Do you need effects?

[Bob Womack]

By the way, a college I graduated from built a new auditorium and someone paid for a pipe organ to be custom-built for the place. The organ builder came to the auditorium, snapped and clapped his fingers a few times and whistled. He turned to the president of the college and said, "I won't put one of my organs in here until you get the reverb time of this room up to (I think it was) 3.7 seconds."

And he didn't until the school brought back the architect and modified the acoustics. The room sounded like a reverb bus but the silly organ SHINED. Their next little battle was with the PA installer to get vocal intelligibility back.

Bob

[posternutbag]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

There's a very perceptible reverb on Roy. It sounds very much like a typical Fender spring reverb.

Bob

I don't really think of spring reverb on an amp as an effect per se. I think of it as a characteristic of the amp. But it changes/alters the sound, so I guess it is.

[SimonFL]

I mostly just use delay and overdrive. I like to have at least two tiers of overdrive/distortion. I have a flanger and a wah om my pedal board right now, but they dont get allot of use.

[Dru Edwards]

Originally Posted by terrapin

Effects are an essential component of electric guitar playing. They can easily be abused and overused, but the right effect at the right time in the right amount can make a song. Purists who say guitar, cord, amp only will not be very useful in many situations. Learning to apply effects appropriately to serve the song is IMO an essential skill for becoming a versatile and useful guitarist.

Hey Russ, good point. Effects are often overused and signal paths muddied. In some cases, some people don't even know how to use an effect, such as a compressor. Once known how to use the effects and how they interact between each other, the guitar, and the amp, it can do wonders.

[iim7V7IM7]

JAZZ: When I play jazz, I plug straight into my solid state amp which has a built-in digital reverb. No effects beyond that is required. My tuner is a clip-on Snark.

BLUES: When I play blues with my tube amp, I use a few effects, but not many. In front of the amp, I use a pedal that can adjust my EQ and hit my preamp tubes to enhance the amp's overdrive tone. In the effects loop, I will use time domain based effects like delay and or reverb. I use an in-line tuner between my guitar and the amp as well.

[BTF]

I don't have to have effects, but I prefer to use them. I play everything between Funkadelic to Dio and having effects make things so much easier.

[pitner]

I like reverb which in my thinking is an effect. I also like compression and on my electric rig is on all the time with the reverb. I can live without the overdrives I have but I do use them like a bit of salt in a stew. I use less as I get older and can be very happy with a good sounding clean amp with a spring reverb. On the acoustic side it is pretty much the sam clean with some reverb. Very happy with just a straight up clean acoustic and nothing else. Years ago I was gigging with a real Leslie and a host of pedals on a giant pedalboard. These days much less complicated and the Leslie sits in my home practice room unused for the most part.

[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by zabdart

I always thought you should learn to master the sounds of your guitar without any effects before you start adding them...Some players just use effects to disguise their own shortcomings as players. Learn to do it by yourself, with just your guitar and your amp, then add effects if you feel they're needed. You'll be a lot better guitar player that way...

Originally Posted by A-Mac

Just plug in and go. A touch of reverb so it's not an overly dry sound...My self-imposed restriction is to handle any song with just my guitar and voice. And a well thought out arrangement.

I've been playing for 52 years, and the more I tried stompboxes or modeling amps the more I realized I'm a guitar-cable-amp guy at heart; maybe it's the fact that I started as a jazzer, but I've always believed that your signature tone (and as I used to tell my students, if you don't have one you need to get one) comes from your hands first and foremost, and anything else is (and should be) merely icing on the cake - frankly, I learned more about tone production watching violinist Itzhak Perlman's left-hand technique than any ten guitarists I can name. Like Pitner, I'm partial to a good clean-sounding amp with a bit of 'verb to keep it from sounding too "dry" or "in your face" (especially in a smaller setting); since I don't play anything too heavy I'm OK with the bluesy/crunchy "brown Marshall" tones I can get from my Bugera V22's OD channel, or for the now-rare occasion I play a bigger house/outdoors I'll ride volume/attack on my '65 Super RI the way it was done back when - IMO it always sounds/feels better when your OD's coming from real tubes anyway. If I'm doing oldies/surf I might use some old-school trem for certain tunes, but that's about as far as it goes...

[zabdart]

You know, before Jimi Hendrix landed on earth, very, very few guitar players used any effects other than reverb at all... and liked it. Scotty Moore had a custom-made amp built by Ray Butts which had an echo effect (analog delay) built into it which shows up from time to time on some records Elvis made before he went into the Army. Bo Diddley frequently used the "vibrato" effect (which actually produced tremolo) on his amps, but no one ever even heard of "fuzztone" before the Beatles ("I'm Looking Through You") and the Stones ("Satisfaction") started experimenting with it around 1965. I believe Eric Clapton was the first prominent guitar player to add a wah-wah pedal to his arsenal on "Disraeli Gears."
Effects are what you make of them. Used sparingly and judiciously, they can be a lot of fun. Used constantly, they get kind of noisy.

[franchelB]

When I used to play electric guitar regularly, I used to think I needed effect pedals.
Now that I play on occasion, with the help of my 2-channel Peavey Delta Blues (w/a tremolo section), I've gotten by with just a touch of reverb, and tap-tempo delay.
I still have my basic effect pedals set-up:
1. Dynacomp
2. Boss DS-1
3. Danelectro Pepperoni Phase
4. Ernie Ball Volume pedal Jr.
5. Digitech Digidelay
6. Planet Waves pedal tuner...
all in a Boss BCB-60 pedal board.

[Steve DeRosa]

Originally Posted by zabdart

You know, before Jimi Hendrix landed on earth, very, very few guitar players used any effects other than reverb at all...and liked it...no one ever even heard of "fuzztone" before the Beatles ("I'm Looking Through You") and the Stones ("Satisfaction") started experimenting with it around 1965. I believe Eric Clapton was the first prominent guitar player to add a wah-wah pedal to his arsenal on "Disraeli Gears."
Effects are what you make of them. Used sparingly and judiciously, they can be a lot of fun. Used constantly, they get kind of noisy.

From Wikipedia:

...The Ventures pioneered the use of special effects on such songs as "The 2000 Pound Bee", recorded in late 1962, in which lead guitarist Nokie Edwards employed a fuzz distortion pedal. Edwards' use of 'fuzz tone' predated the "King of Fuzz Guitar", Davie Allan of The Arrows, by at least three years...The 1964 The Ventures In Space album was a primer in the use of special guitar effects, and made pioneering use of 'reverse-tracking', a technique used very effectively by The Beatles in the later 1960s. The Ventures In Space, because of its ethereal space-like effects, was deemed an influence on the later 1960s San Francisco psychedelic generation...The band's cover of The Tornadoes' "Telstar" (released in January 1963) featured one of the first instances of flanging on a pop record. The song "Silver Bells" on The Ventures' Christmas Album, released in November 1965, has one of the first recorded uses of a vocoder as a musical effect, voiced by Red Rhodes. Rhodes was responsible for devising many of the effects seen on Ventures' records, and was the inventor of the fuzzbox...

...The first wah pedal was created by Brad Plunkett at Warwick Electronics Inc./Thomas Organ Company in November 1966...The concept, however, was not totally new. Country guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins had used a similar, self-designed device on his late-1950s recordings of "Hot Toddy" and "Slinkey"...

- and from www.MyGibsonBass.com:

In 1962 a fourth solid bass patterned after the EB-0 called the EB-0F was made available. The 'F' suffix stood for fuzztone and meant that the model had a built-in transistorized circuitry producing the same sound effect as the FZ-1 pedal then marketed by Gibson as an accessory. Early-60's adverts claimed that the fuzz effect was 'the newest and probably the most startling sound for guitars since the electric guitar was invented.' Oddly enough, Gibson found it appropriate to offer the fuzz effect as a built-in feature on a bass rather than a guitar! Anyway, the EB-0F proved short-lived and was phased out in 1965.

Pursuant to the last entry, TMK the first Beatles song to feature fuzz was Paul's bass line (using his then-new Rick 4001) on George's "Think for Yourself," and was listed as such on the Rubber Soul album cover. FWIW, that's also the last Beatles album I really enjoyed in its entirety - just about everything after that was IMO, well, kind of noisy...

[terrapin]

Originally Posted by Dru Edwards

Hey Russ, good point. Effects are often overused and signal paths muddied. In some cases, some people don't even know how to use an effect, such as a compressor. Once known how to use the effects and how they interact between each other, the guitar, and the amp, it can do wonders.

My goal as a player these days is to be ready to be a "hired gun" for anyone and that implies being ready with effects when called for or requested, and to know how to dial in the sound requested. Otherwise you won't get many call backs!

[Davis Webb]

I use a Boss reverb pedal into a clean PA box, the TVM50 busker amp. That's about it. Perfect for a tele. Most Nashville players add compression to punch up the sound and even out the notes.

When I want to get down and dirty, I use a multi effects box with compression, overdrive, delay, reverb and some amp modeling with the Ibanez. A Fasel circuit wah pedal Cry Baby adds the final touch.

But these days, I am straight up country so its a bit of reverb and clean.

And yeh, you hide TONS of mistakes with effects. Which is why I am pure Tele clean now. Listeners get it too, they appreciate you are honest with your playing. The world has had enough of guitar shop shredders.

[terrapin]

Originally Posted by Davis Webb

I use a Boss reverb pedal into a clean PA box, the TVM50 busker amp. That's about it. Perfect for a tele. Most Nashville players add compression to punch up the sound and even out the notes.

When I want to get down and dirty, I use a multi effects box with compression, overdrive, delay, reverb and some amp modeling with the Ibanez. A Fasel circuit wah pedal Cry Baby adds the final touch.

But these days, I am straight up country so its a bit of reverb and clean.

And yeh, you hide TONS of mistakes with effects. Which is why I am pure Tele clean now. Listeners get it too, they appreciate you are honest with your playing. The world has had enough of guitar shop shredders.

I think your comment about pedals hiding tons of mistakes is a bit overstated. I would agree that gross over processed signal can cover some mistakes, but there is definite technique involved with the use of effects, and I am speaking mostly of modulation here. David Gilmour or Eric Johnson would not agree with that characterization. Also, obviously not only "guitar shop shredders" use ALOT of effects.... That is kinda like the "Tone Purist" stance very prevalent on The Gear Page.....I don't usually see that here?

[Davis Webb]

Hey I am just as impressed with Satriani's Bad Horsie and his dive bombs as the next guy. Its just enough already. The canned overdrive sound on home renovation shows, to the theme songs from sports events, to the earsplittinloudenboomer pick harmonics of metal, its just enough. I don't know what forums you are talking about but I would anticipate that on an acoustic guitar forum very few folks are interested in processed signals.

I, for one, along with most of the players I know, use minimal effects now. Maybe some folks have not changed with the times. Effects can mask a myriad of mistakes and if you have not observed this, then so be it.