The Best Inspirational Devices You've Ever Owned ?

Benson

BintyTwanger77 said:

Everyone who's mentioned the FX8 (@Wazmeister and others)... can you integrate other drive pedals and tone shaping pedals like a Dr Scientist Cleanness into the patches you create on the FX8?

Yes, either in a configurable effects loop or in front of the unit. You can also run it 4CM to place effects before or after the preamp. 

BintyTwanger77

@Benson But in the front of a Fender amp without an FX loop is fine?

Benson

BintyTwanger77 said:

@Benson But in the front of a Fender amp without an FX loop is fine?

Yeah but you won't be able to run 4CM so all effects will be before the Fenders preamp.

ThePrettyDamned

For me, it was BSSM by the chilli peppers. Really changed how I play guitar. I always loved it but it was only when I really listened that it turned me from metal into funk and blues rhythm. 

BintyTwanger77

@ThePrettyDamned Well if we're talking inspirational albums, has to be Verve - A Storm In Heaven and A Northern Soul (plus the early EPs), and Ride's early stuff.

Wazmeister

BintyTwanger77 said:

Everyone who's mentioned the FX8 (@Wazmeister and others)... can you integrate other drive pedals and tone shaping pedals like a Dr Scientist Cleanness into the patches you create on the FX8?

Yes you can, and it works superbly in front of the amp.... BUT you'll prbably find that you wont need the Cleanness; you can simply copy it and model it thru the FX8

ICBM

Benson said:

BintyTwanger77 said:

@Benson But in the front of a Fender amp without an FX loop is fine?

Yeah but you won't be able to run 4CM so all effects will be before the Fenders preamp.

Doesn't matter with a clean amp.

jacksparrow

Without a doubt my Maestro Echoplex EP3.

Grunfeld

Easy:  Sonar.
First DAW I learnt and for me it was the moment I lost red light fever and started to create.

hugbot

Ableton live. Specifically the clip mode, no other DAW feels as fast and easy for trying out parts. 

chromatuna

Going back a long long way to about 1980 I acquired a Strat (still have), Boss OD-1 (bought new) and a Watkins Copicat (borrowed) and all of a sudden I seemed to be able to create something on guitar. Just the right combination of things to open some musical doors for me. One aspect I remember is that many an hour spent playing rhythmically against the echo improved my timing and fluidity hugely - more in a Hillage style than the Edge I hasten to add.

baddog01

Record player....

DesVegas

A Rat. Finally the distortion sound in my head

sweepy

E-Bow and a delay/looper, the hours just fly by

Samgb

Anything new and lovely can give you a little boost. Right now - Two pedals, both of which I've got hold of in the last couple of months. Both Tc electronic. The HOF Mini. My first ever reverb but I'm having a flipping blast with the crazier sounds. There's one called Stratosphear which is a mega spacey reverb with some kind of phasing thrown in . I have started down the path which ends with me spunking $500 on a Strymon on Blue Sky. I am OK with that. 
And the Viscous univibe pedal. Brilliant and inspirational. It makes me play less notes which is rarely a bad thing. The first time I stepped on it in the little trio I've been playing with me and the drummer fell into Machine Gun and when we eventually wound down he just said 'that sounded fucking brilliant'. And it did. 

lasermonkey

Well, the first was my Alesis Quadraverb. When I put some "vanilla" recorded guitar sounds through it, I was astonished at how many weird and wonderful noises I could get from it and more than anything, it must be the Quadraverb which instigated my obsession with effect units and pedals.

Along with that, the Boss SE70 and Roland DEP-5 never fail to inspire me.

WarpedSounds

Guitar Rig 2, Cubase SX3 and Ableton for me. 

octatonic

Wazmeister said:

Oberheim Echolex Digital Pro Looper ???

Tell me more mate 

It is an early digital looper- from the 90's.
It is still the most full featured looper ever made, and one of the best sounding- David Torn still uses it extensively.
But you couldn't easily do 1/2 speed and reverse both from the footswitch so I always struggled with doing the sort of stuff I like to do. Also you would get zipper noise when using midi, which irritated.
The footswitch was brilliant- it was just a number of footswitch with a resistor in parallel, so you could rig up a guitar based switch using a momentary and a resistor of the same value and a Y cable. I did this a lot for overdubbing direct from the guitar- nothing else allowed you to do this IIRC.
It is a great device, almost a granular synth in the way it was conceived, using the guitar as the source material.

FWIW the Fractal looper has many ideas taken from this device- when the early firmware of the Axe FX Looper was being developed  we were asked by Matt at Fractal about the sort of features we'd want to see.
They ended up including a few of the suggestions bandied about- I do remember making a bunch of suggestions to the Fractal guys that were included but I'm not sure how many other people made the same case for them- it was a while back now.
The Fractal Looper is the better tool for what I'm trying to do with loops than the Echoplex, especially being integrated with the FX.

Marktigere1

Oddly a BOSS DM2W.

Really musical and got my creative side going.

Just need more time to actually record stuff

Flanging_Fred

Fleshlight