**NAF1138 **- I’ll help where I can, but as I have said before (in this thread even!) I don’t know pedals. As you can tell from this thread, a few other Dopers do, so I hope they will chime in.
Maybe you need a distortion, not an overdrive? The Art Brut and Wire songs have a bitey, edgy sound to the gain - to me, that is more like a Distortion, not an overdrive, which is softer or a fuzz, which is big and tubey. I can see where the Art Brut riff might be a fuzz, but you could get a RAT or a Boss DS-1 and see how useful you find it. You can figure out if you need a compressor after you figure out what type of gain you need. Also, you need to know what kind of pedal your friend loaned you - the Boss. What model number is it?
Boomy Bass - what does Jack White use? Doesn’t he use an octave shifter/gain type of box to do stuff like, say, Seven Nation Army? Isn’t that the type of pedal you should go for? ::checks website:: yeah, he uses a Digitech Whammy, apparently. (link to Guitar Player article on Jack White’s rig)
A Chorus or Echo? Should you get one? One of the Built to Spill guitar sounds has something like that on it…
Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to direct my last post to you in particular. I was hoping anyone who knew a bit more about pedals than me would chime in. Thanks, for sharing what you do know. I have been a straight ahead blues player for 15 years, so I feel like I am a tiny bit in over my head right now. But I am learning as I go, so it’s all fun.
Maybe distortion is what I need. I get decent drive on my amp alone, my only problem at that point is volume control.
Interesting. I will check that out. That may be exactly the type of thing I need. I’ll read that article on my lunch break. He gets a of sound for just two people, I should probably look into how he does it.
It was basically built to give Fender-y type amps a very spongy, Marshally option for O/D. It is quite a bit more versatile than that, though. Lower gain settings act like a straight boost. Mid gain gives a really good (IMO, much better than Tubescreamer) rock crunch. High gain gets into Marshall territory. It’s awesome.
And unlike some boutique pedal makers out there, Emanual makes all his own pedals by hand, and charges very reasonable money.
Check him out at www.sitorisonics.com. Warning: crappy web page. He assures me he’s working on it.
I was surprised to see that Wikipedia has an article on guitar effects. I’ve just read the part about “Distortion-related effects”, and was interested in some of that discussion. The article has a slightly different take on different sorts of distortion/overdrives.
what about that threw you - the use of a razor on a speaker to get a buzzy, fuzzy distorted sound?
I always think of Dave Davies on The Kinks’ You Really Got Me - he has always discussed cutting the speaker. But on Link Wray’s Rumble, Ike Turner’s (by another name) Rocket 88 and The Rock n’ Roll Trio’s Train Kept a Rollin’ - all known for their distorted sound - I always seem to recall reading stories where the amp got dropped and a tube broke or a tube socket got screwed up - which led to the distortion, NOT due to holes in the speaker…
Well – yes! I’d never heard of damaging a speaker to get a certain tone. I admit I’m shocked that someone would destroy a speaker to get a tone.
ETA: Wordman, what do you think of the wiki article’s take on overdrive/distortion/fuzz? It sounds different than your summary, but I haven’t read the book you reference in the OP.
Damaging speakers - well, it was at best a short term, in studio effect - you couldn’t tour with speakers like that and expect them to last.
In terms of the article - I think it is way too inside baseball techno geeky, but it really doesn’t say much different than what I tried to summarize from the book I recommend: Overdrive (what they call Overdrive/Crunch for some reason) is “smoother” distortion; Distortion (what they call Overdrive Distortion) is a harder-clipped signal that imposes more on the guitar/amp rig’s tone and Fuzz is a different beast altogether. This write up references trying to mimic torn speaker cones; I don’t buy it - there are ads in the Hunter book for the first fuzz tones that speak to having a horn like sound - they didn’t market it for distortion at first…
So it doesn’t say much different vs. the book but the book feels more accurate, always a risk with Wiki posts…
Just to muddy the waters on the overdrive/distortion/fuzz tone debate. I remember in the 70s I had a Bee Bah pedal, Roland/Boss if memory serves. We had one dreadful original song that was all bad folky noodling from the lead singer/acoustic guitarist, some dreary crap that involved rhyming seagull with eagle.
I had nothing else to do, and so I would provide seagull cries with the electric guitar and surf noises accomplished by cranking the volume on the amp with the volume all the way up on the Bee Bah pedal (it had two knobs - tone and volume, and the volume was handy for solos because you could set it so the fuzz tone was louder than the clean sound) and turning the volume all the way down on the guitar. This resulted in nothing but noise coming out the amp, and cycling the tone control of the pedal caused it to switch from white noise to pink noise. Do it in the right rhythm, and it sounds kinda like surf.
{That was my main function in that band - to produce strange sounds when the music didn’t seem to call for an electric guitar. I’d kick the spring reverb and then kill the volume sharply to produce the sound effect in ‘The Boxer’, and after I discovered how to make closed feedback loops by connecting the external speaker jack to the second input of the amp, and then chaining effects pedals into that signal path, I had a primitive synthesizer-like device. But I digress…}
I concluded from this that what that pedal was doing was introducing noise into the signal path to produce that fuzz tone. Whether I’m right or not, that’s a whole other matter.
I started out writing an essay on audio signal processing but that’s not really following the thread.
When I got my first electric it came with a Coloursound combined Fuzz/Wah/Swell pedal so I’ve never not had floor effects of some sort. I’ve owned dozens of pedals, probably a dozen different fuzz/overdrive units. I remember having an original tonebender which had so much gain it was nearly unusable, bet that would be worth a bit now. I’m old enough to remember a time before ‘overdrive’ pedals, you got overdrive by playing loud.
FX wise my first gigging setup consisted of:
CCD Echo/delay – British made, brand will come back to me. Their pedals were bomb-proof extruded aluminium, mains powered.
Sheer Volume (think Live at Leeds)
At the extreme I had a home made board with:
Coloursound Wah pedal
Vox compressor
MXR Distotion+
Boss octave divider
Chorus – Japanese - brand forgotten
Ibanez phaser
CCD delay
I actually gigged with that lot, can’t imagine how I afforded the batteries. Looking back I think I was trying to get a sound that I’d previously got with sheer volume at a more civilised level.
That lot got nicked. Got a more sensible setup of all Boss stuff (and a smaller amp)
Turbo Overdrive, with turbo off this did preserve some of your tone. Turbo on definite ‘brick wall’ effect, couldn’t say what type of guitar even.
DDL/Echo unit
Aural exciter/stereo-chorus (except it wasn’t called a chorus pedal) that Boss apparently don’t make anymore (or Google fails me) nice chorus-y effect without the cyclic wooshing. Sounded more like a classy studio effect than a floor pedal.
Browsing through guitar mags it seems to me you can get pedals these days to do anything and lots of them are very specific. Things like a ‘Fender Twin’ or ‘Bluesbreaker’ pedal, or fsm help us a ‘Hendrix’ wah pedal. Words escape me. And vintage pedals WTF? They don’t make transistors like they used to? My old Coloursound wah had about ten components and sounded fantastic, how hard can that be to copy?
I hear you, but never underestimate Man’s capacity to deem something Vintage and Collectible…
::Antiques Roadshow: “Ah, yes, a vintage Big Muff Pi - you got lucky at that garage sale!”::
However, the book does discuss how the quality of some components, especially the germanium chips **Ogre **referred to in an earlier post, varied widely. Also, based on talking with friends who know this stuff, what seems to be key about the older stuff is that it was usually built with off-the-shelf parts - common electronic parts that varied in performance - like the chips above - or were simply inefficient vs. what could be made today. Well, those inefficiencies would sometimes combine to yield musical effects. The book discusses how players would go through batches of early pedals, looking for the special ones.
I could see now how it would be difficult to by similar, old-design, inefficient electronic parts to make new versions of the pedals. That is the challenge amp makers face since they often want to use tubes - how old-design, inefficient are they? There is a big market in “NOS” = New Old Stock, where someone finds a box of parts on a back shelf from back in the day. Guys sell NOS tubes for big bux online and I am sure the same is true for old chips and other parts - for instance certain old wax-and-paper capacitors…
Ooo, I’ve got a 1971 Marshall head which probably has the original valves in where should I start the bidding?
Maybe there ought to be someone making leaky capacitors, poor spec 741s and crappy tolerance resistors for use in analogue guitar pedals and amps?
I remembered the make of my first echo-box, it was a Carlsbro Built like a brick sh… well just a brick actually, solid frakking aluminium. Didn’t sound all that good (vintage, hah) and only gave you about 300ms (double hah) but at least you didn’t have to buy tape loops for it (ever use a WEM copicat?)
I don’t get it that something like a Big Muff, which is not a subtle device and probably has about 12 components gets to be vintage? Of course the way they were (are?) built means finding an intact one from the 70s is a bit unlikely.
There is a big market in “NOS” = New Old Stock, where someone finds a box of parts on a back shelf from back in the day. Guys sell NOS tubes for big bux online and I am sure the same is true for old chips and other parts - for instance certain old wax-and-paper capacitors…