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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 a modern take on the Fuzz Face with a lot of wild and crazy variations by Zachary Vex, by Z.Vex.

Jack White is an artist that uses fuzz a lot. What the difference is in a nutshell, is fuzz really alters the wave form, almost into a square wave. Without getting too technical, it really sounds like your amp’s broken. I mean I guess that’s the only way to really describe it. There’s a lot of different colors in between that statement. You can get it to sound almost like a very saturated, compressed distortion, all the way to something that almost sounds like an octave.

That it’s so broken up and the wave form is so altered that it almost sounds like two notes being played at the same time. There’s a lot of variations, but fuzz is a very distinctive tone. You’ll know it when you hear it. I guess the long story short of that, is that if you are looking to get a Jimi Hendrix tone and you buy an overdrive pedal, you’re probably not going to get that tone.

You’re probably going to be better off getting a distortion pedal and a fuzz pedal or just a fuzz pedal and crank your amp. Just try and get the tone that you like. But fuzz, very different, probably on the far end of the spectrum, as far as how affected your tone is. I’d say fuzz is the most affected, least natural sounding. Listen to Jack White, listen to Jimi Hendrix if you really want to hear what that sounds like.

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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 situation where you have distortion coming from your amp at a high gain, and say you want a solo to really pop over the rest of the band. A lot of amps will have this built-in. They will have a clean boost, which is basically they’ll have a foot switch. You click on the clean boost and it’ll raise the overall master volume.

But if you don’t have that or you want to add a little color to the clean boost, what you can do is you can take one of the overdrive pedals that we’ve been demoing and we’ll start with the OCD. I have the drive all the way down now and the volume all the way up. Again, tone straight through the middle, because that’s my default. Here on the TS9 Ibanez Tube Screamer same thing, drive all the way down. Level of the effect all the way up, tone in the middle.

So if you have the amp distortion, which I have here setup… That’s the level of the amp and the distortion is coming from the amp. Now if I want to just raise the level of that, the master volume level without even touching the amp, if I have one of these pedals in my chain I can boost the overall level. You could hear it just a little and where it really pops out is on solos. That’s the OCD using it as a clean boost.

Here’s the same thing with the TS9. In my opinion the TS9 adds a little more color. The OCD has a little bit more head room on it on the volume control. Again, why I personally like the OCD for this use, but again, hundreds of different overdrive pedals. Hundreds of different ways you can manipulate them and use them with your amp and guitar. This is just another way that you can use a clean boost through an overdrive pedal to work with your amp distortion.

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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 then we do the chromatic scale on the high E-string, four frets at a time. I’m going to go ascending first, then I’ll stop. For now my foot will be the metronome. So the first thing to note is as soon as one finger goes down, they’re all down. I’m not doing this. I’m doing this, next four. That’s the ascending version.

Alternate picking, every finger down, and try to get the notes really even dynamically and volume wise. Try to get them all even. Now when you’re descending the trick is when you lay the next four down have all the fingers planted already as opposed to… The difference is that. So ascending and descending faster would be like this. You can try it on the other strings. Make sure to keep the fingers planted on the way down and really dig into the fingerboard. And another thing to keep in mind is when you dig into the fingerboard with your left hand, the natural reaction is to pick harder with your right hand.

Be mindful of that and make sure that you’re picking the same velocity, the same intensity while really digging into the fingerboard. When you can separate those two strengths, you really start to understand how the tone and dynamics work with your left hand in conjunction with the picking technique of your right had. Another cool thing you do is to try and do 8th note triplets or 16th notes, 8th notes triplets would be… And that will really help you to differentiate between the patterns of four and patterns of three, with triplets versus the groupings of four with your fingers. A really good technique for the picking and it helps all the way around.

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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 they really come out of is from traditional vibrato, amp vibrato. We demonstrated with the deja vibe here, with that Hendricks uni-vibe sound is like. Again, the pitch is being altered and those frequencies are creating that warbley affect.

To me in the 60’s that was the first example of what we know today as chorus and I feel like everything built upon that kind of affect that family of affect. The next pedal that I have here is a Maxon Pure Analog Chorus. This to me, this pedal I don’t use very much, but its very brassy, very bright sounding chorus, and to me it sounds like a lot of music from the 70’s, that had a very shimmery bright chorus sound.

You’re adjusting small variations in the pitch and that’s what gives you that chorus sound, but you can see how we have evolved completely away from the Hendricks sound into something else now. And what the knobs here are speeding with, the width of the waveform and the speed. So now we’ve definitely moved into chorus land completely out of vibrato, but it is analog. It’s not stereo and it’s still a very simple affect, but it’s becoming very different from what we know from vibrato.

And the third example that I have here is a Boss Super Chorus Pedal and it’s a stereo chorus, so you can run two outputs. I’m running mono right now and this sound is very 80’s, distinctive of the 80’s sound to me. Right now I have a medium setting, I have the rate at about 12 o’clock and the depth or intensity, whatever you want to call it, is pretty high up. To me, when I think of this sound, I think of it mixed with distortion, and then you get a lot of the 80’s sound.

So I’ll put on the distortion here and you hear. I immediately think of Def Leppard when I hear that, even Van Halen, a lot of 80’s rock music used a lot of chorus. The Police was using chorus, Talking Heads. I mean it was a very popular affect in the 80’s. Me personally, I never use chorus. If I gravitate towards chorus, it’s for very specific thing. I I get called to do a gig where I have to emulate that sound, it become the go-to affect. Otherwise, I use it sparingly, because it’s so characteristic of a certain genre.

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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. Distortion head fully saturated and a compressed distortion that’s going to give you a much longer sustained, much more compressed sound, and the frequencies are going to vary, from a very rumbley low end to a high piercing high end, high frequency.

In metal music for the most part, that really is key. You’re never going to get that sustain with an overdrive pedal. So when you’re playing lead, let’s go from the OCD, which is a very clean transparent overdrive, next we have the Box of Rock, which is somewhere in the middle. It’s not very transparent. It definitely colors the tone quite a bit. And then the far end of the spectrum and the most extreme, the Metal Zone, which is the most heavily saturated distortion.

So you’re really going to get a huge wide range of tone here and all under the umbrella of rock music, really. Let’s start with the OCD pedal. I’m just going to play one note. I’m not even going to get into anything flashy, but if you just listen… If you just listen to the trail on that note, it’s so clean that it’s just adding a little bit of dirt, a little bit of hair. You know rhythm and blues, even just to add a little dirt to sound like your cranked amp, you know?

Next we have the Box of Rock, which is going to color it a little more. You’re really getting much more color, much more saturation, much more compression. You’re really hearing more frequencies. You’re hearing more of rumbley low end. You’re hearing a little more of the high mid’s. Finally the far end of the spectrum is the Metal Zone Pedal by Boss. This is the most extreme. I would only bring this on; hence the name metal; I would only bring it on a metal gig.

But you can already here it’s very noisy, and that’s because there’s so much packed into that box. So many frequencies, the distortion is cranked all the way up, so it’s going to be a very dirty sound, which is key in metal. So as far as playing the one note, like I did earlier, you’ll hear how much sustain. I mean it just goes on forever.

So there’s hundreds of different kinds of overdrive distortion and fuzz pedals and depending on what you like and what music going for; what guitar you have, what pickups you’re using, what amps you have; in between the guitar and the amp the possibilities are endless. So it’s all about what sound you’re trying to achieve, what genre you’re trying to achieve it in and you’ll find your own cool sound.

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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 I use. I actually use– this is a Fender medium. This is the traditional pick shape. You can find them anywhere. One pick that I’ve come across for some reason I really like is this Cool pick. It’s a medium. It’s got a texture. This blue part it’s got a grip, which I used to not like, but for some reason I like it now, and it’s got a little bit of a pointier tip than the regular, traditional Fender medium picks.

I like to play with the back end of the pick actually. It rolls off the string in a totally different way then when you use the point, for obvious reasons. And it really gives you kind of a warmer sound. If I’m playing jazz or sometimes if I’m playing even on the acoustic guitar it really sounds a lot different. So that’s with the back end of the pick as opposed to the tip. You can hear it. It has a much different effect playing with the tip as opposed to the rounded edge of the pick. And it also depends on the kind of you’re using.

So a lighter pick, a thinner pick is more flexible. There’s different gauges. They can go anywhere from paper thin to somewhat of a light medium. It just all depends on what you like. I find that the thin picks work really good on a 12-string guitar. Because of the flexibility of the pick, it tends to move with the strings and the more strings you have, like on a 12-string guitar, I just find it works better. A heavy pick is pretty immobile, not very flexible and so you get a duller sound, a thicker sound tends to bring out some of the bass notes a little bit thicker. Just experiment and see what works on your guitar.

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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 have here is I have two very different kinds of distortion pedals. The one I was just playing through is the Metal Zone pedal. It’s made by Boss. They used to make a pedal called the Heavy Metal Pedal back in the ’80’s and I don’t know if they make it anymore, but this one is the closest thing that I could find to that pedal that they still make.

You have some very basic settings on here. Same as all the other Boss pedals or overdrive pedals that we were talking about before, you have an overall effect level. All the way on the right we have the distortion, which is the amount of distortion, minimum to maximum, and the EQ settings are in the middle, different frequencies. The gray area about overdrive versus distortion is that really to me, the simplest way to describe it is whereas overdrive is trying to achieve the sound of a cranked amp. And it works with the clean, transparent sound of your guitar signal to sometimes color it, but mostly it’s trying to emulate the sound of the pre-amp tubes or power tubes in your amp naturally distorting.

It’s an organic, natural way that amps used to work to achieve the first early distortion in the ’50’s and ’60’s. What distortion is is when you finally cross the line of where the gain is colored or intense enough it becomes distortion. The total sound and saturation and compression and the distortion sound that is coming from the box itself and not the amp. That to me is where overdrive crosses the line to distortion zone, where you’re really just coloring the sound so much and getting it so saturated that at the lowest volume you can sound like Metallica or Slayer or any of your favorite bands, even as intense as some of the Def Metal bands out there. Where it’s just a really, really heavy saturated distortion.

So the second pedal I have here is this Zvex Box of Rock. It is a distortion pedal. What’s great about it is it has a boost feature built-in, so when you take a solo or if you want to boost the signal, it has a separate button for boost. It also has a boost knob, which can boost pretty substantially the level. These are two very different distortions, the Metal Zone by Boss and the Box of Rock by Zvex. It gives you a wide range of different kinds of distortion. This Box of Rock is a little bit more of a natural distortion sound. It’s a very warm sound. It’s a very natural sound, but it definitely is coloring the tone. This is without it… so the amp is completely clean.

So all of the distortion is coming from the pedal itself. You have a drive setting here, volume and tone, and then the boost. Boost again, is pretty substantial. And one thing I really like about this pedal is that it breaks up and starts to sound almost like the speaker’s failing. The Zvex pedal’s are pretty crazy in the sense that they go to extremes and this is definitely no exception. You can really go crazy with this pedal, and really get it to sound like the amp is trashed, and some people really like that effect. You can do some really cool things with it.

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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 actually move them with your foot. In the middle of playing you can actually manipulate the settings. So one of the things that is cool about this is you have these two buttons here.

You have a hard and soft, which gives you a really dramatic dip in the wave form, so that the volume really cuts. The floor really drops. So I believe this is on the soft setting. Click hard, you’ll hear that it’s almost– the volume is actually dipping almost to the point of being off. So it’s like and on/off with the volume as opposed to just a dip in the volume, which is really more like a classic tremolo. It’s much more dramatic than the soft setting.

Then you have the mix and the rate. The mix is the amount of tremolo that you’re sending into your amp signal. The rate is the speed. Rate is right here at about 1 o’clock. Obviously, the more you slow it down, the slower the tremolo. You can really– the variance on this tremolo is pretty dramatic. I mean you can go from super, super slow to very, very fast. I’ve found that the comfortable spot is around 1 o’clock for me.

Then you have this other button here, speed. Which doubles up on what this knob can do. You click it and I didn’t even move the rate knob and you’re already double what it was before. If you hit the hard and soft again, you can really almost get almost like a helicopter sound. You can go nuts with this. The other two that I have here, I’ll start with one of the older ones is this Boss tremolo, a Tr-2. This is the wave form, the middle knob, and then the rate or speed is all the way on the left.

So we’ll hear how that sounds. So you turn the wave button and basically, what that does if you picture a triangle wave versus a square wave, it basically the arc of the wave it softens or hardens that. And then the rate, obviously the speed. Finally we have this Strymon Flint pedal, which is a new one that I’ve found recently, which I really love. You have three presets here and they’re all emulating classic amps.

The 61 ‘Harmonic setting on the tremolo almost is borderline vibrato. It alters the pitch slightly, which is a little bit of a grey area, as far as tremolo and vibrato is concerned. But it’s still a tremolo, but just having that option is very cool. 63 Tube setting, just doing that, it’s just emulating a ’63 Tube amp. Classic fender amps, classic box amps. And the third setting is this ’65 Photo, all different colors, all different variations, intensity and speed, same as the other pedals, and the possibilities again are endless.

It’s all just what you like, what sounds good to you. And there you have tremolo, so all three of these pedals have very similar settings. They all sound, as you can see, very different. It’s all what you like. It’s all what sounds good. Experiment with reverb. Experiment with delay. Experiment with overdrive and you’ll see that they all achieve very different tones. Some are very natural and organic and some can be really wild and crazy, depending on what you’re trying to achieve.

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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 Ray or BB King, that used crank amps. You’re going to get that kind of a tone with an overdrive pedal. Cream, early Led Zeppelin; you are going to get tones like that with different overdrive pedals.

Whereas, distortion crosses into the spectrum of a much more saturated, much more colored sound: Green day, Metallica, even Maroon 5 are some modern rock that really has a compressed with a mix of those records, is very high-gain, very compressed. Distortion might be a way you would go in that genre. Really, the spectrum is so vast that you can achieve so many different kinds of guitar tones between overdrive and distortion. There’s so many different pedals and sounds you can achieve in between that’s really impossible to just pinpoint it. Experiment with it and see what works for you.

That was just a little blues thing. I was using my full-tone OCD pedal. As you can see, the humbuckers on my SG are creating much more base-heavy, mid-range-y tone through the amp, without the overdrive pedal. Right away, we’re getting a heavier, meatier sound. Again, Strat and [inaudible : 01:51] verses a Les Paul or an SG is going to get a very different reaction with an overdrive pedal. There’s just so many colors on the pallet to use.

In this case, you might get a tone similar to Cream or some of the early classic rock/blues artists with an overdrive pedal. It’s a very effective way to get a good rhythm sound, really good blues sound, really bring out some of the low mid-range of your guitar. It does add a little bit of color. The drive on this pedal is all the way down, pretty much; probably about 7:00. It’s not as transparent as it would be with the Telecaster or single coil pick up, but that’s okay, because if you want that, just switch guitars.

This is an example of a way you can achieve a blues rock, classic rock sound with an overdrive pedal.

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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 what that is is the drive all the way down, tone 12 o’clock and the volume just depends on the situation. So here’s the clean sound I have going. This is with the pedal. It’s a fantastic sounding pedal.

I try and max the volume clean with the pedal so that there’s not a huge jump in volume, so that it literally sounds like the amp is cranked. Now one of the things you can do, very self-explanatory, if you turn up the drive, you obviously get more drive signal. More saturation, more compression in your signal. More distorted, but be careful with that term, because this is an overdrive pedal, not a distortion pedal. But it is distorting the signal, figuratively speaking.

So the other pedal that I like it use is the Ibanez TS9 pedal. I have a vintage one here that’s modified. Classic pedal, Stevie Ray Vaughn is a guitar player that comes to mind that used it. Thousands of artists use it. It’s very popular. Still popular today, does the same thing. Get’s the sound of a cranked amp. In my opinion, some may argue, it colors the tone a little bit, but it’s a great color. So it’s not as transparent as the OCD pedal, but it adds a very cool color that’s transparent enough that is still sounds like a transparent overdrive pedal. Here’s what it sounds like.

It’s got a very mid-rangy sound to it. Here’s the clean with the pedal off. Here’s with the Tube Screamer. It has a very cool narrow mid-range to me. To my ear, it does something very cool with the clean signal versus the drive signal, where you can still hear some of the clean coming through. So it colors it a little bit and gets a very, very nice warm sound, especially when you do like the neck pickup. So these are some examples of two very popular overdrive pedals on the market that do some very cool things that I like to use. Experiment with the settings. Experiment with the different pedals and find your own sounds that work with your guitar and your playing and your amp.

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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 of the old, vintage Fender amps, they came with tremolo built in. Some of them came with vibrato built in, which I’ll talk about in another video.

But what tremolo is, is basically altering the volume of the wave form at different speeds and different intensities, but you’re not altering the pitch. You’re altering the volume, the in and out so to speak, of how the dip in volume and how intense that dip is, and that tremolo really gives you kind of a warbley. Very cool affect depending on how you use it. It could be very soothing.

It can really warm up your tone, if you really know how to manipulate music with other affects. It’s not to be confused with vibrato, which is something very, very different. It’s in the same family, but indeed very different. I’m going to talk a little bit about how I like to use tremolo for the music that I play, and when I play guitar and how I use some of the settings, to get and achieve some of the best tones that, in my opinion really work well.

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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 guitar that I like the most and try to emulate their playing style, they all seem to pick the same way. And over the years I’ve shown some people and it’s opened their eyes too. So I think it’s a really important technique.

The best way to describe the technique that I’m going to show you, it’s multi-faceted. But if you take the pick, right here we have a medium pick. Let’s just play one note. I’m playing in the middle of the guitar between the pickups and I’m just playing right parallel with the string, the flat under the pick. If I turn my hand under so that the pick is not perpendicular to the string or parallel, it’s more perpendicular like this, facing this way. So this as opposed to this. It may sound like I’m picking harder. I’m actually not.

What’s happening is the angle has changed so that I’m using different muscle groups in my arm, actually. I don’t know if you can see my wrist. I’m curving it around. Not too much, but just enough so that the angle is going this way towards the head stock. Almost at a 45 degree angle on the back end of the pick. But I am picking straight down. Keep the joint of your thumb locked. Don’t do this, because if you notice the angle of the pick, let’s just do the open string. If I bend the knuckle, it’s all it takes. The angle of my hand is the same.

You may pick like this. If you pick like this with your hand up and around, this is with the knuckle bent, this is with the knuckle straight. You can hear right away double in volume, warmer, more rounded. Some of my heroes, like George Benson, Grant Green, even people like Nile Rogers, Cornell Dupree, some of the great rhythm players, Jimi Hendrix also, somehow they; if you look at pictures of them; they all pick this way on the underside of the pick.

And I don’t know why that is or why they all pick that way. It’s just that I love their playing, tried to emulate it. And when I was learning about picking and saw that they all picked the same way as opposed to some of the other guitar players I was seeing, a light bulb kind of went off. And when I was learning how to pick the right way, I was able to do some of the things that I wasn’t before, able to do technically and tone-wise because of this picking method.

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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 actually have it on and I have the drive setting all the way down and the volume about 12 o’clock. And the volume it’ll vary depending on the level of the amp. Right now, we’re kind of at a low volume.

The drive, the most important thing about this is that the drive is all the way down. And then what I’ll do is I’ll get a comfortable volume with the volume knob on the guitar and every guitar is different, so feel it out. But I’ll turn down the volume of the guitar on the guitar knob, on the volume knob on the guitar. And I’ll get the exact same level volume and drive sound that I would get if the pedal were off with the guitar at full volume.

So here’s the pedal off with the guitar at full volume. Here’s the levels with the pedal on, with the guitar volume down maybe 25-30%. Pretty much the same, right? It’s got a little bit of drive on there. And what that does is that gives you head room to play with. To me, I’ve noticed in a lot of musical situations when a passage comes up or a solo or a little phrase that; if you’re working in an orchestra the orchestrator or the musical director; might want to bring out.

You don’t need to necessarily click on a pedal to boost pedal. I’ve seen people with 20 pedals to do all sorts of little volume changes and tweaks. You don’t need to do that. You can do a lot with just the volume on the guitar. So to me, my comfortable setting is the guitar volume at 75%, always.
And then when you just want to add that little extra…

So if you’re on, say the verse of a song and the vocals are there and you’re not trying to get in the way. Say the chorus is coming up. You don’t even have to turn off the pedal. You can just be musical with dynamics. And one of the great things about the OCD pedal is that it allows you to play with dynamics.

Because it’s so transparent it responds to the pickup settings again, to the dynamic and the level and the intensity of how you’re picking. It really picks up all the nuances of your playing and I find by using the volume pedal on the guitar you can really have some head room and room to play, where you don’t even have to turn off the pedal. So I leave it on all the time. That’s one of the things that I do and I’ve found it very effective in my tone.

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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 like a cranked amp, and Albert King, same thing.

A lot of great blues players used the TS-808, TS-9 Pedal and that’s why it’s so great, because for blues you get that really transparent, warm, cranked amp with that narrow mid-range sound that has that bite to it and it really reacts great with the pickup settings on a Telecaster or Strat.

Just now I was playing the lick. I started out with the neck pickup, which is that very warm sound, and then I switched to the bridge. Different sounds, different guitars, but the Tube Screamer’s such a great pedal, as is the OCD and other overdrives similar to it, because it reacts musically to the way that you’re playing.

It reacts really great to the pickup settings. It reacts really great for blues for that reason, because in blues music, on a Strat, or a Tele for example, those kinds of settings really react. The Tube Screamer reacts really great with those kinds of settings. What I did for that setting was, I did the crank the drive.

It’s going to depend on your amp. How loud your amp is, where your drive settings are on your amp, so I cranked the drive a little on this and I have the level pretty high. Again, the tone is somewhere in the middle and that’s what got me that pretty saturated, but really great transparent sounding, blues Tube Screamer sound that is very popular with this pedal.

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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 mean they were using Marshall amps cranked and it’s a very saturated, compressed sound. Nowadays you can get that in a pedal.

I feel like overdrive is too transparent sounding. It’s too clean and it really doesn’t achieve; when you’re playing rhythm guitar and heavy metal; it’s just not saturated enough. So the differences there are that in rock music you’re seeing the spectrum of using an overdrive pedal to get really the sound of a cranked ’50’s tweed Fender amp versus a Marshall Full Stack at high gain, which is used in bands, you know anywhere from Black Sabbath to Slayer Metallica.

When you’re soloing you can use a boost. A lot of these amps have two channels; a clean channel and a dirty channel, some even have three different levels of distortion. I’ve seen a lot of amps that have three channels that are one clean, channel overdrive, channel three full-blown distortion. Those are really good for heavy metal, because you would use channel three for example, switch to channel two for a verse or to clean it up just a little bit, but not too clean or use it as a boost.

A lot of amps also have a separate boost master volume setting, so that you can boost for solos. As far as pedals are concerned, you could have this Metal Zone pedal for all your rhythm stuff, and then you could have another pedal hooked up to really bring out the level of the solos. But for the most part for heavy metal rhythm playing you really need a good distortion pedal that can really saturate the tone, so that even at a low volume you’re really hearing all of the frequencies versus clean, which in metal just doesn’t cut it at all. So that is using a distortion pedal in heavy metal music.

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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 that era that was just playing early R&B; what you might find is an amp that’s a little harried, because its cranked and a tremolo, on board tremolo, setting within the amp. People played; they weren’t really pedals; they plug right in to the amp and dialed everything up. And this was similar to the sound the might have gotten.

I have an amp that was nowhere near what they had back then. It’s a two-channel Rivera amp, a great amp. I’m just going clean, and what I’ve done is I’ve taken the tremolo that I believe sounds closest to what an on board amp tremolo would sound like, this Supa Trem by Fulltone. It’s a very warm, analog sounding tremolo. And then my favorite pedal the Fulltone first generation OCD Pedal, again drive all the way down. I’m basically using it as to emulate a cranked amp, as a transparent sounding overdrive.

So what I’m getting is a very musical representation through pedals and through different settings of what it would sound like if I was just plugging my Telecaster into just an old, vintage tweet amp. What I’ve done as far as the settings, very simple, you drive all the way down on the overdrive pedal. Volume to match the clean, it’d be a little bit of a boost. And then as far as the tremolo, I have it about 12 o’clock. Mix and rate on like a medium to slow, slow to medium speed on the tremolo. It’s not a hard tremolo. It’s a soft tremolo.

It’s almost barely noticeable and that’s what gives you that very warm, rounded effect that I think is really just pretty. I think that a lot of just slow R&B, ballads work great with this. You really pop out of the mix. And I find that if you’re backing up a singer or if you’re playing where you really have texture; you’re not really playing down beats. You’re not really– you’re rolling the rhythm section is really to add color and fill up space with texture. I think this is a great effect to use for that and it’s a very natural sounding one, too.

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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. Without getting too technical there’s a million variations of what that means, but to the ear what it means is that you’re getting a pitch shift.

But really what this pedal is it’s called the Deja Vibe by Fulltone. It emulates the classic UniVibe effect, which is what Jimi Hendrix used along with his Marshall amps and his fuzz pedals and other various effects. The UniVibe was one of the early pre-chorus effect pedals that really gave you a kind of a pitch shift effect. And this pedal is one of the first ones that I ever heard that really sounded like the UniVibe. The settings that we have here, obviously on and off. Speed, which is the rate of how fast the wave form is.

Intensity, for this effect I feel like it’s such a profound effect that I like to hear it, so I keep the intensity pretty high. It’s not a subtle effect, so for me, I usually keep that at a maximum. Volume, self-explanatory volume with the effect. And then you have these little parameters here, modern versus vintage, vibrato versus chorus. I don’t really hear much of a difference between the modern and the vintage. The vibrato and chorus really does– to me the vibrato one enhances the pitch more. Chorus smooths it out a little bit.

Tons of different settings in between. The spectrum is pretty wide on this pedal. It’s very effective. It’s very great. I don’t use it all the time, but when I do I’m definitely going for something specific. So it’s not a staple of the pedals that I like to use, but it is definitely when I do use it, it is extremely useful.

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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 a darker tone. You turn it up towards the PM, it’s a brighter tone. I like mine in the middle, because I like to use tone control on the amp or my guitar. I don’t like the pedal to determine that.

Here on the TS-9 Pedal, same settings as you can see. These are two very different kinds of pedals. For me personally, they’re two of my favorites. There are literally hundreds of different kinds of overdrive pedals, with a million different kinds of settings, a million different kinds of knobs, simple, complicated. Go into a store, go into anywhere, try your friend’s demos song, find the ones you like. It’s really great to have a lot of variation in tone. I have a lot of overdrive pedals, but these are the two that I always bring along.

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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. We all play licks, we all play lines. Even as we improvise we pretty much gravitate towards muscle memory, where our fingers are used to going. And by getting out of that box, we start to work on ways to not know where we’re going next, which is really improvisation.

But what it also does is it helps us hone in on our picking technique, because if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing and vice versa, and you’re improvising in real time and you can’t stop with the metronome, it really takes you out of your comfort zone. I’m just going to play random 8th notes. Now you’ll hear that I kind of flubbed a few notes and why that was is because, keep in mind as soon as you find your fingers, and you find yourself going to natural places where you know, and you start playing a lick or you start playing a line that you’ve played before, stop yourself and remind yourself that you just have to play random 8th notes.

And as soon as you do that, you’ll see that you might flub a couple notes, because you’re forcing your way out of the box to do some new things. And it’s a really cool thing to do. You can also instead of 8th notes, you can do 8th note triplets and 16th notes, raising and lowering the BPM of the metronome. The faster you go and the rhythmic values that you do that a little harder it really becomes challenging. So here’s some 8th note triplets. So you can hear that it’s starting to really become a little bit more challenging. Let’s try it slow first and then try it faster and you’ll see that it’s pretty cool. Keep in mind your picking hand and you’ll really start to be able to get some better facility and get around the guitar. And your improvisational skills will definitely improve.

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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. What I’m using here is the Boss DD3 Delay pedal, digital delay pedal. The setting to achieve this is have the effect level, I’d say about 12 o’clock, which again is the clean signal of your guitar versus the effect level coming from the pedal.

The feedback loop which is the amount of repeats is all the way down. The delay time is at about 12 o’clock, but I have the mode on 800 milliseconds, so I have some distortion from my amp right now, just so you can hear. Now if you see I’m playing and that’s it’s one repeat. There’s no more repeats after that. So that’s about the speed we’re dealing with. So if you double up on that, by picking or playing, here we go. You’ve got to feel for it. You’ve got to work with the delay. Once you get that rhythm going, and you want to make sure that the notes are very staccato, very quick.

That’s a very cool trick. And if you speed up the delay time here, if you get really good at it, which means you’re going to have to double up on the pick with a double up on the picking even a little faster. There it is. If you really want to challenge yourself and practice with it, and you get good at it, there it is. You know, you can really get some very cool things. So that’s a trick that you can do with this delay pedal. I don’t know if I’ve ever used it, but it is really cool to practice with and it gets you comfortable with working with a delay.

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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 almost like the cable is going through the pedal, it’s never touching any of the internal circuits.

What that means is that you’re getting the cleanest, clearest, possible signal when your pedal is off. What that also means is, if you have a pedal board with a lot of pedals the more pedals that cables have to go through, the less signal loss you’re going to have. The more true bypassed pedals that you have, the less chance that your signal is going to get affected by that.

So true bypass pedals have to do with the switch. They’re more expensive. Most of the boutique pedals in the $150-200 and up range tend to be true bypass. The cheaper pedals do not. You can always get a cheaper pedal that you like, because a lot of them are great. You can modify them so that they are true bypass. Again possibilities are endless, but that’s just to clear up what true bypassed actually means, when you’re using pedals in the chain or in a pedal board.

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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 rule about the order of pedals. But there’s definitely rules about if you’re trying to achieve a certain effect how you’re going to get that based on the order of the pedals.

The basic thing to say first is the signal comes out of your guitar. So when people say “first,” that’s what they mean. The cable comes out of your guitar. It goes into your amp. Now, in between the guitar and amp, you have pedals. Depending on the order of those pedals, the signal flow and the signal path from the guitar to the amp, the amp being the last thing that is in the signal chain, the effects react with each other and with your playing in different ways depending on the path of the signal.

So what I have here is I have my guitar going into a volume pedal. The volume pedal is going into a distortion pedal. This is the Box of Rock. It’s made by ZVex, which is a great company, Zachary Vex boutique pedals. From the volume to the distortion to the digital delay, the Bosch DD-3 to the amp. Now that’s the flow of the signal.

The volume pedal by being first, before the other pedals in the pedal signal chain, is going to react completely different than if it were at the end, and I’ll demonstrate how that is. Now, I have both the distortion and a pretty wide delay on right now. So you’re going to hear when I have the volume pedal engaged and then I pull back on it. You’re going to hear what happens to the signal.

So what you hear is the delayed trailing, and you hear the signal going into the amp. The volume pedal is cutting out the signal, but the signal is decaying and delaying because the volume pedal comes first. So your guitar signal is cut out first. Then it spreads to the distortion. Then it spreads to the delay and finally out into the amp.

One of the cool things that you can do is you can swell into notes. You can play chords that swell in. You can really use the volume pedal to create texture.

So that’s a cool thing you can do with distortion and delay.

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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 can’t help but hear it go on and off. That’s really all there is to it.

Some wah-wah pedals have an LED light on the side, so you can see when it’s on or off, but you can’t help but hear when it’s on or off. As far as where to put the wah-wah pedal, experiment. But to me it sounds great when it’s the first thing in the chain, because you’re getting the true guitar signal, and then you distort that signal with distortion pedals that come after that, but experiment and see what you like.

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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 being first, the amp being last, and in between that signal chain you can place the order of the pedals in many different ways to achieve a lot of different kinds of sounds.

We’re working with delay, so one of the things that we’re going to talk about now is having the delay first, before the distortion. So what we have here is coming out of the guitar, we’re going into a volume pedal, which we’re going to use to add and remove the amount of guitar into the signal path. Next we have the delay. Then finally the distortion.

What that means basically is the signal coming out of your guitar is clean by default. It goes into the volume pedal, and you’re delaying first. So the amount of delay in the clean signal, in the true signal is much more intense than if you had the delay last. So you’re distorting your overall signal before it gets to the amp.

If you were to put this in a different order, you would be distorting your clean signal and sending that signal as the true signal into the delay. So you’re going to get a much different sound. It’s not wrong or right. It’s just different.

So this is what the guitar sounds like if you have the distortion last, the delay first.

You can really hear the decay when I back off the volume pedal. It’s a much more intense delay sound than if you had it the other way around because your clean signal is getting delayed before everything else. The true signal is hitting that first, and that means that all of your signal is being delayed before it ever even gets to the distortion pedal.

So experiment with that because there’s a lot of cool things you can do. You can do all sorts of swells.

Working with the volume pedal is very cool for that kind of thing. So experiment with that and come up with your own order and come up with your own settings.