Your best and worst pedal hot takes? 🔥

[finebyfine]

Pedals are for driving. Unless they're wahs, they're stompboxes*

*I don't hold this one myself, but if it's been raised already I missed it

 

[jhaneyzz]

You shouldn't own any pedals until you know all the basic modes on guitar and can name the corresponding note of every fret. This is my equivalent of "I walked a mile to school everyday."

Which I also did.

What’s a “mode?”

 

[bean]

What’s a “mode?”

Some stupid crap music teachers invented so they could have a job, I bet!

 

[Mentaltossflycoon]

What’s a “mode?”

Something something fibonacci.

 

[Bricksnbeatles]

Oh, here's one to play over a major chord. I forget exactly what the scale name is. It's one of the harmonic minor series.

1, b2, 3, 4, 5, b6, b7.

Most commonly called Phrygian Dominant.

Here’s a neat site you might dig. You can input scales and find the name for it. Click on the scale name once you have it input to find all kinds of info like other common names, the names of each of its modes, tonnetz diagrams, pitch classes for set theory, triads, vectors, complimentary scales, prime form, neighboring scales, and a whole lot more. A music theory playground!

The Exciting Universe Of Music Theory

 

[jhaneyzz]

Some stupid crap music teachers invented so they could have a job, I bet!

Like a-la-mode?

 

[DeadAirMD]

Fuckity fucking fuck!

Calling their "clean tone" "clean", when they strum their guitar and the notes are distorted.

Clean tone literally means, absolutely nothing added to your guitar signal. The guitar should not clip or distort in any way, if it does, it's dirty, NOT fucking CLEAN!!!!! FUUUCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!

 

[Giorfida]

Fuckity fucking fuck!

Calling their "clean tone" "clean", when they strum their guitar and the notes are distorted.

Clean tone literally means, absolutely nothing added to your guitar signal. The guitar should not clip or distort in any way, if it does, it's dirty, NOT fucking CLEAN!!!!! FUUUCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!

Thank you!!!!!!!!! You have captured my #1 pet peeve!

 

[Erik S]

Fuckity fucking fuck!

Calling their "clean tone" "clean", when they strum their guitar and the notes are distorted.

Clean tone literally means, absolutely nothing added to your guitar signal. The guitar should not clip or distort in any way, if it does, it's dirty, NOT fucking CLEAN!!!!! FUUUCKKKKK!!!!!!!!!

That one doesn’t really get my panties in a bunch I guess. Clean tone, bypass tone, we all know what they’re talking about right?

If they didn’t demo their gritty bypass tone that would be misleading, but as long as they play it for you I think it’s plenty clear what you’re getting.

I bet if they called it bypass tone it would be even less clear to the average pedal customer what’s going on.

I play at home through a clean amp at low volumes, so a demo set up like that is cool to me, but people pay a lot to get that driven tube amp sound and I bet some of them want to know what a given pedal sounds like into it.

 

[jwyles90]

I dunno if this is a hot take or not, but I think LED clipping sounds much better than any other kind of clipping, and "no diode" clipping is often too loud and open to sound good.

I also think having a variety of clipping options really doesn't make that huge of a difference to begin with. Which I realize is contradictory to my first statement but I'm sticking to it.

 

[MBFX]

I know all the modes and all that jawn (I have a degree in music), and I’ve never used it. Practicing it, however, linked my flingers to my brain compartments with the notes…so now I thinks of F# on the A string, and my flinger goes there all by itself…

Stringed instruments suit themselves best to thinking in intervals, in my opinion. If you know your intervals and how your instrument is tuned, you can play whatever wherever.

 

[Coda]

Stringed instruments suit themselves best to thinking in intervals, in my opinion. If you know your intervals and how your instrument is tuned, you can play whatever wherever.

It took me 20+ years to reach the point where I can move pretty freely around the fretboard. The best practice is playing…anything, really…

 

[bean]

Another crappy hot take: work towards building enough confidence in yourself to think through and solve (pedal build) problems on your own when you can. Ask for help, but believe in your own abilities, too. Do this enough and you will never panic when you don't know the answer to a question. It just turns into a challenge to conquer.

 

[Fama]

For pedal hot takes, I can pretty much just come up with two:

1.) Some people are way too snobby about pedals.

I know it's the hot takes thread, but I also see it outside this thread.

2.) Some people just don't want to put in the work to learn how to use pedals with a lot of controls.

For this one, of course there can be too many controls on a pedal and they can be just badly implemented. But instantly dismissing a distortion/OD pedal with more than 3 controls just because it didn't instantly sound great for you is also dumb in my opinion. "The designer should have made it so that it only sounds good" right, if you use the same guitar and amp I'm sure it does, but what if I have something else? Maybe I need some more options so it works for me. You don't have to touch those controls if you have them where you like them. Having more parameters makes dialing it in more complex, that's true. But I'm sure you could do it, buddy, if you put some effort into it. I have faith in you!

Edit: Oh, and #3 might be "Boss is really fucking boring", but to be fair that's probably because Boss is everywhere and I haven't used Boss pedals very much. I also don't like how their OD and distortion pedals sound in ~any demo. The rest of the stuff is great, I'm sure. I do however feel that a pedalboard made of only Boss pedals makes someone seem like a boring person. And yes, that does make me a hypocrite with #1, obviously.

 

[Guardians of the analog]

For pedal hot takes, I can pretty much just come up with two:

1.) Some people are way too snobby about pedals.

I know it's the hot takes thread, but I also see it outside this thread.

2.) Some people just don't want to put in the work to learn how to use pedals with a lot of controls.

For this one, of course there can be too many controls on a pedal and they can be just badly implemented. But instantly dismissing a distortion/OD pedal with more than 3 controls just because it didn't instantly sound great for you is also dumb in my opinion. "The designer should have made it so that it only sounds good" right, if you use the same guitar and amp I'm sure it does, but what if I have something else? Maybe I need some more options so it works for me. You don't have to touch those controls if you have them where you like them. Having more parameters makes dialing it in more complex, that's true. But I'm sure you could do it, buddy, if you put some effort into it. I have faith in you!

Edit: Oh, and #3 might be "Boss is really fucking boring", but to be fair that's probably because Boss is everywhere and I haven't used Boss pedals very much. I also don't like how their OD and distortion pedals sound in ~any demo. The rest of the stuff is great, I'm sure. I do however feel that a pedalboard made of only Boss pedals makes someone seem like a boring person. And yes, that does make me a hypocrite with #1, obviously.

 

[spi]

"The designer should have made it so that it only sounds good" right, if you use the same guitar and amp I'm sure it does, but what if I have something else? Maybe I need some more options so it works for me.

See this is where I disagree. If a pedal doesn't match your guitar and amp, then get one of the other bajillion pedals that are out there.

Why do we have so many YATS? Because there's probably one that's right for you.

(BTW, not really meaning to argue with you, just taking my hot take to the extreme. I do see the point in versatility).

 

[JTEX]

too many knobs, switches or trim pots turn me off. Pedal designer should voice the pedal, not make the user do it.

Ex-forking-zactly. It's like those freaking office chairs with 5 or 6 levers and knobs and no matter what you do with them for half an hour, you're still not as comfy as just sitting on a properly designed chair with only an up and down! I hate it when "designers" outsource the hard work on the end users.

 

[jhaneyzz]

Ex-forking-zactly. It's like those freaking office chairs with 5 or 6 levers and knobs and no matter what you do with them for half an hour, you're still not as comfy as just sitting on a properly designed chair with only an up and down! I hate it when "designers" outsource the hard work on the end users.

I have a really nice Hermann Miller chair that felt like absolute shit when I first sat in it and almost dumped me to the ground when I leaned back. I twiddled with the arm rest angle, height, stiffness of tilt etc for a day, THEN it fit me great and I haven't messed with any settings in the two years since.

If it got the original "properly designed" chair with no options or twiddly bits, I would have returned it and spent the past two years auditioning chairs from designers who think their singular vision is the Right chair and "screw the customer if they want the arm rests lower so they can sit at a desk that isn't exactly the same height as mine" and still might not have one that works.

 

[jhaneyzz]

See this is where I disagree. If a pedal doesn't match your guitar and amp, then get one of the other bajillion pedals that are out there.

Why do we have so many YATS? Because there's probably one that's right for you.

(BTW, not really meaning to argue with you, just taking my hot take to the extreme. I do see the point in versatility).

I know you actually get this point, but to participate in the socratic dialog: with the "buy one, see if it works, buy another one" approach takes years, a big budget, and a endless hassles to buy all those pedals, audition them with your own gear, in your setting, to figure out which one works.

I started there, then bought/built pedals with options to EXPERIENCE the options.

After years of that, I have definitely settled on single purpose pedals for my gigging pedal board. (that is, the pedal board I would gig with if I actually gigged, and if I was actually good enough to gig. etc...)

So my opinion is completely hypothetical and academic and based upon the imaginary band that only exists in my head.

So.... yeah.... I'll shut up now...

 

[JTEX]

All concentric pots are crap.
All push-pull pots are crap.
Most other pots aren't much better either.