Your best and worst pedal hot takes? 🔥

Guardians of the analog said:
There's a big difference between liking a pedal and using a pedal. I'm learning this lesson again right now. I like the idea of chorus and flanger, I enjoy noodling on them, but I find using them in the context of my playing to be less enjoyable. Turns out most of my playing is no pedals, a boost and Delay when I do use them and the occasional phaser and trem.
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Word. I feel the same about fuzzes. I love them but they are not very useful for the kind of music I actually play.
 
giovanni said:
Word. I feel the same about fuzzes. I love them but they are not very useful for the kind of music I actually play.
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Same same. I like fuzz when noodling around, but in the context of a song and mix, most fuzz is hard to use for me. I like articulation, amp drive is where it's at for me.

I feel like the pedal industry in general has turned guitar into a novelty item that is fun to make noises with, where you play the pedal instead of using the guitar to make music.
 
Guardians of the analog said:
Same same. I like fuzz when noodling around, but in the context of a song and mix, most fuzz is hard to use for me. I like articulation, amp drive is where it's at for me.

I feel like the pedal industry in general has turned guitar into a novelty item that is fun to make noises with, where you play the pedal instead of using the guitar to make music.
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Probably a direct result of music not being as popular as it used to be and the difficulty of finding good people to play with

My favorite distortion tones are the ones that sound like a hot, saturated fuzz face
 
Guardians of the analog said:
I feel like the pedal industry in general has turned guitar into a novelty item that is fun to make noises with, where you play the pedal instead of using the guitar to make music.
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This is me selling every synth pedal I ever owned. I still want to try an EHX micro synth because they kinda sound like crap and that might be useful. The other ones I’ve had are far too pristine 😂
 
Guardians of the analog said:
I feel like the pedal industry in general has turned guitar into a novelty item that is fun to make noises with, where you play the pedal instead of using the guitar to make music.
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While I don't think Chase Bliss pedals having so many controls is necessarily a bad thing, I do absolutely think that most of their pedals fall into this category, and I have zero interest in them. Same goes for a lot of "Instagram pedals" I feel like (stuff like the Meris LVX or Hologram Microcosm). But it's also possible that there is a (relatively) thriving scene for music they make using such pedals that I'm just blissfully unaware of.
 
Fama said:
While I don't think Chase Bliss pedals having so many controls is necessarily a bad thing, I do absolutely think that most of their pedals fall into this category, and I have zero interest in them. Same goes for a lot of "Instagram pedals" I feel like (stuff like the Meris LVX or Hologram Microcosm). But it's also possible that there is a (relatively) thriving scene for music they make using such pedals that I'm just blissfully unaware of.
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There are definitely niche genres that use a lot of the more exotic stuff. One example is Noveller who makes ambient guitar music. Not exactly my cup of tea but she uses a ton of crazy effects that I would probably never use myself.
 
It's interesting to me that the rise of the digital age of ampless rigs coincided with the era of non guitar sounding pedals. There's an entire generation of players using the guitar to sound like anything BUT a guitar and it seems counterintuitive to me since if you are using a DAW or modeler, you could just use a midi controller and make it easier on yourself. I don't know when real guitar tones stopped being cool to so many people, like it's some kind of rebellious act against music norms or something.

I think that YouTube and social media became a big part of the reason for this. Guitar influencer culture turned playing guitar into one big infomercial to sell products. The culture of guitar turned from playing guitar to playing pedals. You don't need to learn guitar, write songs, be in a band. Just bleep bloop on this digital algorithm and be one of the cool kids.

On another note, I think it's disheartening as someone who grew up with loud amps and drummers to be in such a silent digital world. While I can get close to the sound of my rig with my two notes stuff late at night, it doesn't make my panties wet like playing my amp loud and feeling the push pull of the speakers and guitar. That long sustaining feedback cannot be replicated in the matrix. No aiab pedal brings the feel to the table, and a big part of the tone is the feel and weight of the guitar interacting with the amp and pedals at real volume.
 
Guardians of the analog said:
It's interesting to me that the rise of the digital age of ampless rigs coincided with the era of non guitar sounding pedals. There's an entire generation of players using the guitar to sound like anything BUT a guitar and it seems counterintuitive to me since if you are using a DAW or modeler, you could just use a midi controller and make it easier on yourself. I don't know when real guitar tones stopped being cool to so many people, like it's some kind of rebellious act against music norms or something.

I think that YouTube and social media became a big part of the reason for this. Guitar influencer culture turned playing guitar into one big infomercial to sell products. The culture of guitar turned from playing guitar to playing pedals. You don't need to learn guitar, write songs, be in a band. Just bleep bloop on this digital algorithm and be one of the cool kids.

On another note, I think it's disheartening as someone who grew up with loud amps and drummers to be in such a silent digital world. While I can get close to the sound of my rig with my two notes stuff late at night, it doesn't make my panties wet like playing my amp loud and feeling the push pull of the speakers and guitar. That long sustaining feedback cannot be replicated in the matrix. No aiab pedal brings the feel to the table, and a big part of the tone is the feel and weight of the guitar interacting with the amp and pedals at real volume.
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Exactly. Loud amps rule. Digital mousy tones bleh. :P
 
I just want something that operates like an amp, and feels like an amp. If I can’t tell the difference, and it’s something reliable, designed to last, and possible to self-service, that ticks all the boxes.

I have a little modeler- it’s fine for travel. It’s not interesting if I have an amp available. When I practice I go for a little princeton knockoff with a switch to go from 5W to 1W. It’s not my favorite amp, but even that little thing feels better than a modeler to me.
 
If a digital pedal doesn't have analog dry through I don't wanna FW it. That's another pedal ick of mine that I didn't learn I had until recently. There's something lost in translation when the signal goes through an ad/da conversion. I had a the boss sde-3 and while it can sound good, it didn't fully do it for me. I compared it to other digital delays and after some reading online, it turns out that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
 
I have a two notes Cab M I use for my acoustic, and some IR's have to much latency and that is destroys the "feel"
 
Guardians of the analog said:
If a digital pedal doesn't have analog dry through I don't wanna FW it. That's another pedal ick of mine that I didn't learn I had until recently. There's something lost in translation when the signal goes through an ad/da conversion. I had a the boss sde-3 and while it can sound good, it didn't fully do it for me. I compared it to other digital delays and after some reading online, it turns out that I'm not the only one that feels this way.
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I feel exactly the same. I have a Keeley digital multi-fx without analog dry through and I hate the way it sounds so I never use it even though the double tracker is cool.
 
As a person who has no amps and lives entirely through his HX Stomp....my HX stomp had a faulty footswitch and is with line 6 for repair...since the 11th of October.
I'm literally dying
 
Nostradoomus said:
If I could afford a place to run amps at 10 I would be there in a heartbeat.
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I only use a Quad Cortex for all my amp needs, but if I lived in a house I could play amps loud at, I would probably get a power amp and an FRFR cab or something along those lines.

You can also play with headphones using a tube amp, although it's much more unwieldy with having to run an attenuator and still producing all the heat and such, so personally I don't feel like it's a "loud amp vs. modeler" comparison. It's a "loud amp vs. headphones", and "modeler vs. tube amp" is separate from that.
 
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