We're going to talk for a bit about electric guitar effect.
Now it's not that you can't use some of these on an acoustic guitar, especially if
you have a built-in pickup, but as an electric guitarist, one of the fun things
we have at out disposal is electric guitar effects in the form of a pedal.
They often fit on the floor and you can operate them with your feet, and
you can kick them on and kick them off at various points in the song.
I'm going to talk about just three effects that you might find useful.
Some of them you might even find useful over some of the songs that we've done for
this course.
The first of these pedals is called overdrive.
Without getting into a lengthy discussion about physics,
overdrive through use of some compressions, some harmonics,
squashes the signal into what sounds very crunchy, and
it adds lots of sustain, and it sounds like this.
It's often used when you're playing power chords.
It's a very popular sound in pop and rock music.
So I have an overdrive pedal right here that I'm going to kick on,
and I'm going to play both the original signal.
I'm going to play a G power chord in third position.
[SOUND] Now that's the clean signal,
now listen to what happens when I kick on the pedal.
[MUSIC]
Now you can see it sounds really gritty and crunchy and if you were to play that
at a loud volume it would certainly sound like a wall of sound.
Over drive is often used when soloing.
We're going to talk a little bit about soloing at the end of this course.
But just know that for now,
overdrive sometimes gives you a little bit of an edge and
allows you to cut through if you're taking a solo on an electric guitar.
[MUSIC]
That's an overdrive pedal.
I'm going to kick that off.
Another pedal that I'm going to talk about is called the chorus pedal.
A chorus pedal actually makes your guitar sound like more than one.
It's often used when you want to create a little bit of a bigger or
prettier sound if you're playing chords, for example.
Here's the sound without the chorus.
[MUSIC]
And now I'm going to kick on the chorus pedal.
[MUSIC]
Chorus is really useful when you're playing, say, a really simple,
pretty rhythm part like the song that we learned called JP Lullaby.
[MUSIC]
Often used for rhythm parts.
Another effect that we're going to talk about is called a wah-wah.
Here I have a small wah pedal that I have on my board.
And this one's a mini pedal and it actually has what's called a treadle and
allows you to scoop and make very vocal like sounds.
So this is what it sounds like without the wah pedal.
[MUSIC]
Now this is what it sounds like with the wah pedal.
[MUSIC]
Now a wah pedal is used not just for soloing, as you can see it sounds very
effective on a single note, but it's also used for rhythm parts.
And there are many great classic songs that have been played with a rhythm
part that has been accentuated with a wah pedal.
[MUSIC]
Very much a vocal quality, but it's also very effective for
playing single notes too.
[MUSIC]
So those are three very fun pedals that you can use on electric guitar.
We went over the wah pedal, which you can certainly use on rhythm and lead parts.
We went over the chorus pedal which is very useful,
especially on those ballads such as JP Lullaby.
And we went over the overdrive pedal, which is really very useful.
You can either use it on your power chords or you can certainly use it for
soloing, which we'll cover in the next section.