Recording - July 2011 - 18

Foot Down!
before the “dirt”, while others like the sharper, edgier tone that comes from positioning it after. It’s a matter of taste. However, if you’re using a “fuzz face” style pedal: placing it before the wah tends to cause the wah to lose a lot of its usable range or “sweep” due to differences in impedance and signal loading; remember, this type of fuzz really wants to have nothing between it and your guitar’s pickups. Both players and pedal makers have varying opinions on the best way to handle this. One solution could be a fuzz with a buffer circuit built right into its input, such as the MXR M173 Classic 108 Fuzz. Another option is to retrofit your wah pedal with its own buffer on its output circuit, such as the Wah Retrofit made by Foxrox. Google searching on fuzz, wah and buffer will provide you with all manner of information, opinions and potential solutions to consider if you use these two kinds of pedals together this way. If you use a pedal intended to be an amp/cabinet simulator, such as one of the various SansAmp pedals made by Tech21 NYC, remember they’re designed to not only sound like a real amp/cab,

Put Your

Before and after science II: delay OK! Time to jump over the fence to the effecting side of the “completion point”. Over here is where you’re likely to find the most creative sound-altering options in your chain, where the before/after order of the effects is likely to yield the most dramatic, wild-sounding results. And similar to distortion on the processing side, I’ve found that often this hinges on how things are positioned before and after whatever delay effects you might have. Boiled down to simplest terms, it’s like this: whatever effects and tones go into your delay end up echoed and repeated (depending on delay time and feedback settings), and wherever you then send the signal coming out of your delay determines how those repeated echoes themselves will ultimately sound and be further processed. Let’s start with what happens with effects going into your delay. Sure, adding some tasteful delay to your solo tone can work wonders as far as increased sustain and overall sonic magic (just ask David Gilmour!); but as almost everyone is aware: applying delay, especially with actual long echoes (versus a quicker “slapback” kind of delay) to anything that somehow changes your tone over time will usually make that change more intense, noticeable and... well, generally more cool-sounding. This is usually due to the way that long delay tends to increase the apparent sustain of your tone, and in turn intensify the various facets of the tone as well: things that sweep will appear to sweep more intensely, things that whirl will appear to whirl more dervish-ly, and so on. Some classic examples of these kinds of changes over time could be:

You’ll typically want to avoid placing noise reduction pedals after any kind of effect that fades down over time, such as a delay/echo whose repeats each get progressively quieter, or a reverb with a long fading tail.
but to respond to input signals as a real one would. With that in mind, I usually prefer to keep these kinds of pedals as close to the end of the entire processing segment of the chain as possible, with the idea that the “completed” tone resembles what I imagine would be coming out of this “virtual amp” before heading over to the effecting side of the chain. So, for example, you could send a clean-boost pedal into your amp/cab simulator pedal (while the amp is set to a very clean, rich sound) and then set the clean boost high enough to “slam” the front end of this imaginary amp, creating something that sounds more like the way a real amp would saturate and overdrive in a warm, natural way when sent the same kind of hot signal. This position also allows you to send various types of overdrive, fuzz and distortion pedals into this “virtual amp” to stack up, creating interesting “hybrid” amp sounds. For example, I like sending a cranked Marshall styled overdrive pedal like the Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret into my SansAmp Blonde which is set to sound like a clean or semi-clean Fender amp, and then tweak their individual drive settings so as to get a unique “best of both worlds” hybrid tone. Since each maker of these pedals tends to make them in their own special “flavors”, it’s really worth trying out the different varieties available to find the ones that work best for you. And don’t be afraid to stack up and mix and match various types simultaneously in different combinations to fine-tune your sound even further.
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~ Changes in pitch, such as playing your guitar with a slide, dive-bombing using a whammy-bar, using a pitch-shifting effect such as the Digitech Whammy Pedal or Eventide PitchFactor, or simply bending your strings. A classic example of how delaying these kinds of pitch changes sound would be the haunting echoy swoops in the middle of Jimi Hendrix’s version of “All Along The Watchtower”. ~ Changes in timbre, such as by using a flanger, phaser or filter. Some interesting examples of how delay can intensify these would include the deep swirling flanged guitar effects on The Cure’s “Fascination Street” or the flanged, percussive guitar intro to Genesis’ “Follow You Follow Me”. ~ Changes in volume/amplitude, such as by using a volume pedal or playing your guitar’s volume knob with your pinkie to get echoed “bowed” effects created by slowing each note’s attack. A classic example of this would be Van Halen’s almost violin-like “Cathedral”. That said, putting any of these same kinds of effects after your delay can also yield similar-but-different tonal variations, because you’re then changing the sound of the actual echoes themselves over time. For example, using a pitch-shifter to change the pitch of each echo relative to the original note can allow you to create a kind of synth- like “audio arpeggiator” effect. Pedals like the Eventide PitchFactor allow you to have both the delay and the pitch-shifting right within a single unit;

Recording - July 2011

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