I got a chance to play with a Twin this weekend live with a band - I can see how owning something like that would make pedals seem redundant. Unfortunately, I've never really had a nice amp.

http://www.reverbnation.com/thedeadranchhands

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZEW74mHjQk

JoshHeartless
pedals?

i wouldn't be caught DEAD using pedals.

just the tank for me, please.

Okay, let's call them effects then. The tank is an effect as is a Tremolo or Delay pedal.
Actually, I hardly ever use my pedals, but is nice to have a few options, after all it isn't 1961 anymore. I've seen a lot of the best guitarists on this site and many of them use effects in addition to a tank.

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Last edited: Sep 23, 2009 21:06:01

surferXmatt
I believe the amp is the most important factor for tone (besides your skills) .. for me it is a money issue, however. I use what I have - If I could find a happy medium between putting food on the table and playing better gear, I would.

Sell the Peavey and the Marshall, might as well throw in the rack effects and Pod too. That should get you more than enough to buy a nice amp. You won't regret it.

Same, I do not play out any more currently, so buying too nice of an amp would be silly for home practice. I really should ditch some of my crap. Hard to let things go for me, even if they are junk.

That bothers the wife quite a bit.. eh synchro? Haha, oh well.

Back to pedals. As a person that uses pedals only occasionally I am convinced that the Boss ME-50 is a great idea for people like me. I've seen them on eBay for as little as $225 and they do a pretty good of covering all the basic pedals. The compressor strikes me as superior to Boss' CS-3. There are an assortment of overdrives, something for just about everyone. Chorus, Phasers, you name it.

The only thing I didn't like all that much was the delay portion which was OK for the most generic settings but seemed a bit sensitive and hard to set compared to my DD-5 or my RE-20. Still, it would work for most situations. The analog delay sounded good but I found it very hard to acheive a workable delay setting. I think that they may have tried to give it too much range and ended up with a knob that is far too sensitive.

The main thing I like about it, compared to other multi-effects units, is that it's setup like a pedalboard. You don't have to do a bunch of editing, you can select one delay effect, one modulation effect and one overdrive effect at any one time and control them with three separate switches built into the pedal. Each of these three has several options (various O/Ds, mod effects and delays) and parameters for each of those effects. The controls are intuitive to anyone that has ever used stomp boxes.

The one thing I have not been able to determine about these units is how they treat your signal when all the effects are switched off. I've only been able to test an ME-50 in a demo kiosk and there's no way to physically bypass it and plug directly into the amp.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

surferXmatt
synchro - I have tried that pedal at an old buddy of mine's house. The effects sounded pretty good to me, nothing extraordinary, but certainly a solid set of effects for the casual effect user. As I recall though, it did cut out when switching between effects. So, for a live setting this pedal would not be ideal. In the studio or at home, I think it is a pretty good buy. Plus you have the flexibility of actual knobs and not just solely digital parameters.

That's really how it struck me. I'm a casual effects user in that I play clean almost all of the time; but I'm also a gadget freak and I assure you that I have a stack of effects, enough to populate at least 2 healthy pedal boards. This is the dilemma I face, I only use effects occasionally (with the exception of some light delay that I use as my default/neutral sound for a lot of Pop/Standards etc. On those relatively rare occasion when I do play out I'd love to have a wide array of effects available to me but I don't want to suffer the signal degradation or go to all the trouble of setting up a bunch of effects. For this sort of purpose the ME-50 strikes me as almost perfect.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

surferXmatt
I remember a small delay when switching between effects. Totally muted. That would not be good playing live.

I'll have to try it again but I agree, that'd be a spoiler for me.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

This is my current, temporarily complete board:

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