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Guitar Stuffs
Mar. 6th, 2009 03:20 amFinally getting the hang of my Digitech Brian May Red Special pedal. The settings are all starting to fall into place to sound sweet with my guitar. I find myself sticking with settings 5 and 6, which are the acoustic/Tele and delays/harmonizer settings. As long as I stick to chords, the acoustic setting sounds pretty good, definitely more acoustic like than just using a clean guitar tone. The Telecaster setting lets me kick it into more of a rockabilly sound, which is fun to mess around with. Double delays are where it gets interesting. I can't do much that really takes advantage of the delays, but it still sounds awesome. The harmonizer just sounds evil (Brian May using a harmonizer).
To my ears, that little pedal gets the harmonizer tone dead on, and, since the pedal has an expression pedal, I can change how much the sound is shifted, which lets me do a light bit of whammy bar like work. The Tele settings don't quite show off the mids as much as I'd like, but I think that's because my guitar has cheap, shitty pickups. The delays give me that nice overdriven AC30 tone that Brian has, but it's not quite the same, again probably because of the guitar being cheap and not a Red Special.
I find most of the other settings to either have effects I don't want/need or I haven't yet quite fully figured out the best settings for them. Whenever I get around to learning "Unchained" by Van Halen, I'm definitely gonna use setting 1, which is a flanger effect. Setting 7, the Deacy Amp, will be nice when I get to wanting a unique tone not found anywhere else (aside from BM's setup, that is).
Earlier, I finally got around to getting a couple of adapters so that I could take advantage of the stereo output capability of the pedal. That's definitely fun to play with. When used with the delays, it'll output the audio centered, then left, then right. I had it just running into my PC speakers earlier, and it sounded really awesome, much better than trying to get it to work well with my Vox DA5 amp. After some experimenting, it might be better to actually plug the pedal into the aux in on the amp instead of between the guitar and the instrument input.
Anyone know of any cheap audio A/B selectors with 1/4" inputs and outputs? A quick check of Amazon and Musician's Friend shows the cheapest ones being in the $30-40 range, which is a bit much for such a simple device. I'd like to be able to switch between the pedal and the amp's sounds, but it's frustrating since I can't get them to play nice with each other on the settings I like on the two. I'm thinking just A/Bing between the two with the pedal run into the aux in would be an alright solution.
Overall, it's a nice little pedal, especially since I picked it up for 1/3rd list and 1/2 street price. As a general multi-effects pedal, I don't think it'll be enough for most people, but it's definitely nice if you want that Brian May tone without having to drop thousands of dollars on equipment. I think I'm gonna start using it for most of my recording and letting my amp be more for live work/practice.
Now, I just wanna get a wah pedal, and Musician's Friend has a treble booster as their Stupid Deal of the Day that's tempting me.
To my ears, that little pedal gets the harmonizer tone dead on, and, since the pedal has an expression pedal, I can change how much the sound is shifted, which lets me do a light bit of whammy bar like work. The Tele settings don't quite show off the mids as much as I'd like, but I think that's because my guitar has cheap, shitty pickups. The delays give me that nice overdriven AC30 tone that Brian has, but it's not quite the same, again probably because of the guitar being cheap and not a Red Special.
I find most of the other settings to either have effects I don't want/need or I haven't yet quite fully figured out the best settings for them. Whenever I get around to learning "Unchained" by Van Halen, I'm definitely gonna use setting 1, which is a flanger effect. Setting 7, the Deacy Amp, will be nice when I get to wanting a unique tone not found anywhere else (aside from BM's setup, that is).
Earlier, I finally got around to getting a couple of adapters so that I could take advantage of the stereo output capability of the pedal. That's definitely fun to play with. When used with the delays, it'll output the audio centered, then left, then right. I had it just running into my PC speakers earlier, and it sounded really awesome, much better than trying to get it to work well with my Vox DA5 amp. After some experimenting, it might be better to actually plug the pedal into the aux in on the amp instead of between the guitar and the instrument input.
Anyone know of any cheap audio A/B selectors with 1/4" inputs and outputs? A quick check of Amazon and Musician's Friend shows the cheapest ones being in the $30-40 range, which is a bit much for such a simple device. I'd like to be able to switch between the pedal and the amp's sounds, but it's frustrating since I can't get them to play nice with each other on the settings I like on the two. I'm thinking just A/Bing between the two with the pedal run into the aux in would be an alright solution.
Overall, it's a nice little pedal, especially since I picked it up for 1/3rd list and 1/2 street price. As a general multi-effects pedal, I don't think it'll be enough for most people, but it's definitely nice if you want that Brian May tone without having to drop thousands of dollars on equipment. I think I'm gonna start using it for most of my recording and letting my amp be more for live work/practice.
Now, I just wanna get a wah pedal, and Musician's Friend has a treble booster as their Stupid Deal of the Day that's tempting me.