How To Be A Gear Snob:
Perfecting Effects

By Corralee Booth      

How does one perfect their tone using effects? Easy, use anything you want. What I love the most about effect pedals and multi-units is that they all pretty much work with any setup to create fun and inventive new tones for your instruments. There are very few ways to get your sound wrong, so you can do anything you want to. Lets have a look at a few different effects and combinations.

There are two ways to go. Stomp box single effects, and multi-effect units. Single effects are simple. Stomp on them to turn them on or off. They do one effect and one effect really well. They generally sound better than the multi-effect units, but they have a couple of drawbacks too. First being that anytime you want to alter the sound, you have to bend over and tweek the little knobs and try to remember where you had your first tones set. Second, every time you link up another pedal, you add more noise (hum or static) to your sound. Third, if you want to change more than one pedal at a time, you better wear like a size 13 shoe to hit all those pedals at the same time or be really quick about changing them. As you can see, this really limits how far you can go with your sound mid song. And it doesn't take long to rack up the dough in single effects either because each one can be costly. There's also the transport of all those little boxes to consider too. However, they sound better than multi-effect units and are well worth the extra effort and money if you only use a few effects and don't have many changes to make during a performance.

If you do a great deal of playing around with your sound and need access to many effects at once, a multi-effect unit is probably the way to go for you. It's cheaper to get one big unit with all the effects in it than to buy them individually. You can pre-program to set yourself up for wild changes mid song with the click of a button. And they often can have other cool features to help you out as a player like built-in chromatic tuner and sometimes even a drum machine. (To help you work on your time if you're a beginner.) The downside is that to the picky ear, they don't sound as good as single effects boxes and sometimes get a little dated by technology.

There are basically four types of effects used on a regular basis:

1. Distortion.

Distortion can come in a light overdrive or an all out "rip up your speakers and throw them off the Lincoln bridge" heavy metal type of simulation. It can boost your signal to push your speaker harder and cause it to rumble and distort or it can digitally simulate the same effect. Most overdrives are simple volume boosts to help perk up a solo and get you to pop out of the mix a bit more. The other types of distortions are more for an all over tonal flavor to change the emotion or drive of a song.

2. Wah.

Wah is a tone pot that you can control with your foot. As you rock the pedal back and forth, you sweep the pot to open up and accentuate certain frequencies. It can come in an autowah or envelope filter format as well where you don't control the variances with your foot but rather by allowing the pedal to sense the swells through volume instead. It is in my opinion the single most important piece of equipment for the self-indulgent wanker soloing and I thank God every day for it. Where would we be without it? I shudder to think.

3. Time based effects.

These types of effects are harder to describe and there are a lot in this category. Phaser, Flanger, Chorus, Delay and probably a few others I haven't even thought of here.

Delay is basically the building block of these effects. If you record something and play it back a split second later, you have delay. It can be a short delay (40 to 120 milliseconds) often referred to as a slap delay or for longer periods of time referred to as echo. You can feed the signal back to your input to make the delayed phrase repeat over and over until it fades out. This is called regeneration.

Chorus is a very short slap delay that is played a little bit faster. You know when you speed up a recording to make it sound like a chipmunk? Well, that's what happens with Chorus. When the sped up phrase is played back just slightly delayed, this makes it seem like there are two or more instruments playing instead of just one. Like a choir where people never sing exactly on the same pitch or at the exact same time, the chorus achieves this sound through it's own pitch variances and delay. It's a nice way to thicken up your sound.

Flanger and Phaser are delays with certain filters on their frequencies. You mix the filtered signal with the input signal to get that strange whooshing noise. You can control the depth (amount of filtered output added to the sound) and the sweep. (How far the filters sweep up and down the frequencies) It can brighten up acoustic guitars, add mystery to vocals and make it sound like an airplane is flying inside your amp. Pretty cool!

4. Compression/sustain.

The Compressor is made to reduce the dynamic range of a signal. In English, that means it makes the loud sounds quieter. A singer does this naturally by pulling her head back from the microphone when she hits the louder notes. The compressor helps to keep more of the suddenly loud notes under control to avoid distortion and damage to equipment. It also helps to make the softer notes louder if you have a secondary gain for adjusting the output level. The extra boost added keeps your instrument's volume from dropping therefore making it sound louder. Because the compressor boosts volume to your quieter notes, it adds volume to held notes that would have normally died off increasing your sustain. This is very nice, but it's a trade-off having your compressor at a higher level because it also kills your attack.

There are many companies out there to buy from when it comes to brand names. Don't feel like you to have to stick with any particular brand. You don't have to buy a VOX Wah if you own a VOX amp. If you have a DOD Distortion with a Boss Flanger and a Danelectro Chorus, no one is going to shake their heads at you. It all comes down to what you like best. Otherwise I might invest in any of the new multi-effects units available out there.

Most of the companies all offer the same thing. Time based effects, wahs, distortions, and other variations of the above. Some are expensive and some are cheap. You can usually tell just in the construction as to why the price varies so much between some companies. A lightweight plastic body will be cheaper, but it will also be more susceptible to crushing and breaking. Cheaper ones are usually wired with cheaper components therefore lending themselves to more excess noise and higher probability of breakdowns due to their makeup.

Once you have made your decision on which way you want to go. (Or both, there's no rules saying you cant link up stomp boxes to multi-effects either) your next step is to figure out which way you want to lay them out. My suggestion is to plug your guitar into your volume pedal, compressor, then your wah, on to your distortion and then out to the amp. This part is all just suggestion based on my personal feelings. I find that the wah stands out better when it is placed before the distortion and I think it can get a little muddy if placed afterwards. Some people don't want to rob tone from their distortion and are less reliant on their wah for their soloing and tone and prefer to put distortion first. Try it both ways and see what's best for you. If you have a multi-effects unit, this isn't much of a problem. All you do is plug into the unit and then out to the amp without worries.

Any time based effect I would run through the effects loop on my amp. Chorus, flange, reverb, phaser, vibrato, delay, or anything like that can alter your tone enough that it's nice to be able to completely shut it off. The one rule to effects I'm going to give to you before I let you go, is to not put your distortion through the effects loop. I'd hate to see anyone wreck her gear. It can damage the amp and it sounds yucky too. Other than that, do as you wish and have fun.