I just want to give you a quick note about effects before we get started. You can’t set up your effects in your practice area and expect them to sound the same in the club this weekend. Room acoustics change the dynamic sound of your effects. Allow yourself plenty of time to set up your equipment and tweak your effects at the club before you start playing. If you don’t do this, you can have a disastrous show and may not be invited back to that club again. Remember that every club is a different room environment. It is best to keep a notebook on how you set up your effects at each club in case you play there again.
Now let’s talk about specific effects.
Echo Effects:
Reverb:
“Reverb” is a good place to start since it is built in to most guitar amplifiers on the market today (and for the past fifty years!). Reverb is an echo effect reminiscent to sound you get when you are overlooking a canyon and can’t resist the urge to shout “hello” and hear it echo back at you. If you want an example of reverb, turn the reverb knob all the way up on your guitar and strum it. Immediately mute the strings with your hand and you should hear the echo reverberate from the speaker.
In the early days of recording reverb was done in different ways. One way was to place a microphone at one end of the room and another close to the speaker cabinet. You would then record the guitar on two tracks and play them back together giving a sort of echo effect. If the effect needed to be tweaked or changed the engineer would move the microphones or speakers around the room until the desired effect was achieved. Another way of achieving reverb is to place the microphone and amp in a bathroom. We have all sung in the shower before and thought we sounded pretty good, right? Bathrooms are small rooms with hard tile walls that reflect sound instead of absorbing it. Weird Al Yankovic recorded many of his early albums in a bathroom.
There are many types of reverbs that you may run across in your search for the best sound for you. Three of the most common are spring reverb, plate reverb, and digital reverb.
Note:
As a general rule of thumb too little reverb is always better than too much. Too much reverb in the mix can make the sound muddy and drown out vocals and other instruments.
Delay:
Delay is probably one of the most valuable effects. It is the building block that many other effects such as reverb, flange and chorus are based on. A delay is basically what the name says. It is a delay of the original signal of the guitar that plays at a set time after the original notes or chord is sounded. It can range from milliseconds to several seconds depending on how you set the time parameters. When set at several seconds you can actually solo over yourself.
Slapback delay is probably the most commonly used and can range from 30 milliseconds to 100 milliseconds.
Chorus:
Chorus is a version of delay and is my favorite effect for clean sounds. Chorus gives the impression of multiple instruments playing the same part. The unit puts a very small delay in the signal and (depending on the amount of delay) it detunes the echo to give the effect that another guitar is playing with you. This effect adds a sparkle and clarity to your sound. Chorus is best and most often used with slower tempo songs.
Flange and Phase Shifters:
Flange was created by accident in a studio. It was found that if you played back a reel-to-reel tape of the guitar track, held up the reel (the flange of the reel, to be exact) with your hand, and then let it go, it would catch up with the other tracks causing what would become known as flanging. The best way I can describe this effect is that it’s like riding a roller coaster. You go up the hill slowly (the engineer holds the reel back with his hand) and when you hit the top you pause for a millisecond and then you rush to the bottom very quickly (the engineer lets go of the reel to let it catch up with where it should be). Then you start up the hill again slowly (the engineer holds it with his hand again) to do it all over again. The other instrument tracks would be played normally and the guitar track would be held up and let go to catch up at regular interverals throughout the track. This created a “whooshing sound” on the guitar track kind of like a jet engine.
Thanks to electronic and digital technology we can reproduce this effect with stomp boxes and multi effects called flangers. Flange moves in and out at a constant and steady predetermined speed that you set.
Phase shifters are like flangers except they have multiple flanges going on at the same time and sometimes with no predetermined speed. Both are great additions to any guitar player’s setup.
A couple of things you need to remember about using effects in general. There are no set rules on how to use these effects. You can use just one or you can use a combination of all of them. While the echo effects are similar in ways they have their own distinct differences that can complement one another in a mix. Play around with them and have fun. You never know what you will come up with.
All the effects I have mentioned have their own parameters that can be adjusted giving you a full range of variations to play with. You can find your own signature sound by using what you like from each one.
Effects can improve the sound of your guitar and sometimes can make you think you are playing better. They can cover small mistakes, but I urge you not to use them for this. That is not the intended purpose of effects. You should be able to play a part cleanly with good technique before you start adding effects. If you can play it clean, it will sound even better with effects.
Note:
If you use compression and gates always put your reverb and delay behind the gates in the effects chain so they fade out naturally instead of being cut off by the gate.
In Part II of ” ‘Effective’ Use of Effects”, we will look at compressors, limiter, expanders, and gates.
