In the long, long ago.. In the before times, my axe was a Royal Artist
I was so excited when I got this, I played it every day. As was the time, I was playing pretty heavy rock music: Cream, Led Zeppelin, Hendrix, Black Sabbath, etc.. And that’s when I started learning about effects pedals. You know, Fuzz boxes, wha pedals. My amp had reverb and tremelo, but those pedals were where the fun was. I went through a few iterations in my youth. At one time I had a Fuzz Face and a Vox Crybaby. Just like almost everyone else I knew. There were the few with a UniVibe and then that one guy with the Echoplex. But, at that time there wasn’t much else. Phase Shifter were few and far between. Flangers were a thing of the future. It was a simpler time.
A few years later I bought my Fender Stratocaster and by this time there are a lot more effects pedals to play with. Gone are the Fuzz Face and the Vox Crybaby and in are more “modern” effects, at least for the early 70s. My Dirt was now a Electro Harmonix Big Muff π, my wah was an EHX Wah, that was really just a Crybaby, at least when looking at the circuit that’s what I deduced. I was probably wrong.
And then I added a few different pedals; a EHX Frequency Analyzer (essentially a Ring Modulator) and an EHX Pulse Modulator (3 square wave tremelo circuits with individual and unlatched frequency and modulation amount. It also had a booster in it I think. I wish I had a picture of the birds nest inside this pedal. It was made entirely on perf-board and point to point wiring. I also had an EHX Bad Stone Pedal. Like a wah, except instead of a BPF, it was a phase shifter. So cool! I wish I had one now (actually I kind of do, but more on that later). If you noticed, these were all Electro Harmonix pedals. They were without a doubt the pedals to have. I still love the pedals they produce. The two other effects I had were a Musitronics µTron and.. Yes I got an Echoplex! Pink Floyd here I come!
Sometime in the 80s, life happened. Jobs, marriage, kids and so playing the guitar took on less and less of an importance in my life until I basically didn’t play anymore. Every once in a while I’d pull out my Yamaha acoustic and play, but that’s not the same. I’m a noise maker and you put that Pulse Modulator in 3 different syncopated rates, push it through the µTron and then the Echo and You Got Noise!
Earlier this year I decided I would try to build a pedal board. Back in my EHX days I had sort of built a pedal board. I had a power supply custom built so I could power the pedals without batteries. I switched out all of the stomp switches with ones with extra poles so I could run LEDs to show if the pedals was on or not. Also, I like to fiddle with knobs and switches. Like those big Kieth Emerson Moog Synthesizers. So I put them on a stand in front of me and relocated the stomp switches to a floor box. I could still activate them with my foot. But I could adjust stuff without kneeling down to the floor.
But now I want to see what a building a “modern” board is like. So, I went to my friends, Sweetwater and ran a search for effects pedals and sorted it low to high. So, modern: yes, expensive: no. I’m not a pro, or even an amateur. I’m a hobbyist so I don’t need to spend a lot on this. I just want the experience. So what I found were a bunch of Behringer Effects Pedals. Now, I’ve never had a problem with Behringer, but I know they get some bad rap. I don’t know why, I really like them. I use a couple of their small mixers for work and streaming. As for the pedals, the price is certainly right. About $25 apiece. These are the rainbow shell series of pedals, copies of Boss pedals for the most part, some Maxon pedals, some Line 6. I am also getting some of their other format, like the Klon Klone, a Univibe and some recreations of the Musitronics pedals. So I mave a µTron again! I also have their octive box and a dual phase.
Yeah, I think so. Think about it. Push your signal through 20 or so pedals you’ll be lucky if it sounds like anything you expected it to. Here is a plug for a YouTube channel: JHS Pedals and Josh Scott. Josh is a true pedal geek and I have learned a lot from him and he as validated many things I’ve discovered on my own. I don’t own any JHS pedals, but someday there are a few I have my eye on. Josh also talks a lot about building his pedals. It’s been anther inspiration, so I will be looking to build some pedals. Check out his channel.
One of the things Josh has said is if you put two pedals together in series, you have made a third pedal that you may or may not like. The simple example is a distortion device and a wah pedal. They sound completely different depending on the order you place them. I usually go wah after dirt, but there other way has it’s advantages as well. Sometimes I rig up the kit with a distortion on either side of the wah so I can have the best of both worlds, but if you keep this up, phasors, flangers, delays, digital reverbs, you end up with something you were not maybe expecting. I started looking into ways of putting some off this stuff in separate effects loops, or running them in parallel. Where I’ve settled is I run two complete pedal boards with dirt, color, sparkle (distortion, phase/flange, reverb/delay) in parallel and combine them at the amplifier with a small Behringer MX400 mini-mixer.
You may notice these 3 guitars are all Squiers. Like I said, not a pro, not even a working amateur. I don’t need to spend $$$ on this hobby to have fun with it. These guitars and pedals, though inexpensive, feel and sound really nice. And, because they are cheap I can get a whole bunch and experiment with series and parallel combinations.
In this bottom picture you see the stand that has the MX400 in the lower left corner and my amplifier simulator, a Zoom VAMS GS-200 I’ve had for a while. I do have a small Fender Frontman, the black box in the back of the photo, branded with “Fender”. It’s a good clean amp and a decent reverb. Not loud, but takes a mic rather well.