Your best and worst pedal hot takes? 🔥

Paradox916 said:
Why do I keep putting “stomp” switches in “pedals “ when they sit at 50 degrees on my desk 99% of the time..🤡
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I found that soft, momentary footswitches combined with a little relay work equally well on the floor and on the desk. Takes a little more work and a few more $ to put it together, but also increases reliability as a bonus. A relay is a heckuva lot more reliable than a stomp switch.
 
JTEX said:
I found that soft, momentary footswitches combined with a little relay work equally well on the floor and on the desk. Takes a little more work and a few more $ to put it together, but also increases reliability as a bonus. A relay is a heckuva lot more reliable than a stomp switch.
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Hardly. I’ve only had like, 3 footswitches fail. But that one time I asked a relay to pick me up from pickleball practice, and it never showed up…
 
Relays never work well with anything (or anyone) reeking of pickle-juice — probably 'cause the acidic nature of the pickle-juice/fumes corrodes the contact-points, then the electrodes explode.
 
jjjimi84 said:
You just warmed this old farts heart, check is in the mail.

Teaching my son to play guitar brought back all of those old scales and modes and notes out of the cobwebs and bong resin.

1, b2, 3, 4, 5, b6, b7. I grabbed a guitar right away to check this out, sounds exotic.

Anybody take lessons at 40? I am intimidated and not even sure what to ask anymore. "Dear person half my age, please make me better, whatever better means."

This is a moving target for me too, some days i get it and others not so much.
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I recently started taking lessons (I’m 42). I have an agreement with my teacher that I’ll just schedule lessons with him every now and then (about once a month so far) because with kids and work I need time to absorb and practice. I have some specific goals to achieve and I discussed them with him and we are working on it. It’s been fun so far, especially since all the self imposed pressure to learn I put on myself when I was young is gone. I recommend it!
 
My hot takes:
- I love building pedals but apparently not playing them. I end up using the same few pedals all the time.
- I have little use for most fuzz or distortion. ODs I can take or leave.
- my pedal building aspirations constantly clash with the reality of me wanting to do something else (even playing guitar!).
- granular delays sound interesting in demos but I have a feeling they are just a gimmick or at best a one trick pony.
- aging sucks not because our bodies start falling apart, but because it becomes clearer every day that some doors have closed behind us.
 
giovanni said:
- aging sucks not because our bodies start falling apart, but because it becomes clearer every day that some doors have closed behind us.
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Aging sucks, but it beats the alternative. Don't take it lying down! You're not in the nursing home yet.

I'm just a little older than you, and I got three hours of skateboarding in yesterday. It's not as easy as it was 20 years ago, but I appreciate it a lot more now.
 
jwyles90 said:
I try to remind myself of this regularly. Whenever I catch myself stressing about age-related things, I try to flip the script and tell myself what a privilege it is to have made it long enough to experience them in the first place.
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This is great way to frame things. I'll definitely have to remind myself of this when I inevitably have to go in for my annual PT sessions because I did my post-run stretches in the wrong order that one time :ROFLMAO:
 
Feral Feline said:
Robert Smith definitely has boring corporate music; even he admits he just regurgitates a descending minor vibe for every song, and prefers Boss pedals.
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@giovanni — I noticed your ":unsure:" reaction.

In case it didn't come across and got misinterpreted, I was being facetious — I'm a big Cure fan.



BEST — There's Phrygian in the riggin'...

WORST — ...'cause there's Aeolian else to do.
 
  • I like the white washers.
  • I think in a lot of cases “pedal overdrive” sounds better than amp overdrive. Plenty of cases where an amp sounds great as the primary means of dirt, just being pushed by a pedal for sure… but there are also a lot of amps that just don’t break up in a very pleasing way to me.
  • I’ve never found a good use for when a pedal has a clipping switch that includes a “no diodes” position. In my experience just about every "clean boost" I've played sounds better than an overdrive with the clipping diodes lifted.
  • A lot of the time various mods or component changes can probably be approximated by just tweaking the knobs on the stock version of the same circuit
  • Sometimes mojo DOES make a difference and I’m not sure it all boils down exclusively to differences in tolerances/values. Maybe it is just confirmation bias or something I guess. I'm sure there is some science-y reason to explain it but it's beyond me :P
  • I like the idea of "you can run it at 18v for more headroom" in theory but in practice I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've preferred any drive/boost/distortion at 18v over running it just on 9v.
  • I know it is kind of a polarizing topic, but I am generally in the camp that prefers a more "tuned" pedal vs one that has more "options" or "versatility". The latter often comes off to me as a jack of all trades, master of none type of case. It just ends up feeling fiddly to me and sometimes even comes off as a bit lazy from the designer. A personal example... my favorite take on a Bluesbreaker is the Pro-10 Blue (Browne Carbon/Blue side of Protein). I used to own a Snouse Blackbox 2. The Snouse obviously has WAY more options and can be more "accurate" to the original, too. But I can dial in the Browne in 30 seconds and even with a million different options/combinations I wasn't able to dial in a sound on the Snouse that I actually preferred to the Browne. Different strokes for different folks, obviously, but I've generally found this to be the case over the years.
  • Perhaps undermining much of what I've said above, but I just don't really think I've got the ears (or at least the patience) to bother much with taking the time to swap out diodes or op amps or whatever. I've done plenty of builds where I socket the clipping diodes or the opamp and either a.) get the "stock" parts in there and decide it sounds fine and close it all up or b.) try it out "stock", flip it over, swap out some components, try it out again and hear no discernible difference/improvement. Kinda reminds me of when people talk wine tasting and have all these fancy descriptions and "notes" for their wines and I'm just over here like "It's red" "it's white" "It's kinda sweet" "it's not very sweet" "It has bubbles" and that's about the extent of it. I mostly feel the same when I try swapping diodes or opamps, idk.
I’m sure there’s more but that’s enough for now.
 
"Kinda reminds me of when people talk wine tasting and have all these fancy descriptions and "notes" for their wines "

I found out the other day my wife didn't know what "cork sniffing" was. I thought it was a common knowledge. But I guess that's kinda like common sense... Not everybody has it 😁
 
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