More pedal suggestions

I’ve stated earlier that I find it absurd to spend $500 on a single pedal. Nothing against the people who make them (or buy them), but I still find this crazy, especially when you can buy 4 midrange pedals for the same price and experiment with them.

I buy most of my pedals used on eBay. So as long as they work, I don’t care really how they look. In the past year I bought a Boss BF-2 for $40 and an OD-2 for $50. Both pedals are long out of production and the current version costs 3x that amount. Both are kind of beat up looking, but that just adds to their charm. They sound great and do what I want them to do.

I’m finding it more and more that cost is less important than utility. Admittedly, I bought both of these pedals because famous people used them. I know Rachel from Slowdive had the OD-2 listed on her pedal board. I’m interested in getting a Boss HM-2 soon, mainly because Kevin Shields and Bilinda Butcher used them on all the classic MBV albums. Also, if I ever want to do death metal, I can get that Entombed sound with this same pedal.

I’m also less concerned about digital and analog pedals. Some people refuse to buy digital pedals, but that’s nonsense. Even if you have a tube amp (as I do), sometimes digital pedals are the only way to get certain sounds.

I guess if you play blues and country where your dry tone is important it might make sense, but in more experimental genres like ambient, noise rock and shoegaze, I find it less important. In the case of ambient the less dry signal you have, the better, so “tone suckage” is really a non-issue.

Lately I’ve had good luck experimenting with pedal placement. I have a Hardwire RV-7 pedal at the front of my chain, followed by the Boss OD-2, followed by a Boss PS-3 with a TC Hall of Fame at the end. I run it into my Fender Hot Rod DeVille on the dirty channel (with the fuzz turned pretty low) and the presence knob on 5 and the reverb knob cranked up. It’s kind of shrill and trebly at times (probably because of the single coils in my Strat), but I’ve also learning to experiment with tone knobs on both my guitar and amp.

In more traditional forms of rock it’s unheard of to place your overdrive after delay or reverb. But again, in experimental music, it’s best to place your pedals wherever you get your desired sound. This ain’t Nashville.

Basically I plan to muck about more with pedals and tone before buying an 8 track digital recorder. I have one picked out, but I’d rather wait to buy it. My stuff isn’t good enough to record yet (I’m sure there is a joke in there somewhere), but the more I prac and the more I experiment, the better my sound is getting. I don’t want to sound like another Brian Eno or Kevin Shields or Rachel Goswell, I want to sound like me, dammit.

Shoegaze guitar tone chasing

Four videos from YouTube. The first one is better viewed on YouTube, because it has important links with pedal settings, etc.

Obviously, shoegaze (and its mellower cousin, dream pop), are close relatives to ambient music. A bit more aggressive, but definitely something that has influenced my own music, and will influence any future ambient guitar music I make. These tutorials help me to understand how to get my desired sound better. And like I said before, to help differentiate my own sound from what everybody else is doing. 

 

Song for a Saturday morning

I really love XM radio. Sometimes I get tired of the way they play the same old shit all of the time, but sometimes they deviate from the norm and bring you something totally new and refreshing.

I had never heard of Michael Stearns before. I had assumed he was a new artist, since he does fit in nicely with many of the modern day ambient composers. But it turns out this song is over 30 years old! Whodathunkit?

I really need to buy this whole CD. And probably the rest of his discography as well. I feel the way about this song the way I do Eno’s “Discreet Music” and Burzum’s “Rundtgåing av den transcendentale egenhetens støtte”

Tone chasing

I’m always interested in finding new sounds, new pedals, whatnot. Experimenting with stacking pedals and effects and the different sounds you can get from them. One day I plan to get a Tascam and start recording some of these experiments. Right now they sound like shit, to be honest, but someday I might get something worth recording.

One problem with YouTube videos dealing with echo, delay and reverb pedals is the style of music featured. You rarely, if ever, see ambient, space rock or drone music featured. It’s always some guy with a douchey sense of humor, playing the same boring blues and rockabilly riffs to the same slapback reverb setting. It almost seems like there is a factory producing SRV clones with the same playing style.

Don’t get me wrong, there a couple of channels dedicated to ambient music (a lot of electronic, which is cool, too), but they get lost in the avalanche of bad blues impersonators.

Of course, the same problem applies to your average guitar teacher, or music store personnel.  If you’re gonna go pedal shopping, they’ll always tell you the pedals and settings that Page or Clapton or Hendrix used on whatever song. Again, I don’t really fault them, as the great majority of buyers are going for that sound. I’m an oddball, and that’s fine with me.

There used to be an online community, but I never joined because of busy life stuff, but it’s now defunct. Which is just me always be late to the party.

But at the same time I plan to do more experiments and get my own sound. For one thing, most ambient guitar guys use insanely expensive pedals. Stuff that costs $500 a pedal. The four pedals I will use cost about that much combined. Yes, I use stuff by MXR, TC Electronics and Line 6. That’s just what I can afford. Or justify paying. Maybe if I made thousands of dollars a month at Bandcamp I would put the money towards a Strymon, or a Death by Audio pedal. Some of those Death by Audio pedals are tempting. And they’re made by Oliver Ackermann of A Place To Bury Strangers (one of my favorite bands), but I still can’t really justify or afford the cost at the moment.

Also, when people use the same boutique pedals, often times their sound is too similar. I won’t fool myself into thinking I’m getting a revolutionary sound out of my four, moderately priced pedals. But I like to try. And I like to go for something different.

I’ll be honest for a second and say that if I had a pedal that gave me an instant Windy & Carl sound, I’d be happy. At least for a few minutes, until I realized I was simply poorly replicating music that came about 15 years ago.

For now, I’ll simply experiment and go from there. Most of the fun of ambient music is finding new sounds, and ways of making sounds in different ways. And sometimes that kind of thing is best done alone.

Oh so close…

I’ve been working on an XR1300 album lately. It’s strange in that it’s less dancey than the last two, but also more ambient. Yet it’s too dancey to be a Rural Citizens Band album. I’m using a lot of fuzz bass on this one, and as I play around different effect pedals (mostly delay, reverb, echo, etc) I’d love to make a sort of space rock album and release it under the XR1300 name later in the year.

But first I need to complete this one. And that is proving to be kind of a chore. I have 11 of 13 songs done and finished. Baring any unforeseen difficulties, I will leave them as is. Another song is damn near done, I just need to add a few touches here and there. I’d say it’s 80% done. The last one isn’t even started yet. I’ve tried three different songs, but none of them are past the planning stages. One I used my trusted Fender Precision bass (named Marceline) and had a pretty good bass line. Sadly, I thought the song was in C, when it’s really in B. So the bass line clashed in a really bad way with the rest of the song, changing the pitch in Audacity made it sound like shit. But I’m not too bugged, because the rest of the song was shit, TBH.

This always happens, then at the last minute I pull out a winner. Something completely different. It just comes to me. I have a couple of muses, as it were, for this album, so I will continue until the battle is done. The nice thing is that I have no real set release date. I also know that I’m most likely the only person who will ever hear any of this, so I really do end up in the shitter, it won’t matter that much. Except it’s my album and I want this track to be perfect. There has to be 13 songs on it, otherwise it won’t be right.

You got it!