A little pedal purchase I've just made has got me thinking a bit.
For ages and ages I've wanted a Danelectro Grilled Cheese distortion pedal. I have NO idea why that idea entered my head, but it stuck there despite reading and hearing on YouTube how entirely awful it is.
So I finally got one despite all common sense telling me not to bother. Guess what?
It's shit.
But that was sort of the point. Danelectro have a long history of 'bad' cheap instruments and yet tons of great music has been created using them ( just ask Jimmy Page). So in this era of Klons, Helix's, Strymons and the like, I get the feeling that deliberately trying to take something 'bad' and get something usable out of it might be a dying creative art for us guitarists.
I spent about 20 minutes last night sat on the floor with my Grilled Cheese and my new Vox Pathfinder making pretty cool steam train noises
Comments
The point of the post was to ask if any of you guys deliberately use 'bad' pedals in order to be more creative? What do you use and how? I love a good classic rock tone as much as the next guy but all things need to evolve.
It is how you get the cool almost ring mod tone in My Way by Limp Bizkit. It is not how you get a good chorus or flanger sound though
But yes, getting good sounds from bad gear is a skill that guitarists should cultivate, as is getting deliberately bad sounds for when only a bad sound is good enough.
There's a lot of roads to that destination though- I have a few pedals that I know I can get ugly sounds out of if the need arises (a couple of analogue octave up/down effects, a fuzz with bias and voltage starve controls, a crap pitch shifter etc) but that can be made to sound good too. I'd rather that than a house full of pedals I don't actually like except for one shit sound that might be exactly the right kind of shit for some future project one day.
There seem to be quite a few effects makers out there now whose stock in trade is to create pedals that deliberately create harsh, "bad" sounds- Devi Ever springs immediately to mind, although apparently she extended the bad-ness to build quality as well as tone.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
I also have an EHX Nano Clone chorus that I won in one of the composition challenges on here. Almost sounds like a ring mod. Absolutely atrocious - crap but really crap!
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
Instantly my thought.
I use it to make my guitar sound like a spring - the crazy wackd mode - like Korn do on the clean guitar on "it's on".
Great sound. And I love it.
Like a bad DS-1. Too compressed, too middly.
The only dirt I struggle to get a good sound from.
Ringleader of the Cambridge cartel, pedal champ and king of the dirt boxes (down to 21)
I have a Rocktek PH-01 Phaser that I picked up in 1992 , it's plastic , cheap , and very noisy ... and absolutely glorious .
I'd never use it live but if I need a chewy O.T.T phaser for recording it would win every time .