The Best Inspirational Devices You've Ever Owned ?

Teetonetal

Reaper - coupled with Sgear and NI komplete.

This was a game changer for me. For the first time I could easily record good quality guitar tones, without having to go through the absolute nightmare of micing up, or putting up with the some really bad VSTs. No doubt my desire to play, practice and write increased dramatically. Almost every single creative thing I've done in the past 5 years has been a direct result of that combo. Plus with NI I could easily create full band tracks.

Helix has now replaced Sgear for connivance reasons - but the joy still remains.

NotNowJohn

Treble Booster - for instant Ronson, Bolan, May, and more importantly a huge factor on 'my sound.' Very inspirational.
I currently have a Cornish TB-83 Extra but have used equally as good TB's from Catalinbread, Guitarsystems, Throbak.

BintyTwanger77

"lasermonkey said:

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."

How would you set up a Quadraverb with a '65 DRRI, seeing as it doesn't have an effects loop?

earwighoney

A bit of a boring one from my perspective, it's the clip on guitar tuner.  Makes tuning acoustic guitars a lot less frustrating. 

Also bottleneck slides.  

earwighoney

octatonic said:

 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.

I saw Battles play a fair times and when they were touring their first few albums, they all used Echoplexs to great impact. 

lasermonkey

@BintyTwanger77 ;  I have a '75 Silverface Twin Reverb and an Orange AD30HTC/PPC112, neither of which have effect loops.
 I mostly use a clean tone when using lots of modulation, delay and reverb, so going straight into the front of the amps is no problem. I can't honestly say I have ever missed having an effect loop, although I guess if you're using your amp's overdrive, it could well be an issue. If I need an amp style overdrive before the effects (sometimes a little crunch makes all the difference) I just use my DIY Liquid Sunshine clone. 
  So basically, I set both amps up with a nice, chimey clean tone (it's hard to get any distortion from my Twin anyway!) and then make sure any effects are set at unity gain, so as not to overdrive the input, unless it just happens to sound good. Sometimes it works!

PolarityMan

The most inspirational item I own is probably a copy of lateralus by tool.

Drew_TNBD

My brain. And drugs.

Sporky

I found the VG-88 quite inspirational, especially as you could split the magnetic and GK inputs and add the GK stuff later in the signal chain. And the control was really good too, so you could use the expression pedal to blend in a harmonised 3rd on just one string (fer example).

fretmeister

Probably an ebow.

JezWynd

Adobe After Effects 3.1. I'd spent a couple of years messing around with multiple 8 & 16mm in-camera exposures and blending projectors etc. Suddenly there was this software that allowed you to do it all with incredible finesse and control. And that was only scratching the surface of what it was capable of - fly throughs, motion text, tracking etc. Exciting times.

Sassafras

A capo.
Gives you a change of flavour and inspires me to play differently. Not better, just differently.

Ally

Industrialectric 4046M is pretty out there.

Beef

If were talking about FX, then it was my first Watkins Copicat tape echo. Game changer.

In terms of other gear then it was when I was 13 and saved up enough to buy a Gibson SG standard so I could butcher Sabbath riffs but still feel like a badass. Got it shipped over fresh from the Gibson factory, can still remember the smell when I opened it! Prior to that I had a Squier Affinity strat, my first electric, that I had bought from Costco and it was just the least inspiring thing to play when all you wanted to do was play evil shit. I'm still prejudice towards all Squiers to this day. 

therose789

I often find a good reverb and delay to be a great creative tool. 

I have just got a Walrus Audio Julia, haven't used chorus for many many years but this thing is so inspiring. Last night I was messing about with quite a heavy compression. Sounded so good! 

TTBZ

JezWynd said:

Adobe After Effects 3.1. I'd spent a couple of years messing around with multiple 8 & 16mm in-camera exposures and blending projectors etc. Suddenly there was this software that allowed you to do it all with incredible finesse and control. And that was only scratching the surface of what it was capable of - fly throughs, motion text, tracking etc. Exciting times.

After effects was an eye opener for me as well. After I'd learned how to use it properly of course. Took me a while to get my head around it and I've loved it ever since! 


Guitar wise I'm not sure really. I always like faffing around with a delay but don't really create much useful stuff with one. 

Benson

ICBM said:

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.

Delays and modulation won't sound the same before the preamp vs after. Depends on the effect required but they won't sound the same. 

Benson

ICBM said:

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.

Delays and modulation won't sound the same before the preamp vs after. Depends on the effect required but they won't sound the same.