Your best and worst pedal hot takes? 🔥

Here’s the way I see it. Your guitar, amp, and everything in-between is your instrument. At a some point, depending on your pedal choices, the guitar becomes more of a source signal and the pedals become the instrument. Which is its own cool thing.

I can get a really aggressive, gritty clean tone and be fine. But I love to be able to really trash my signal and pull out some rude sounds. Feedback control, wild double-stops… it takes skill, it’s just very different from busting out some bach or a 4-voice jazz arrangement.

To your point, there’s closed voicings or intricate lines and dynamics that don’t sound right when there’s dirt in the way. And the obvious- time spent chasing tone is time spent not practicing.
 
A pedal won't make you play better. Playing makes you play better. I think a pedal should merely inspire you to play. For the record I'm not anti-pedals (built dozens of them). Frankly, I love fooling around with circuits and soldering. Right now in my life I have limited time for myself so I'd rather spend it playing/practicing then soldering. Having the right gear definitely does help. I'll have more time once winter is fully here and cooped up in my house all day.
 
Like many (most? all?) things in life, I think it’s about balance. Of course you won’t improve your playing if you don’t practice or, well, play music. If focusing on gear has the effect that collecting or learning about gear becomes the hobby, at the expense of making music, I think that is a very real pitfall and I have met people who had that approach and still sounded terrible even with all the fancy gear. It’s easy to fall into that trap in a heavily consumeristic society. On the other hand, if you consciously decide that you are happy with the collecting or building or pining over gear, that’s a reasonable hobby to have. I have seen worse lol.
 
giovanni said:
Like many (most? all?) things in life, I think it’s about balance. Of course you won’t improve your playing if you don’t practice or, well, play music. If focusing on gear has the effect that collecting or learning about gear becomes the hobby, at the expense of making music, I think that is a very real pitfall and I have met people who had that approach and still sounded terrible even with all the fancy gear. It’s easy to fall into that trap in a heavily consumeristic society. On the other hand, if you consciously decide that you are happy with the collecting or building or pining over gear, that’s a reasonable hobby to have. I have seen worse lol.
Click to expand...
Makes me think about a thread listing unreasonable hobbies we've witnessed or got trapped by, to feel better about ourselves and what we're doing. Personally, I think everything that prevents our private life from growing stagnant, is a worthwhile persuit in life (and the less consumerism it involves, the better).

As per William Blake... "Expect poison from the standing water."
 
tegendemuur said:
Makes me think about a thread listing unreasonable hobbies we've witnessed or got trapped by, to feel better about ourselves and what we're doing. Personally, I think everything that prevents our private life from growing stagnant, is a worthwhile persuit in life (and the less consumerism it involves, the better).

As per William Blake... "Expect poison from the standing water."
Click to expand...
gotten trapped by airsoft once ... holy shit what a useless money pit of a hobby
 
Last edited:
BuddytheReow said:
There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Page, Clapton, Hendrix, Yngwie, Satriani, Dimebag. I could go on. Most of them had minimal gear or a small pedalboard.
Click to expand...
And Tom Morello.

BUT!

Then there's Nels Cline, Doug Wimbish, John Frusciante, ... a large long list of power pedal-users ensues.


ALSO, the amount and types of gear available to the first few artists that you mention ... well, in their heyday there wasn't much to choose from.
 
Hot take #1: gear building and/or collecting is its own (mostly harmless) hobby that may or may not ultimately be in the service of making music

Hot take #2: people on the DIY gear-building forum are probably somewhat into gear…

…they may also be into motivational speeches about how they’d be better off behaving like artistes and improving their songcraft 🤷‍…who can say? ;)
 
pricklyrobot said:
Hot take #1: gear building and/or collecting is its own (mostly harmless) hobby that may or may not ultimately be in the service of making music

Hot take #2: people on the DIY gear-building forum are probably somewhat into gear…

…they may also be into motivational speeches about how they’d be better off behaving like artistes and improving their songcraft 🤷‍…who can say? ;)
Click to expand...
Thanks for listening to my TED talk
 
BuddytheReow said:
Thanks for listening to my TED talk
Click to expand...
acv4bm.jpg
 
BuddytheReow said:
A pedal won't make you play better. Playing makes you play better. I think a pedal should merely inspire you to play.
Click to expand...
100% this. I don't just sit down and play very often, but every now and then I try a new pedal and end up playing for hours on end. The same can be said for a new guitar or a new amp. If getting a new thing makes you want to play more, and especially to make you play in ways you haven't before, that is not a bad thing.
 
Wampler pedals are boring AF. They are unimaginative and in my eyes low hanging fruit. First off, I don't want every pedal to have a 3 band EQ. That's not always intuitive. It's lazy in my opinion because you didn't want to make an executive decision on voicing the pedal. It's like a chef not seasoning a meal and letting the person eating figure it out.

Then it's mainly drive pedals. Has he attempted to make a circuit of his own? It's like evil BASF, they make the products you buy worse. Like, at least VFE tried to make existing pedals different. (I also dislike VFE). Wampler is like I'm gonna add a bunch of unnecessary controls and call it a day. In an attempt to make it ultra tweakable, he made in ultra impossible to dial in to virtually every rig.

His graphics are somewhere between fulltone and JHS. Every pedal has way too much bottom end, like it's only made to sound good at low volume and with teles. I never see them in the wild, let alone a touring bands board. It's like they are marketed only to Boomers, they are the white new balance of pedals.
 
Guardians of the analog said:
Wampler pedals are boring AF. They are unimaginative and in my eyes low hanging fruit. First off, I don't want every pedal to have a 3 band EQ. That's not always intuitive. It's lazy in my opinion because you didn't want to make an executive decision on voicing the pedal. It's like a chef not seasoning a meal and letting the person eating figure it out.

Then it's mainly drive pedals. Has he attempted to make a circuit of his own? It's like evil BASF, they make the products you buy worse. Like, at least VFE tried to make existing pedals different. (I also dislike VFE). Wampler is like I'm gonna add a bunch of unnecessary controls and call it a day. In an attempt to make it ultra tweakable, he made in ultra impossible to dial in to virtually every rig.

His graphics are somewhere between fulltone and JHS. Every pedal has way too much bottom end, like it's only made to sound good at low volume and with teles. I never see them in the wild, let alone a touring bands board. It's like they are marketed only to Boomers, they are the white new balance of pedals.
Click to expand...
Scathing!
 
Guardians of the analog said:
Wampler pedals are boring AF. They are unimaginative and in my eyes low hanging fruit. First off, I don't want every pedal to have a 3 band EQ. That's not always intuitive. It's lazy in my opinion because you didn't want to make an executive decision on voicing the pedal. It's like a chef not seasoning a meal and letting the person eating figure it out.

Then it's mainly drive pedals. Has he attempted to make a circuit of his own? It's like evil BASF, they make the products you buy worse. Like, at least VFE tried to make existing pedals different. (I also dislike VFE). Wampler is like I'm gonna add a bunch of unnecessary controls and call it a day. In an attempt to make it ultra tweakable, he made in ultra impossible to dial in to virtually every rig.

His graphics are somewhere between fulltone and JHS. Every pedal has way too much bottom end, like it's only made to sound good at low volume and with teles. I never see them in the wild, let alone a touring bands board. It's like they are marketed only to Boomers, they are the white new balance of pedals.
Click to expand...
Wampler is definitely one I've struggled with over time ... What makes me mad is that the good stuff he did eventually got fucked up by adding unnecessary shit by making the pedal "deluxe." The Pinnacle was great, you didn't need to deluxe it.

VFE is more difficult for me because I like the guy but I feel like he looked at the fuzz factory and figured if Vex could add three knobs to a fuzz face, he could add three knobs and two toggles to everything else.
 
ICTRock said:
VFE is more difficult for me because I like the guy but I feel like he looked at the fuzz factory and figured if Vex could add three knobs to a fuzz face, he could add three knobs and two toggles to everything else.
Click to expand...
I feel like VFE brought the customization possible with DIY to non-DIY consumers with the 'bring everything to the front panel' approach. For retail pedals, this expanded classic circuits with more options (e.g., the one knob and one switch of the Small Clone is expanded substantially with the Choral Reef).

For a DIY build today, this can absolutely be seen as excessive since many of the settings are honestly not very useable and are arguably better off set at the design stage, but this type of customization years ago either meant you built something yourself or modded an existing pedal with internal changes or panel controls where they could fit. I get the frustration with this approach because it does seem to put what is possible ahead of what is useful—but it really is just a different approach (albeit maybe one that is not very useful today). Having a ton of options (even if they are set-and-forget) lets someone audition it in their rig in a way that isn't as possible with a breadboard. Perhaps the compromise is having an exploded prototype unit for demoing, then building a streamlined final build.

Given that it's really just a difference of design perspectives, I can't really be too upset by it. It's a much more useful design strategy than slapping an expanded EQ on something after all.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top