As I was piecing together my own pedal board from scratch, I stopped to reflect on all the mistakes that brought me to this point. This whole blog was started to provide others with the information I wished I had when I was starting out, so they could avoid wasting money on the wrong gear for the job. To that end, I’d now like to specifically look into the world of pedals.
It’s a huge topic, and probably too much for one post. To spare everyone from having to scroll through a massive wall of text, I’ve decided to break it up into a series of posts.
For today though, let’s just dip our toe in the water with a couple of simple questions: “Why do I even need pedals?” and “Where the hell do I start?”
Why Do I Even Need Pedals?
Stop me if you’ve heard these before:
- *Insert guitar legend’s name here* used to just plug straight into their amp without any pedals, and they sounded fine
- Why worry about all that stuff? Tone is in the fingers!
- You wouldn’t need pedals if you had a decent amp
- Want to sound good? Get lessons and practice more! Then you won’t need pedals!
First of all, if anyone comes at you with that noise, there’s a particular guitar fingering exercise you can demonstrate for them which should serve as an adequate rebuttal:
Extend your fret hand towards them, and curl your index finger, ring finger and pinky towards the palm of your hand, locking them in place with your thumb. In this position, elevate your hand slightly, whilst adopting an exasperated facial expression.
This person is either incredibly ignorant of the wonderful world of guitar tone, or has no gear of their own and is adopting a “sour grapes” position to save face. For this reason, the finger exercise above should suffice as a response.
If however, you actually want to stoop to their petty level, here are a few considerations:
- *Previously mentioned guitar legend* probably played a style of music which didn’t typically make use of pedals, or they played in an era which predates commonly available pedals. They’d probably use every pedal they could get their hands on if they were around today.
- Hold your fingers up to your ears. Can you hear tone? No. All you can hear is bullshit.
- A high gain amp might negate the need for a distortion pedal, but you’ll be hard pressed finding one that’ll rock a wah. There are more pedals out there than just drive pedals and reverb.
- No amount of lessons and practice will make a nylon string acoustic guitar generate harmonic tremolo or octave fuzz.
The truth of the matter is that electric guitar is a unique instrument, quite distinct from its acoustic ancestor. Electronically manipulating the waveforms generated by your pickups is as much a part of playing the instrument as strumming chords and picking notes.
As an electric guitarist, your amp is as much a part of your instrument as the strings and frets. The same can be said of effects pedals.
So Where the Hell Do I Start?
I’ve seen people rush off and buy random pedals fuelled by the knowledge that they’re just a thing guitarists use and being bummed that they didn’t have any yet.
I’ve seen enthusiastic but not-so-helpful people advise new guitarists that they simply MUST have this pedal or that pedal, predominantly because that’s what they use and like.
The first place to look is not a catalogue of pedals, but your music collection. Listen to the style of music you intend on playing on guitar, and try to identify the sounds involved in the guitar tone. After all, pedals are but tools of the trade, so step one is to work out which tools will be required for the job at hand.
In my next post I’ll go over the process of choosing pedals for different musical circumstances. See you then.
Tone Quest 