(upbeat music)
- Hey guys, how's it going? It's Nate Savage here,
and Sweetwater just sent me this awesome pedalboard
full of boutique overdrive pedals
that they used in their epic video
with Rob Scallon on creating the world's largest pedalboard.
If you haven't seen that video,
check out the link in the description below.
Anyway, this board actually got me thinking,
"Man, I have made a lot of mistakes with the guitar effects
and pedalboards over the years."
So I wanted to share with you my eight biggest mistakes
that I have made with effects and pedalboards.
That way, you can avoid them when you're chasing
your absolutely perfect tone for your guitar,
and if you want to win one of these pedals,
just wait to the end of the video,
I'll show you how to do that.
Also, Sweetwater is giving away some pedalboards too,
and if you want your chance to win one of those,
stick around.
So if you're just getting started
with electric guitar or pedals,
they're not as intimidating as you'd think.
The big key here is to remember
that there are really no rules and experimenting with pedals
is the way to get good sounds out of your gear.
Speaking of gear, the amp I'm playing through,
just so you know what you're listening to,
is just a Peavey Classic 30 mic'd up with a SM57
and a Royer over there.
I'll be going through my humble little pedalboard here
for all the sounds.
Okay, the first mistake that I made with my effects pedals,
and I did this mostly because
the touring situation I was in,
I had just a backpack and my guitar,
so I couldn't carry a pedalboard,
but the biggest mistake that I regret over the years
is using a daisy chain and a power supply like this.
There's nothing wrong with these
if you're just at home running two or three pedals,
but as soon as you go out on the road
or start adding more pedals,
the biggest problem with these
is they are going to introduce noise
to your signal at some point,
so that's gonna really kind of
degrade your sound a little bit,
and they're not the most reliable things in the world.
I probably own three or four of these.
I'm not even sure if this one works anymore.
When the best solution would've been for me to get
a really good isolated power supply like this 1 SPOT
that I've had for years.
It's probably about the same price
as buying three or four of these,
and it's gonna sound a lot better.
Another thing you might want to do
as far as power is concerned,
just throw a couple of 9 volt batteries in your bag.
They're always a good backup.
Number two, using too much cable in between your pedals
or using poor quality cables.
Those are all things that might contribute
to noise or a bad signal,
and just kind of suck the life out of your tone.
I have three pedals here,
all powered with this daisy chain
and way too much cable in between.
This is a 100-foot cable right here.
That's just ridiculous, but listen to this.
(humming)
That's my clean sound; it's already noisy.
When I kick this on,
(loud humming)
super noisy, and this guitar has humbuckers on it--
(guitar music)
Sounds great when you're playing, but as soon as you--
(humming sound)
kick that off or you know,
have some kind of quiet time when you're not playing,
it starts to sound pretty bad,
and I know we can't all go out there
and buy the most expensive cables,
but get what you can and do the best you can
and try to keep things neat and tidy.
It's a lot less chance the thing will go wrong
and sound noisy for your board.
Number three, general pedal order,
and this is by no means a rule,
but it is kind of a nice place to start,
and this is really the general consensus for everybody,
kind of in the online community, for setting pedals up,
but it really doesn't mean anything.
The main thing here is you have to experiment
with what you want and the sound you want
with your own gear.
A really good rule of thumb here is what I call DDR;
it's Dance Dance Revolution.
I'm just kidding.
It's drives,
delay,
reverb,
and that's like the most basic one.
If you can remember that, it's a good starting point.
Put your drives first, so overdrives, distortions,
delays, and then reverbs at the end.
Now, I use the reverb on my amp most of the time
just because I like that,
but I have an amp right here with no reverb,
so when I do have reverb,
I usually put it at the tail end of things,
and if you have more pedals, different types of pedals,
a little bit more detailed order would be wahs and volumes,
or tuners at the beginning,
then you have a compressor maybe, before your drives,
then your drives, and then any kind of time-based effects,
like chorus, delay, reverb.
A lot of people put phasers and flangers
at the beginning before drives,
so that's something you may want to experiment with too,
but the important thing is
that you find out how your gear works,
and we'll get to this more later,
but find out what specifically you like in your gear
and what order things sound best for you
and for what kind of music you play.
This one is near and dear to my heart
because, well I'll show you in just a second.
Number four is stacking order,
or the mistake I made was not experimenting
with the stacking order of drive pedals.
It's a really cool way to get a lot of different sounds
out of the gear that you have,
and I have these 10 pedals here that are just awesome,
nice boutique pedals,
and you may not like the way one sounds
running into another.
Let's say, you're coming into this pedal, into this one,
and you have both of them on,
and you just don't like the way they sound.
Well, one thing you might want to experiment with
is putting them in a different order
to get a completely different sound,
and a really good example of that is
these two pedals right here,
this TS808 and this OCD, this is a new one.
My old one had been on my pedalboard for probably 15 years,
these two pedals,
and they're like my go-to bread and butter,
and if you swap them, if you put the OCD first,
they sound completely different than they would
if they were the way I prefer to have them set up,
so let me just give you a sound,
(humming)
or a taste of what they sound like,
so here's the Tube Screamer on its own--
(guitar music)
And if I wanted to stack the OCD with it,
just to give it another level of gain,
it's a really cool way to get some nice sounds.
(guitar music)
And the cool thing about that is
you get to get creative with it and experiment for yourself,
and that's why I'm sitting on the floor for this video.
This is where guitar players sit
when they're figuring out their pedals in a fix
because you're gonna have stuff all over the place,
plugging things in, unplugging things,
experimenting to get the best order for your pedals,
and different sounds by stacking them,
or you know, putting the order a little bit different.
Number five, not fully experimenting
with the pedals that you have.
Oftentimes, if I'm trying out,
let's say a new pedal from this port,
I may plug it into an amp and be like,
"You know what, I don't like this pedal.
I'm just gonna dismiss it,"
when I could really be missing out on something
because it could be the pedal to unlock
some kind of magical tone for a song,
or just my sound in general,
and not experimenting fully with what you have
is really an opportunity to miss out
because some pedals sound great
into the clean channel of an amp,
some pedals sound great into the drive channel of an amp,
some pedals sound great with humbuckers,
some pedals sound great with single coils,
but not experimenting with your pedals
and seeing what they can really do
in a lot of different contexts,
you're kind of ripping yourself off when you do that,
especially when you lay down money for a nice pedal,
but I'm just gonna throw on this OCD pedal right here,
and I'm gonna just show you
what it sounds like with humbuckers
and then with single coils too.
(humming)
(guitar music)
So, two very different sounds.
You may like that with humbuckers,
and maybe it was a little too bright or shrill
if you split it into a single coil,
if you use a Strat or something like that,
but experimenting with that and finding what
combinations of things work really well together.
There's a big part of growing your tone with guitar effects.
Mistake number six that I made for a long time,
and I thought I was just bad at using delay pedals,
I thought I sucked at it, but it wasn't the case,
this mistake was running loads of gain
through a delay pedal into the front of an amp.
It just sounded muddy and garbled to me,
and I could never figure out why,
but the reason--
you know, you aren't going to have the necessary-less
of a pin here as far as your taste and tone,
but I liked delay and reverb a lot better
if I was using pedals through
the effects loop of the guitar amp,
especially if I was using a lot of distortion
directly from the amp
or if I was using a lot stacking gain pedals
through the front of the amp.
Let me even let you hear what the difference sounds like
between running the delay through the front of the amp
with a lot of gain and then running the delay
in the effects loop with a lot of gain.
So here's the gain channel of the amp
with the delay run right into the front of the amp
(guitar music)
It gets really washy really quick,
and let me change this over to
where it's the clean channel of the amp
with the drive pedals going into the delay
and then into the front of the amp.
(guitar music)
So to me, that sounds a little less washy already.
I did not change the delay settings at all.
Let's see what the effects loop sounds like.
So, I have one cable right here.
I'm gonna put it into the send of the effects loop,
and that's sending signal so it's going to go
to the input of whatever the first pedal in my line
that I'm putting in the effects loop,
which is my delay and then goes into reverb
and then it goes out.
The output comes back around here to the return,
and that's how you use an effects loop.
So all of my time-based effects,
like reverb and delay right here that I have going,
are going post all the other pedals and all the EQs
and pre-amp section here.
So, I'm coming into my volume pedal with a just guitar cable
and then I come through my drive pedals,
and then drive pedal output, my last one,
goes to the input of the amp.
And that's the setup I'm running with right now.
Here's what delay, a lot of delay, sounds like
with an overdrive, an OCD, through the front of the amp.
(guitar music)
That's probably my favorite way to do this.
The delay just doesn't, it's not as obnoxious and clanging.
Let me show you what this sounds like
when I use the drive on the amp.
(humming)
(guitar music)
So there are four different ways,
if you have an effects loop on your amp,
that can experiment with different sounds.
I thought those all sounded pretty drastically different.
It took me a long time to decide
how I like to run this stuff
just because I didn't know about effects loops
or the best way to run time effects like delay.
(guitar music)
So that's a great example of using way too many effects
and too much gain on an amp setting.
It's so loud, comes through the amp too.
So, tip number seven is don't use too much effects,
or just don't overdo them.
I have a lot of reverb, a lot of delay,
a lot of gain on here,
and the overall tone wasn't bad,
but it's just really garbled,
so maybe go for more moderate settings.
I'm turning my delay on down there,
I'm using a little bit less gain here,
and I'm gonna go turn the reverb on my amp down.
Just a second.
Okay, I didn't change anything as far as EQ,
just turned everything down a little bit
as far as intensity with the effects and overdrives.
(guitar music)
And it's the same tone characteristics and everything,
but it's a lot more decipherable, a lot clearer.
Probably the biggest offenders from experience,
as far as putting too much of something into a guitar sound,
are delay, number one,
and then number two, to me, would be gain.
Using as little, the little, the littlest,
amount of gain as possible on your tones
is a really good way to keep them clean and clear,
and just using enough delay that's appropriate
for whatever type of music you're playing
is a good rule of thumb to go by.
The last one and the biggest one
that I have been guilty of for such a long time
is depending on your pedals to make you a better player.
If you go and buy new pedals, they're gonna be fun,
they're gonna be entertaining,
but they will not make you a good player,
and I am a living proof of that.
The only thing that makes you a better player
is spending time with your instrument,
setting goals, and working toward them.
So those are just some of my guidelines
and some of the mistakes that I've made over the years
to help you whip your pedalboard into shape
and start to learn how to use guitar effects
a little bit better,
and just remember this,
there is no magic rule that says
how you have to use your pedals,
but experimentation is probably the biggest key
to getting the sound that you want out of your guitar.
Alright, now the part that you've all been waiting for,
Sweetwater, as I mentioned, sent this board
full of awesome drive pedals
that they used in that Rob Scallon video
with the world's largest pedalboard.
We're giving three of these away.
All you have to do to enter to win
is comment on this video,
what is the biggest mistake you've ever made
with a guitar effects pedal,
or the biggest mistake you've ever seen someone else make?
We'll be choosing three winners at random
on September 4th, 2019, at 12 p.m. Pacific,
so be ready for that.
We'll ship it to you;
you may have to pay a little bit of duty on it,
but it won't be much, depending on what country you live in.
Also, if you want to enter to win
an awesome pedalboard from Sweetwater,
all you have to do is check out the link
in the description for this video.
Follow it; enter for your chance to win.
Thanks so much to Sweetwater for sponsoring this video,
and remember even if you only have two or three pedals,
experiment with them as much as you can
with the gear you have to find your own unique voice
with the gear you have.
(upbeat music)