DS1, DS2, EQ, Vai and Cobain and More...........
I wanted to post more about the DS1 and other ideas with pedals and will still do it, but it seems to be appropriate to make some comments about that here as well.
The DS1 in itself it a great pedal as it can give you many different colours: From a mild boost, to Crunch, to Fuzz and Fusion sound. True the pedal does not have a lot of bass when you turn it on full blast but that may be the thing: You need to be a bit carefull to dial in your tone.
Anyway a bit more to the point now:
Steve Vai does still use a DS1 but he had it modified by Robert Keely. I have not heard these modifications myself, but from what I read about them they just give you a bit more bass. Well in a way there are so many ways to add some bass to your sound: Various Eq pedals or perhaps even another pedal.
Now with all of this: Those pedals may be better for studio use, for a performing situation you may just need one good amp with a great sound and make all you sonic variations with your different pick-ups and tone controls as you are too busy performing and simply do not have the time to tweak as you would have in the studio.
The DS2 is a great pedal as well, but not as flexable as the DS1, yes it does the boost job and gives you great distortion, and if you wonder what the Turbo idea is: Well it gives you more midrange [Think early Metalica] it is that kind of sound, but you can not turn the DS2 into a Fusion or Crunch sound.
This midrange boost can easily perceived by the use of an EQ pedal, but I guess for performing something like the DS2 is easier to use as you can just kick it in and have you sound straight away.
Some folks made some comments about Kurt Cobain and his use of the DS1 and him getting a good sound out of it. Well just think about this: What amp did he use it through? How was his sound recorded? What kind of room did they use? What did they use during the mixing to change to overal sound? There are too many variations here so you need to be carefull, it is not like: "OH Cobain did use this, so let me get one as well" As you may find that the sounds you are getting are soo different to the ones you are hearing on a certain recording. In a way I like all of this, as it is part of becoming a better musician and understanding how certain sounds are being created.
The "In Utereo" album is mentioned as well by someone, well I feel this album has such a different guitar sound compared to the album before: The sound is much more rawer and more urgent, the songs too sound darker. Now there is a book about the journals of Kurt Cobain, when you read that you will come across some notes he made for the preparation of the recording of that album. By the time Kurt was going to do this album they had done a lot of gigs and they had the recording experience of the previous album, so I believe he knew more about the kind of sound he wanted for his songs, so a lot more thought went into it. Really it is a next step up from the previous album soundwise.
Where does you eq sit in your signal chain? Well as mentioned by others, you can put it in many different places:
Gtr----> EQ----->Distortion------Amp
Gtr---->EQ------>Distortion---->EQ---->Amp
In the fist example the EQ defines the freqency spectrum of your distortion pedal, so for example you can boost the MIDS with your EQ and the Distortion pedal will just sound more midrange, in the second example the second EQ is there to finetune some freqencies in your overal sound. Again this is something you may like in a studio situation, for perfoming you may not have the time to look at any of this.
"The Good old Days, Bush and when music was still recorded on tape"
this was a remark posted by the previous person, well in a way I agree, but it is scary to think that "These good old days" are only ten years ago, we are not even talking about the days of Led Zep or the Late Sixties period or some older electric blues guys. Do people today not have enough time to create good sounding albums with inventive guitarsounds or are we are using the same amp modellers and similar plug-ins? I am not expecting an anwer really because this topic is so deep and not only related to music but we see it in many other areas too: "The good old days", and if you want any equipment from those "good old days" period you need to fork out "good old days" money.
Surely with the technology we have today we could surpass the "Good old Days" quality, but for some reason we seem to make only half of the quality of what we were able to do in the past.
Eddie
