How to choose a pedal
Playing an acoustic is easy the sound you hear is the sound you get; okay you might get a bit more bass/middle/treble tone out of different guitars but an acoustic guitar sounds like an acoustic guitar. But pick up an electric, plug it in and the possibilities are endless!
However finding the right tone can take years, although you can have great fun plugging in a few pedals and listening to what sound you get. However, pedals are in, which means there are thousands on the market, many of which have ‘interesting’ names that bear no relation to what they do. They also vary in cost (from about £40 to £hundreds) and size (from micro pedals to two and three footswitch models.
But what does each pedal do?
Chorus
A delay based effect designed to simulate what happens when two instruments play the same part – makes your six-string sound like a twelve string!
Compressor
Using a compressor boosts quiet notes and reduces heavy signals such as chords, averaging out the natural differences. This makes finger picked passages sound smoother and gives more flow to clean lead passages.
Delay or Echo
Echo-units copy the natural effect of a sound being deflected from a distant surface using analogue or digital means. This makes your guitar sound fuller and alive, rather than flat and monotone.
Distortion, Overdrive, Gain or Fuzz
This should do what it says on the tin and add a grit, and grin factor, to your sound! Think ‘I can’t get no satisfaction’ a fuzz pedal, or classic Led Zeppelin – overdrive. A fantastic array of different types of pedal are available giving you a massive choice of sounds – you could spend years and thousands, finding the right sound for you. Classic pedals include the Ibanez Tube Screamer and EHX Big Muff
Flanger
A delay-based effect that originated with tape recorders (listen to some of the 70’s rock records to hear it) where the sound produced is mixed with the normal sound.
Phaser
Mixes slightly out of phase identical signals giving colouration to the sound.
Reverb
A reverb unit mimics the natural effect of overlapping sound reflections that may occur in a large room making it sound less flat or dead – you can get plate reverb, spring reverb, room reverb and hall reverb and all points in between giving you a great choice
Tremolo
The volume of the signal is modulated producing a rhythmic pulsing effect. Don’t get confused with the tremolo arm on your guitar – technically that is a vibrato!
Vibrato
Here the pitch of the signal is modulated rather than the volume of the signal.
Wah-Wah pedal
A foot operated pedal – when the pedal is flat a high treble sound will be produced and when you raise the pedal gradually the bass is increased. Used in funk and blues a lot.
Other pedals include Booster – as the name suggests they boost the volume of your guitar, which is great for solos: Octave/Pitch – these shift your notes up or down an octave or scale; and many more!
You can of course plug all of these in at once to produce your own unique sound. A word of caution though – the great BB King said in an interview recently that the sound he hears is not the sound he hears in his head, which he had been searching for all his career!