Multi-Effects Pedals

Description

This is just a quick video showing a few things that a Multi-Effects pedal with amp modeling capabilities can do.

Some people ... "purists" as they like to call themselves ... maintain that the only way to get good tone and sound on a guitar is with a decent amplifier.
While that statement is true, it also leaves you with relatively little choice in the matter as far as what other sounds you have available to you.
In other words, you may get a fantastic sound ... but without some kind of effects, that's about the only sound you're going to get.

While I'm all in favor of using an amazing amp and guitar on stage to get just that right sound, my personal feeling on the issue is that I also couldn't live without having a multi-effects unit.

I've had some excellent amps in the past ... Twin Reverbs, Marshall, etc. ...
and they definitely sounded amazing ... when they were set up correctly and placed in just the right room and used with just the right guitar and pickup.

However, there were always problems.

Octave feedback is just one example. I could get amazing, endless feedback in practice with a band. My amp was in the corner of the rehearsal room, placed at just the right height and had just the right room acoustics to give me perfect feedback every time. I'd even gotten it to the point where I could point the guitar a certain way and change what octave was feeding back.

Then, performance night would come, I'd set up on a stage in a club with an audience ... the acoustics get completely changed and sure enough ... no octave feedback at all. I would look like a total idiot waving my guitar around trying to get it to feedback properly.

So the next step was to get some pedals to help me dial in the sound a little better.

Over the years I tried buying individual pedals and building custom boards with power supplies in them but ... man, what a hassle. Half the time the power adapters would fall out. Or the 9-volt battery would be half dead, or a cord would short out. I would lug this heavy wooden box to every gig and it looked like something a student had made in woodshop class.

So, I finally bit the bullet and decided to buy an old used Boss Multi-Effects unit. ($250 with a free Redbox Cabinetulator)

This was one of the first ones ever made - a Boss ME-5 . First time I used it, I thought I'd gone to heaven. Stereo chorus, reverb, compression all at once. Push a pedal and you got over the top distortion. Push another one and you got stereo phase with reverb. Awesome ... now we're talking. :)

Next thing I was pleasantly surprised to discover was that the MIDI input was going to become indispensable. The band I was in at the time was heavily into "over the top" production. We were a three-piece band but needed to sound like we had a synth player, piano player and orchestra behind us as well. We were doing songs like "Get The Funk Out" by Extreme, or "Caroline" by Concrete Blonde and they had to sound better than the original or we would fail miserably.

So one of the first things we did was to program all the songs into MIDI (all the piano parts, horns and strings, samples of people talking, even vocal harmonies). Hooked our drummer up to a click track and stuck a small Mac Classic II beside him. He'd hit a button and get a 4 click count in ... he'd count us in four more clicks and the computer would take over and play all the extra instruments for us.

My own job was to play guitar, Taurus pedals, guitar synth and harmonies. Many times I'd have several patch changes during a song and sure enough ... it was inevitable that I'd occasionally forget to hit the overdrive patch for a lead solo or accidentally launch into a blistering overdrive when it was supposed to be a ballad.

So ... another pleasant MIDI surprise ...

I programmed all the pedals MIDI patch changes into the computer. Then hooked the MIDI output of the computer to the midi input of the Boss ME-5. Now when we played a song, not only did we sound like a ten piece band, I never had to hit another pedal to change sounds on my guitar. My lead part would come up in a song and instantly change to overdrive. Then back to soft and smooth for the rest of the song.

By the time I'd finished experimenting, I was up to a couple of hundred patch changes a night, just for doing simple things like lowering the volume during a verse, or adding a tiny boost to the last note of a solo.

After a year or so of doing this, I didn't even bother putting the pedal on the floor anymore. It was more convenient to just have it on a stand so I could tweak the sounds and save them instantly without having to bend over all the time.

Anyways ... to make a long story short. (Yeah, right) I still have decent amps on hand but in all honesty, I rarely use them anymore. They're noisy. They're a pain to find the right sounds. Once you record a certain sound you're stuck with it. You listen back later and discover the 12" Open Back speaker cabinet sounds too boxy and you need a 4 X 10" Closed Back to get the right sound.

It's easier to just lay down a temporary sound and record a clean signal to tape, then play it back through the processor while it's playing along with the music, and tweak around the settings until the guitar part sits just right in the mix.

Even live, I can go straight into the board and get a better sound in stereo than I could out of a single amp placed to one side of the stage.

Several months ago, I finally upgraded & got brand new multi-effects pedal with all the bells and whistles.

I guess the point of this rant is, I constantly keep seeing questions in the forum area asking, "How do I get a certain sound?" A lot of purists will insist (and it's definitely true) that to get the exact sound of one of your favorite artists, you need to buy the exact same guitar and amp as they are using. Unfortunately, the amp and guitar are probably worth more than you make all year.
Not only that, you have to have the same $2000 microphone placed at exactly the same distance and angle from the speaker, the same room acoustics, the same high end mixing board and effects and an excellent mastering engineer with years of experience using his Avalon compressor to dial it in just right.

If you're rich and have tons of money to throw away ... great, go for it.

If not ... do the easy thing.

Get yourself a decent small amp ... something that's just the right size that's necessary for whatever you need it for. Then get yourself a decent Multi-Effects pedal (and high end cables) and spend a few hours tweaking it around and using different speaker cabinet and room sound emulations. It might not be a real Marshall or Vox or whatever, but you'd be hard pressed to find anybody that could honestly tell the difference.

The video here is just a very small sampling of sounds available on a Multi-Effects pedal. The pedal is plugged straight into the computer using a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter. There's no additional processing involved except what's coming out of the pedal itself.

The ones I'm dialing in are just factory settings. Once you start tweaking the BPM delay rate by tapping it in, then emulating your favorite amp and speaker combination, using the wah pedal or pitch ... synth, feedbacker, sitar, acoustic processor, auto riff, harmonist ... compression, chorus ... Let's just say that with a few hours practice you can pretty much instinctively figure out how to copy any guitar sound you hear just by playing around with the dials.

The MP3 is a 15 minute extended version going through just about every factory patch in real time showing how easy it is to dial in sounds and how good they can sound. For recording purposes I still occasionally use the Redbox Cabinetulator or run guitar parts through Amplitube but for the most part, they can sound pretty good as-is.