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Guitar talk: acoustic, bass, classical, twelve string? You name it! Pt III

I also like the idea of just having a guitar and an amp and not having reverb in the amp would mean at least one pedal.

It is certainly worth evaluating what pedals you need and I’d never argue against Doug & Pat or whoever say ‘none’. I definitely need ‘some’, but I guess that is as I am largely of my new-wave/indie era so I do want access to some utter filth, chorus and echo sounds as well as what the amp does. I certainly don’t need a huge pedal board, there are just three on the floor (Reeves fuzz, Boss CE-2 and DM-2). I’d not sell the Rat or BD-2, but I haven’t felt the need to plug them in for a while. I use delay as dirty grungy mush/texture more than anything. I seldom play in time with it, though in fairness I seldom play in time with anything.

PS All the best Boss pedals end in ‘2‘. Science fact.
 
It is certainly worth evaluating what pedals you need and I’d never argue against Doug & Pat or whoever say ‘none’.

This is especially true for me as much of my pedal buying has been to get a certain soundmy amp wasn't providing rather than to allow me to play lots of different tones for different songs. So my plan with my new amp is to start with zero pedals and see which ones I find a need for beyond what the amp can do.

PS Talking of retro shoegazey sounds this came across my rader the other day. It's a bit meh although it gave me loads of record shopping in Berwick St. flashbacks :)

 
PS All the best Boss pedals end in ‘2‘. Science fact.

I hate to be an unscientific poopy-head but...

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That is the hill I will fight you and be willing to die upon.
But if i had an original it’d never leave the studio: too old and fragile now.
 
One of my friends’ bands had a CE-1 way back in 1980 or so, it was a very nice thing. Old even then!

PS Being a heretic I think I prefer the CE-2, I certainly use the CE-2W on the standard mode rather than its CE-1 emulation most of the time.
 
If it were up to me, all the chorus pedals would be in a landfill.

All the JC120s too.

Along with the DX7, these are some of the things that ruined the '80s.
 
If it were up to me, all the chorus pedals would be in a landfill.

All the JC120s too.

Along with the DX7, these are some of the things that ruined the '80s.

All pop music sounds go through a cycle of ‘very in’, ‘very out’, and then several decades later ‘retro cool/knowingly usable‘. Pop music is always technology driven, it is the sound of whatever is the current trend in instrument design. I was always on the alt/leftfield of ‘80s music, so I guess more on the then ‘retro cool/knowingly usable’ side of Velvet Underground, ‘60s psyche etc and avoiding DX7s etc, though now in hindsight I have made peace with them. I can certainly enjoy Prince (DX7s, Boss Dimension C on *everything*), Miles Davis Tutu, Propaganda etc (Linn Drums, Fairlights) etc. It is as identifiable to its decade as Phil Spector or George Martin, or the dreaded auto-tune today (which I hate to be honest).

Dan on TPS was funny today as one of the viewer questions was ‘can chorus ever not be cheesy?’ and he concluded that it wasn’t chorus that was the problem, but shimmery digital chorus, which is “worse than global warming and covid 19”. I’m inclined to agree as a nice analogue bucket brigade chorus like the CE-2 is just Seventeen Seconds/Faith-era Cure, Durutti Column (actually a 501 Chorus Echo), Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine etc. None of which are even remotely cheesy to my mind. All wonderful stuff.

I’m of the mindset that there are no bad instruments, only bad contexts and lack of imagination. Everything is useful.

PS The problem with the DX7, and to a lesser degree Roland’s D50, was 98% of people were either too thick or lazy to program them and just played the cheesy and hopelessly overused presets. You can get all manner of crazy stuff out of a DX7 with a little time and effort. It’s great for industrial stuff, great for techno bass etc. You don’t even need to learn the theory either, half an hour randomly prodding the buttons usually ends up in interesting angle-grinding a bin-lid or grainy ambience sort of stuff. Early on it’s like a TB-303 in that what comes out is never anything remotely like what you thought you put into it, and that’s great fun. The DX7 presets were terrible emulations of ‘real’ instruments. No one should ever use any synthesiser for that. They are for creating whole new sounds. If the DX7 had been ‘one knob per function’ rather than the tedious letterbox programming it would have been way more interesting and the ‘80s would have sounded quite different.
 
The 80s music sounded fine. It is what it is, leave it alone.

CE1 bass mods existed. A sound made de-rigeur for part of 80s era, with everyone slavering to sound like Pallodino, Giblin or Percy Jones using delay-lines except if you listen, very few did! To this day I still emulate the older approach which is immediately double track a measure in unison, it’s a much much better sound (It’s in the middle 8 of Statues of London, two Fretlesses with organ drums & vocals). Cheaper than owning a CE2 and something to fret-less about. They can make bass sound a bit soupy.

The DX7/9 ushered in a whole new era of fizzy cheese for a bunch of kids partying before we die of AIDS or nuclear devastation or Thatcher. It was glorious.
 
Although the gated reverb snare thing drove me nuts. It seemed like it was on every record.
 
Although the gated reverb snare thing drove me nuts. It seemed like it was on every record.

Still love it. Simple pleasures. It may have subsided to stepped reverb now (hard gate + tail on a secondary wet signal sidechained) but it’s still very much in the toolbox. Simmons SDS was always the go to for gating, epic. Would love an SDS ROM set but it’s not time for that yet.
 
I remember playing a gig a lifetime ago (mid-80s), Central London Poly IIRC, thinking all went reasonably ok, and then listening to a soundboard tape later (now sadly lost as it was bloody funny in hindsight) where the idiot on the desk had really hard-gated the snare which changed our drummer from a subtle and wide-dynamic jazz/surf kind of style into a machine gun when he was using brushes.
 
It is a lovely amp. Sadly out of my price range, I think.

EDIT: Oh no I just checked and yes much cheaper than I assumed.

And Tremolo but no reverb!?
 
And Tremolo but no reverb!?

As a brownface that is kind of right, certainly the original early ‘60s brownface Princeton never had reverb. One thing I love about my Rift is it effectively a brownface Princeton but with (I assume blackface) reverb, kind of best of both worlds.

The next thing for option paralysis is speaker size. I agonised over this for ages and eventually went for a 10” rather than 12” as that is what original Princetons had, plus low volume is obviously my priority. Mine has a 10” WGS Veteran, which is a remarkably cheap speaker (about £50 IIRC), but seems to be really well liked in Princetons. I figured I could swap it out for some fancy upmarket alnico job, but the more I read the more it sounds like it was a very, very good choice by Rift for a low volume amp. It certainly sounds great.
 
Suhr's amp range is really interesting but they do get £££ very quickly. For people who like pedals the Bella looks perfect and whenever I play into my computer I find myself using a model based on his Hedgehog.
 


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