Originally Posted by
GAR
Weve gone over this before, I don't post pix. I think I posted my cat a couple times before, or some of my cabinets I had been restoring before getting ripped off in 2003 but I've only recently had the heart to resume horsetrading to build up my gear again. Since everything is still in storage, I have nothing setup but maybe this year I'll post gear pix.
I don't need a mountain of gear, but as far as pedals go I keep a trunk for them to roll around in.
I like a wah with just a halfstack or combo, but I have used phasers delays and all the fancy stuff before.
I talk alot to share alot, but am pretty set against seeing digital effects stuff residing on a player's boardbecause of the A-D conversion frequency loss. I am not against Rocktron or Line 6 or Alesis or Johnson or what have you who make these things.
Now when it comes to time-delay based effects which are phasors, flangers, choruses and delays, there are different reasons I can elaborate upon to explay "why" so here's my reasons:
Echoplex and tape-based delays: I like these best because its the best and most natural way to add compression to your sound via tape saturation while setting the record head bias pretty hot. I had a Guild Copicat and stock, it was alright and basic and fairly transparent sonically except the tape-drive capstan rollers were inferior and being it was a tape loop that broke constantly at the splice area, you either became creative at making replacment loops or you grew up and spent the dough on the Maestro EP-3 solidstate echoplex which was bulletproof so long as the 5 minute cartridge loop lasted.
Signal loss is a great concern to me, and tape based delays have the best compromise to me: they go down to 30 hz up to about 6,000 hz which is a comfortable range for reproducing most of the guitar string sounds.
Next, the "analogue" effects, usually based on bucket-brigade transistor arrays in a large chip called a BBD: these chips are what begat the CCD chips in digital cameras - made up of thousands of tiny capacitor section etched on silicon, they charge up then discharge like little batteries. That's all they do. It's archaic technology, but it's very warm sounding and retains almost ALL your low bass frequencies - but they're noisey as FUCK! That's alot of microscopic discharging going on inside all the time, and the workaround to it is reducing the high-end response.
It's the ONLY way. Enjoy a BBD pedal, but sacrifice your highs to retain your lowend.
I like chorus, delay and especially flanger-based BBD pedals because they are unusually warm and saturate just a little bit in the midrange with an enhanced lowend response. But because these BBD chips are noisey, they're often incorporated with circuit filtration and noise companders which limit the high-end range to 2K or 3K hz.
The cheap BBD "analogue" pedals have a shitty response barely reaching 2K in some manufacture - but people don't notice the high losses because they'll kick it on and hear the effect over the loss of hi's and don't care.
I like digital delays, basically for this reason: less highs filtered out, less inherent hiss and noise such as the BBD pedals give off, and enhanced highs because the frequency range is usually 300 to about 15,000 hz.
Yes, 15K is really really good, especially for the clean channel shit in 80's-90's English butt-ramming music like Johnny Marr's effects - he kicks ass with simple clean channel echos' and sometimes it's a headscratcher just listening to it trying to figure out how he's getting that sound in his echos and choruses: well, the choruses is BBD based yet the echos are digital delays. So he probably runs a JC120 amp with the digital delay rack effect via the effects loop panel input, placing the digital after the analogue.
Lastly, in order of desirability for me would be the Pod shit: digital multi effects either pedal or rack or software.
the Multi's are based on a processor called an FPGA=field programmable gate array, which is like a lattice network of switches controlled by software after your guitar signal has been converted to digital.
The'res so much loss to the low end, it doesn't make sense to me to use. I have never used one, tried them all out and they're like toys.
"Well you talk so much shit how do you like them if you hate them" well it's easy - I have always promoted the Pods as great scratch-pads and songwriting tools.. they replace the pedalboard, but should not reside on the pedal board.
Pods should reside by the computer: you use them to record a song idea to help you in handing off a newly burned copy for your drummer to jam to. But they shouldn't be used as final-copy tone machines, ever.
The same layman's arguement I feel against the digital multi-effects equivalent holds true to the FLAC promoters who favor lossless recording. Since ultimately as music gets recorded, I feel strongly that Pod-type pedals should not be used in the final but accept them in the jamming or demoing stages.
I saw a clip on Youtube where Kirk Hammet was backstage talking about his gear, and he gives the guy (guitar world? maybe?) a full showcase of his guitars, backline and his pedalboard setup. And on his pedalboards was one of those Rocktron digital multi's.. I laughed!
With his kind of money he could afford either a quad-snake running two-way to and from a rackmount of real pedals, or a larger roadcase to have his pedals up front with him but no he has the digital pedal upfront with him.
I thought, no wonder I never liked his sound.