your amp sucks, then you'll have to get a better amp man, but dont put down petals, and as said befor, you'll be wishin you had one when/if you get into a band and things like that. i used petals with an ibanez starter amp.................btw, so you should'nt need anything special, as long as it doesnt sound like crap..
-sjj
 
yeah. i had a skb board with a multiprocessor & some other pedals. but i grew to hate setting it up at gig's.
now i just use a line6 & its floorboard.
 
Jotosuds said:
yeah i thought pedals were GOD when i first started guitar, but then i realized the only "effect" i liked was distortion. amp distortion to be exact.

i like phasers though :)
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Phasers!!!!!!!!hoothoot!
 
I might add my 2 cents to the pedal conversation.

my opinion comes from playing live.

While it would be nice to have a soundtech that travels with you and does sound for you at every venue you play at, and knows every part of every song your band plays. IT just doesnt happen. I feel a good band kinda does its own mix on stage to a point by adding a effect, or a volume boost here or there for certain spots. maybe a clean sound needs some chorus, or a lead needs some delay, or a certain EQ setting to sit your guitar in the mix or whatever. All achieved with some kind of pedal.

Pedals will help you achieve your stage/house mix if used right. You wont have to rely on a soundtech to know every song to make you sound good, you have control to a point of how well your mix is.

I dont believe a pedal will make you play better, only practice will. But, it will make you and your band sound better, and have better dynamics when playing live even at practice.

yep.
 
I don't hate pedals; I have many, but rarely use them.

I do believe that new players should avoid them for as long as possible as they create a lot of poor playing habits and absolutely cover a lot of bad technique that thereby becomes hard to be rid of after one later recognizes it.

My own belief is that one should learn on an unforgiving instrument such as a Telecaster, plugged into a clean solid-state amp. When you can play that rig well, you can play properly and with mastery of that "tone in the hands" business.

To my surprise, I have found that a lot of excellent players of long experience have come to exactly the same conclusion and give the same advice as teachers.
 
when i first started out i wanted a bunch of pedals.

well i got 2 and barely used them at all.

i sold them, moved on, started playing bass and more acoustic, and now im back to my electric guitar roots.

throughout the 4 years of not having pedals, i havent missed too much.

its just now i need a normal distortion pedal for a band im in and a normal mxr distortion will probably do it.

pedals to me seemed like a waste since i barely used them. I mean, does any one really use a phaser that much?
 
Well, I have been playing for 30 years or so. At this point, I think I have bought just about every new gaget, box, pedal or whatever to improve my sounds. I can tell you that nothing sounds better than a good tube amp. The only thing I use with it is a BBE Maximiser, but I also have a Marshall TSL and a Mesa Tripple Rect.

Now not too many people can drop $5 grand to get a good sound so what you are left with are pedals and amp sims to get a better sound. I have a POD and I can tell you, they sound good but they do not respond or act like the real thing. But for the money and setup ease, they have there place for a lot of players.

Now for the brutally honest opinion... If you are just playing for a year or so, adding effects can hide mistakes, where a clean sound will just point them out. On the other side, a large selection of pedals and boxes just gives you more things to do and takes your concentration away from playing things right, which is what you should be concentrating on.

One piece of advise, you can use so many effects that you can't even tell what note you are playing. I have heard that so many times and it sounds like crap to me. If you do use a lot of effect, run them through the effects loop of you amp rather than before the amp. You can then use your amps sound and mix a little effect in. You will get a better sound and still be able to tell what you are playing.
 
I used to have a board with 10 of them on there and a volume pedal and noise gate. Turns out all I ever used was distortion and some reverb (not when I record, though) and my amp had them. I don't really fuss over my tone, so whatever distortion the amp has is good enough for me. I don't use a lot of it anyway. But I still like using a good pedal now and then just to see what I can do. I love the Boss DD-02 delay pedal. It can make my slow hands sound like a shredder if it's set right. Sometimes I wish I would have kept my board. I sold them all and got a digitech processor when they first came out. I hated it as soon as I started using it. They weren't very user friendly when they first started making them. I sold that too, and now I just use my amp and a good mic to get my tone.
 
i go back and forth between hating pedals and thinking they're useful......especially distortion pedals. right now i'm thinking they have their place. especially if your amp doesn't have a good distortion sound.

up until recently i had a delay pedal. i used it on one song. it was cool, but it broke. i need to call ibanez and see what they'll do for me.
 
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juststartingout said:
If you do use a lot of effect, run them through the effects loop of you amp rather than before the amp. You can then use your amps sound and mix a little effect in. You will get a better sound and still be able to tell what you are playing.
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Thats a "parallel" effect loop. Most people don't have those on their amps. That is still a relatively higher end feature.
 
Oooops, I didn't answer the original question:

I don't hate pedals, I just don't have much use for them anymore... and like juststartingout said, all those effects can mask a shoddy performance...
 
well it all depends... (that's never been said before)

i play bass, which is typically best left a clean instrument. but, having suffered from effect-envy, i've cycled through a series of pedals and come to the conclusion that bass is best left a clean instrument.

i think pedals / effects basically fall into two large categories: sound-enhancers and sound-disguisers. most of the sound enhancers replicate or intensify a normal sonic phenomenon. reverb, for instance, creates the effect of being in a larger room with different acoustics. distortion pedals replicate the sound of electronic circuitry being overdriven, etc. in pretty much every instance i've found that the sound-enhancing effects that come with or are integral to a good amplifier will always blow away the little pedals. (by this I mean a good spring reverb tank and the overdrive you get when you crank a tube amp).

sound-disguising or altering pedals are largely built around delaying, modulating and affecting the volume of the original sound. phasing and chorus are both created by duplicating the sound either out of sync or in a subtly different tone to create swooshing or trilling effects. i've found that while these effects can create a sound that it's impossible to replicate effect-less, they also tend to limit what you can do, and can lead to effect dependancy, which can be both good and bad. any given song by the cure just wouldn't sound right without the 20 gallons of chorus, flange, reverb and delay that's smattered all over the place. i love this stuff, but it does beg the question whether you can end up limiting yourself in your efforts to widen your vocabulary of sounds....

i think pedals should be used like spices. use them sparingly or not at all and your base ingredients will stand out and be more deeply appreciated. use a lot of them and you end up with indian food--there's no mistaking what it is, it takes a lot to get the balance right and you might not notice what's underneath it.

i thought about deleting everything i just wrote, but i didn't. it just seems too cruel to all those cute little words.
 
Totally depends on what style music you play...in my case i play very indie, emo, alternative rock...and its very atmospheric at times with lots of delays and reverbs and phasers....but if you dont play that style or need something withhen pedals are a waste.
 
Put some thought into your Pedals

osus said:
i thought about deleting everything i just wrote, but i didn't. it just seems too cruel to all those cute little words.
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I have just done that for you :D

No joking now ;) I totally agree with what you say [ but who cares what Timmerman says? :) ]

Another post which did put it all into perspective was Bongolation one's.

Okay CyanJaguar,

So you felt you could not get a good sound out of your amp with the volumepedal right in front of it? Well what did you do with the volume pedal? Do you know what they are designed for? Okay, just kidding here eh? But really you need to look at effects, that is ANY of them, as being designed for a PURPOSE, they are not a substite for playing chords or whatever you can think of ...............

Before you start using a pedal [or buying one] it may be easier at first to ask yourself what you would like this pedal to do. Once you know what you want from it, it is a lot easier to get these sounds out of the babies.

Another thing is: You need to understand your gear and know what it can do.

Me myself I had many years of playing an electric like it was an acoustic: Did not make it howl, did not get it to sustain or whatever. Why? Because I just treated it as an acoustic, did not know, or yes..............I knew about Rock n Roll but was more interested in learning, how it all works and...... :D

Well fortunately the learning never stops, but in the meantime you may want to make some dirty sounds as well, and pedals could help you with this ;)

I see many of my students who also treat their electric as an acoustic, they do not dig in to get the sound, they forget about sustain, but heh, that is why they come to me: To learn and to get inspired :) and yes I can understand that in the beginning the notes and chords may be your first priority instead of sound, but you do need to learn about sound, and there are many many ways....................

Okay okay back to topic, pedals eh? Do I hate them? I absolutely loath them eh as you can tell from what I mentioned before :D

No I like it all, and perhaps you should just use them sometimes, but make sure you can get a good sound on a clean amp, then try using some pedals, and it is true man: When you try a Chorus, you will love it, ..........play with it every day, and you will.....................want to throw the thing away. Just use them some time.

Now a general remark to ALL of us here: I thought this was a recording site, right? So people into making their own albums and sounds and..............so what about soundvariety in your songs? Use any pedals or is it all fingers and hands and, you know, just hard work man :D

Oh well, I cannot believe that, some of you must be using some of those funky old flangers, phasers, ringmodulators and...............yes all of them really, but now and then eh? Just like those great herbs we use for our cooking :)

I thought I will keep it short for today, and look what I have done :o Ah well, tomorrow another day eh :)

Enjoy the "love-sounds" of the season,

Eddie :)
 
hhhmmmm....

in my opinion, effects are just tools there. imagine the music as a piece of wood, and the effect as a, i dunno... a saw. if you build a table using the saw, and it looks good, then the saw was used well, so its cool. but if the table looks crap, then maybe the piece of wood would have been better just left as a piece of wood.

i love effects when they're used well - and used cleverly. i suppose you could say theres all types of effects that other instruments use, like glisses on a trombone or plucking instead of bowing the strings of a violin, but again, it only works if it sounds good. the only difference is most of our effects are little metal boxes lying on the floor :p

and i Don't believe in all this 'use effects sparingly' nonsense - its the sound at the end that's important, and not how you got there.

only my opinions though.

Andy
 
Great post man, I like how you put it all together, and................sure I have to give you credits for your comments, must come from a creative mind :)

Eddie
 
Janesaid2me said:
Totally depends on what style music you play...in my case i play very indie, emo, alternative rock...and its very atmospheric at times with lots of delays and reverbs and phasers....but if you dont play that style or need something withhen pedals are a waste.
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I'm very much onboard with this as well. Sometimes I'm playing etherial, "atmospheric" sounds more reminiscent of a synthesizer, and other times it's just balls-to-the-wall rock 'n roll. Especially with my new Les Paul, my amp (Tech21 TM60) sounds great with NO effects....however it also sounds great WITH effects, so it's nice to have the options. Many people say that using effects is a cop out to cover a lousy performance. Well maybe for everyone else, NOT using effects is a cop out to cover the fact that they weren't patient or skilled enough to get a creative, yet very usable sound out of the effects.

Sure I can play without my (rather large) pedal board. But I like the extra sonic options it allows me. Compression, wah, volume to the preamp, EQ, filtering, delay, volume in the effects loop....it's all very useful if you have the patience to learn to use it. It's like the patience you need to learn to play guitar well. You're learning to "play" your pedals well.

On a side note to whoever mentioned parallel effects loops... See? Here's where the creativity comes in! My TM60 does not have a parallel loop, so I made the board do it. Signal comes from the effects loop and goes to my EQ. The EQ splits the signal, with one staying clean and the other running through the filter and delay pedals and then into a volume pedal. Then the two signals are mixed back together and sent to the effects return on my amp. Many guitarists probably wouldn't have had the patience to work the details of that out, and calculate everything to make sure there weren't impedance mismatches and what not....but I did. The result is a very powerful, but mostly analog, signal processing setup.
 
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