How to Use Guitar Pedal Effects

Transcript So another variation of an effect that is similar to overdrive or distortion, but definitely a lot different is fuzz. Artist that comes to mind that uses fuzz is Jimi Hendrix, pioneered it. There was an effect called the fuzz face that he used. There’s a lot of different pedals. The Fuzz Factory is …

Transcript I have my Gibson SG. It’s a 1972 Gibson SG Deluxe. It’s a great guitar. I love this one. It has humbuckers and for the purposes of this demo, I want to show you some ways to achieve a clean boost signal through a distorted sound and I’ll explain. So if you have a …

Transcript So one way to practice this new picking technique, once you’ve kind of gotten it together with the pick playing on the underside of the pick is something simple like a chromatic scale on one string. There are two facets to this. You can just take the open string and pick, alternate pick, and …

Transcript So chorus is an affect that is very popular. I think at it’s height of popularity in the 80’s, it seemed like every instrument and every song had chorus on it, heavily saturated with chorus. But I guess to me in my mind, I feel like there’s three generations of chorus sounds and what …

Transcript So when you’re talking about rock music, and you’re talking about rhythm versus lead, and you’re talking about overdrive versus distortion and even fuzz; which I’m not demonstrating today; there is just such a wide spectrum. And really it comes down to a lot of different parameters, but one of the things is sustain. …

Transcript There are hundreds of different kinds of picks. They differ in thickness. They differ in shape and size and they all have different kinds of uses. For me, I tend to gravitate towards the medium pick. The traditional pick shape I use is this. This is actually a Dunlop pick. It’s thinner than what …

Transcript So I just played some metal and I’m going to talk about distortion now. I went straight to metal because there is no metal without distortion. But I wanted to talk about distortion and exactly how to use it to get a sound that ranges anywhere from classic rock to heavy metal. What I …

Transcript So I have three tremolo pedals here. All three of them I use quite frequently. They all sound and do slightly different things. The one I love maybe the most is this Fulltone Supa Trem. I love the ease of use, two knobs you can’t go wrong. The knobs are big so you can …

Transcript The uses of overdrive and distortion in rock-and-roll and blues music is critical. Really, I don’t think that you can achieve the tone without using, to me, either overdrive or distortion. I’d say more blues and classic rock tones are going to gravitate more toward an overdrive sound, even as far back as Link …

Transcript So the different kinds of overdrive settings that I tend to use, let’s start with the Fulltone OCD pedal. I like the sound of a cranked amp, so when I can’t have a cranked amp at full volume, in a low volume situation, this the setting that I think gets me the furthest. And …

Transcript I’m going to talk about tremolo. Tremolo is an affect that is an essential, necessary part of my arsenal. I don’t really go on any gig without it. And what I like is I like the organic, natural sound that the old vintage Fender amps used to get. If you look at a lot …

Transcript So I found that over the 25 plus years of playing guitar one of the biggest things that I found that is overlooked by players, by teachers is how to properly hold a pick. I found that in the music that I like to play the technique that I’ve employed and the hero’s on …

Transcript One of the things that I do pretty much 99% of the time in a musical situation, in a rehearsal on a gig, I have the OCD pedal constantly on. I bring it with me everywhere, almost like a tuner. It’s just there. It’s in my pedal chain. And what I do is I …

Transcript A lot of blues players use the TS-808 Pedal or an overdrive similar to achieve a really great blues sound. Stevie Ray Vaughan I know used one. He used one with a Strat and different amps, so we’re not getting the exact sound, but you can hear in that example of how it sounds …

Transcript Distortion is pretty much an absolute necessity in heavy metal music, rhythm playing or any playing for that matter. I don’t really think that overdrive works that well in true heavy metal. I think that back in bands like Black Sabbath in the ’70’s and when metal was really starting to take off, I …

Transcript So what I’ve just demonstrated was just a tune I just made up that is really the essence of it is I’m trying to achieve a classic amp sound. Like you might get in the ’60’s; if I was back to Stax recording’s, the Motown recordings, Steve Cropper, the Funk Brothers, really anybody from …

Transcript So what I just demonstrated was kind of a genre specific representation of some music that maybe Jimi Hendrix might have played in the ’60’s, a lot of psychedelic music. And the effect that a lot of the muse was vibrato as opposed to tremolo, vibrato is altering the pitch rather than the volume. …

Transcript So I’ll start with the settings on this OCD pedal, very simple. Volume and drive and tone, self-explanatory. The drive is the amount of drive signal that you’re sending to the amp. The volume is the effect level and the tone it varies from pedal to pedal. In my experience, towards the AM is …

Transcript So a more advanced technique that I learned when I was starting improvisation is something that seems on paper very simple, but it is actually harder than you think, and what it is is playing random notes with a metronome without stopping. What it does is it gets you out of your comfort zone. …

Transcript A cool trick that I picked up along the way; I don’t remember when, I was probably playing heavy metal as a teenager; it’s a delay trick that you know, I don’t see a lot of people using, but Steve Vai comes to mind, Eddie Van Halen, I couldn’t tell you who it is. …

Transcript So there’s a term that is common in a lot of pedals today, called true bypass and what that means basically, when a pedal is true bypassed the switch, the on off switch on the pedal is basically, it never touches the input of the pedal effect circuitry. So that when it’s off, it’s …

Transcript One of the things that for some reason used to confuse me, when I was a kid, when I first started playing guitar and I bought a lot of pedals, was the order. That seems like a fundamental, basic thing, but it can get very confusing. There’s also room for experimentation. So there’s no …

Transcript So as far as the settings on the wah-wah pedal, there really are none. It’s very simple. The pedal is up and down, low to high intensity. The switch is actually underneath the foot of the pedal here, and to get it to engage, you have to press it down all the way. You …

Transcript So basically one of the things that kind of confused me when I first started playing guitar was the order of pedals, and it’s something that doesn’t need to be confusing. It is something you can really experiment with. Depending on what comes first in the signal chain and what goes last, the guitar …

Transcript So the wah-wah is a very cool effect that was pretty much pioneered by Jimi Hendrix. It is an envelope filter-style effect. Without going too technical the wah; the actual pedal opens and closes the filter and the amount or depth of that filter within the signal. It’s a very distinctive sound. Right here …

Transcript So some of the most popular effects for the guitar are overdrive and distortion. There is some gray area about what the differences between the two are and there’s a lot of room for debate. There’s a lot of crossover, where you’ll have pedals that could be classified as both distortion or overdrive. But …

Transcript There’s a lot of different kinds of delays. Some of them are in the form of a guitar pedal, which I’ll demonstrate here today. I guess, the basic two kinds of delays are digital and analog. When delay was first introduced, obviously it was analog before digital. They actually used tape, so there’s a …

Transcript There’s also a different kind of delay called modeling delay. One pedal that comes to mind is the Line 6, which is a company that makes pedals that emulate other classic pedals, such as delay. So there is one that is made by Line 6 and what it does is, it is a digital …

Transcript One thing that’s obviously taken off in the past few years is the use of software plugins to get guitar effects sounds, also amp sounds, even as far as scenarios, for example different miking techniques or different microphones. You can simulate different microphones being used on different amps or amp cabinets in different rooms, …

Transcript Three of the effects that Jimi Hendrix used quite frequently were wah-wah, fuzz, and vibrato or univibe. All three of those effects in conjunction with each other simultaneously, and also at different times, he used one or the other. When you use wah-wah along with the univibe sound and distortion, you really get close …

Transcript So a lot of what’s common in rock-a-billy music and early music like that, a lot of Western music, Country and Western music, early country, was the use of a large reverb, but most commonly it was a slap back delay. And that’s an effect that was more or less honed in on over …

Transcript So what we have here is we have a few pedals that you might find on a typical gig, minus the chorus pedal. This is probably a typical scenario that I would travel to a gig with. It’s not on the pedal board. It’s not hard-wired. I like that, so I can mix and …

Transcript So basically simply put what separates analog from digital is a circuit board. Digital pedals or effects basically have their components hard-wired to a circuit board and that’s a very different sound than analog pedals. To me, analog pedals or effects are really trying to emulate vintage gear, effects that were built into amps …

Transcript So if you’re someone that travels with a lot of guitar pedals, you might get to a point where you want to build a pedal board. You really have to commit to having a lot of pedals and carrying them all with you at the same time. If you’re a person that uses a …

Transcript So the ’80’s were a time of experimentation with a lot of different kinds of effects. One of them that was very popular was delay, digital delay, all kinds of delays. You had people like The Edge of U2 who was a pioneer of using that kind of effect. If you want to add …

Transcript Pedals, 99%of them have 9-volt batteries inside them. I tend to– I’ve blown off batteries in my career. I just never remember to bring them. They always die. I have to run to a drugstore to pick up extra ones. I’m kind of done with living that way, so what I always do is …

Transcript To get the slapback delay, basically the basic setting on a very simple pedal like this pedal, this is the Aqua Puss by Way Huge. This was a company that was around in the early 90’s as a boutique company. If you have the delay setting almost all the way down, so that the …