Should I Use Guitar Foot Pedals or Digital Effect Modellers?
Guitar pedals have come a long way in recent decades. In the 60s and
70s, you got your sound from an amplifier and in some cases a pedal or
two. Many classic sounds were made with just a guitar, tube amplifier,
and a few stomp box pedals. Today, there are tons of stomp boxes
available as well as newer digital effects which began to appear more
often in the 1980s.
Digital effects when they first came out were quite poor. They suffered
from an overly processed sound and it was tough to get any real good
tone out of the first effects pedals based solely on digital effects.
Today, digital effects are a lot better and in some cases you can’t even
distinguish between a regular analog stomp box and a digital effect
pedal.
Why Use a regular Stomp Box?
Pros
The man reason you want to use a normal stomp box is that they sound
great. You can get great sound out of a normal stomp box because that’s
what they are designed to do. For example, if you use a stomp box that
produces distortion, you’re going to get a wide range of distorted tones
you can actually use. You may even have a poor amplifier, but you can
still produce tones that you can actually use when playing. If you’re
looking to recreate those classic sounds then several good stomp boxes
and an amplifier is going to be all you need. You can depend on classic
stomp boxes like a Jim Dunlop Crybaby Wah Wah, for example, to deliver
those classic sounds time and time again. Those sounds are tried and
true and the guitarists bread and butter.
Cons
A downside to stomp boxes is that you often have to have a lot of them
to create certain sounds. For example, you may need a delay, an
overdrive, several distortion pedals, a noise gate, a reverb pedal and
so on. This creates a lot of cables and a lot of mess and it takes time
to setup before you go on stage. You have to constantly test things out
to ensure you’re getting the sounds that you want. If you’re not using
adapters you have to ensure that all your pedals have batteries
installed.
Why Use Digital Effects?
Pros
You want to use digital effects when you want to create multiple tones
quickly. You may need these as samples for example, for a music project
or you have sounds that are always changing when you play live. Fore example, you might be a cover band and need a whole bunch of classic
tones right at your fingertips. When you use digital effects, you also
spend less money because you can get everything in one digital processor
such as a Zoom processor. You don’t have a lot of cables of fuss with
and most processors have tons of tones you can work with. Many
processors also allow you to create your own tones and save them in
banks or share and download tones with other people.
Cons
Digital pedals and effects still don’t quite sound like a real amplifier
and a good stomp box. Distortions for example, can be quite
disappointing with digital effects and you often have to search a long
time for a good tone. The processing can also be extreme at the pure
tone can be quite muddy. Another drawback is that software goes out of
date quite quickly and you have to update programs or buy new processors
to work with newer computer systems. One good analog pedal for example,
will last you forever with no updates required unless you decide to MOD
it.
Both digital and regular analog pedals have pros and cons. It’s up to you to decide which ones you want to work with. Happy jamming.
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