Hello

Wondering about natural effects analog may be a term.

The question is what effects do you think can be created by playing the instrument, without effects, and what effects do you think would be extremely difficult to play without electronics?
Do we use effects as a crutch, or as a tool to express ourselves ? Is it sometimes easier to express yourself with help from loops or digital cgm creations?

I guess manual effects. Stick and amp. What effects can you make with basics. What music can you make? What sound?

Volume pedal nice.
Wah nice.
I cannot recreate a volume pedal by tapping strings. Wah maybe difficult but doable with training.

Wah is nice to have, always wanted a wah on my stick. Whammy bar etc. Foot pedal is nice too but not the same.
Effects with limited electronics or learn to create effects with analog sound.

What is the difference between analog and digital?

What are good sounding effects without all the digital effects, and which can be created without digital processing?

Are all effects the same as long as you know how to use them? effects become part of the instrument if used properly.

Questions on my mind I digress I'm sorry carry on.







StiiiiiiicK

I guess there's no effect you can do without effects pedal, except vibrato, whammy (doing some precise glissando on stick can be tricky), overdrive (if you crank your amp) and... delay (if you play some phrase twice?).

But you can create some effects by using a limited number of devices. If you have a very good delay pedal, you can sometimes go to modulation, filter and reverb territories. It's the reason why I always have at least a good delay on my pedalboard. An overdrive/distortion is a must have as well IMHO, to add some character to your core sound. I rely on the room space in which I play to add some natural reverb, so it's always varying.

Through the years, my rig has more or less followed those principles, even if I added some devices to make playing less complicated :
- Melody strings : filter - overdrive - delay - granular delay (for creating some evolving pads a la Bill Frisell)
- Bass strings : overdrive - modulation - delay - looper (not often used, except when I play for dance classes)
I've recently added a stereo pedal (Empress Zoia), which is more a synthesis pedal than an effect pedal though, jusst because I wanted to learn more about synthesis modules.

Effects without pedals is limited.
- pitch bending strings.
- sliding across frets (including vibrating between frets)
- playing muted strings (to create a muffled tone)
- playing harmonics.
- playing multiple strings simultaneously.

There are lots of effects but pedals make the biggest difference.
Compressors, reverbs, delays, etc. make a huge difference in tone.
My favorite is IRs. (Impulse Responses) They alter the sound space.

- For my Stick and Railboard, I prefer the Helix Floor.
- For my PRS Custom 24, I prefer the Kemper Stage.
- I also play Sax and the Roli Seaboard Rise 49.

Good response,

To the list below I would add:

- vibrato
- hammer-on/pull-off

Chapter 9 of The Stick Book has lessons on all of these.

Through the wonders of reverb.com I was recently able to acquire another Lexicon MPX-G2, which was a key piece of my performance rig in the early 2000s. I sold it in a fit of poverty and regretted the move ever since. It has excellent distortion, filtering, ambient and pitch effects, as well as a great speaker emulator, and an insert loop, which I use for the SE-70.

So the current setup is:

Melody: StepABout preamp -> TC Fireworx ->Lexicon MPX-G2 (with nested Boss SE-70)
Bass: StepABout preamp (mainly for switchability with melody pathway) -> SWR SM-400 preamp -> Boss SE-70 -> Boss SY-300.

I have a patch selector pedal with additional controllers for each side, the Lexicon MPX-R1 for the melody side and the Boss FC-50 for the bass side.

Why revert to an old unit like the Lexicon when there are so many more recent alternatives? Sound. Each device has a personality, and each does some things better than the others.

For example, the Boss SE-70 has an unbeatable slow gear, rotary speaker, and programmable analog distortion, but it doesn't have a great reverb or pitch shifter. The TC Fireworx has a great filter and pitch shifter, the Lexicon has a great set of ambient effects and an great sounding "whammy" effect.

With the exception of the SY-300 none of these devices has a computer editor, so programming means stepping through menus, which can be tedious, but the ends justify the means.

I hope to be posting some improv. jams with this rig soon, just have to do a little more programming first....