PEDAL SHOOTOUTS-- PROS AND CONS

There are an unholy amount of guitar pedals available today. Overdrive, distortion, fuzz, etc., etc. It's not uncommon for a guitarist to own several of each kind of pedal. (My colleague Andy has observed that my collection of five different fuzz pedals is absurd overkill; I probably shouldn't tell him I'm considering buying more.) Many talented designers and modification gurus are building great stuff, and modifying generic assembly-line pedals to make them better than what you buy at the store.

The internet has helped this world of boutique pedals grow, until we have a bewildering array of variety out there, and a bewildering number of ways people can throw their two cents into the discussion. I've spent probably more than fifty hours online, watching demo clips, reading reviews, searching through forum chats, and trying to absorb all kinds of endless babble about all the pedals I can choose from. I've bought a huge pile of pedals, and mostly been happy with them. I want to talk here about the phenomenon of the "pedal shootout."

You see these clips on youtube where a guy plays through one pedal, then another, and talks about the pros and cons of each. As I'm about to make some critical generalizations about these shootout posters, let me offer a disclaimer upfront. I respect anyone who's gone to the trouble of trying out these different pieces of gear, and filming themselves demonstrating them. It takes a lot of work, and although I'm thinking about doing something similar, at this point I haven't done it. That said, I have some problems with the pedal shootout, in theory and practice.
Many of these clips suffer from pretty serious flaws-- as the commenters crassly observe, again and again. Some of these flaws are more cosmetic than significant (i.e. clip has too much unnecessary information about the player's personal life, dead time while player talks to his dog who wanders into the shot, etc. My pet peeve is the strange need many rock guitarists have to keep saying how much something rocks, or just to endlessly slip in tiresome verbal idioms to remind all of us that he is a "rock" musician). Beyond the numerous time-wasting indulgences, there is a more serious problem with the whole idea of comparing pedals individually.

I've found that many pedals sound best in conjunction with other pedals. The most obvious example is fuzz pedals; pedals like the Tone Bender and the Fuzz Face are nasty and obnoxious by nature, and they can often be more useful when mellowed out in combination with another kind of pedal. I typically combine a fuzz with an overdrive such as a Tube Screamer. I like the abrasive kind of in-your-face fuzz sound you hear on garage punk records like the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction," but I don't usually need that kind of extreme sound in my own music. Blended with a Tube Screamer, a fuzz can become much less harsh. You can end up with a pretty warm sound if you experiment along these lines. Because overdrives are generally trying to mimic the sound of a cranked tube amp, I figure running a Screamer with a Fuzz Face is just approximating what Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck would have been doing when they stepped on a fuzz pedal.

Because the shootouts generally show you what a pedal sounds like by itself, it's not a complete picture of what a pedal can do for you. Where some pedals sound better, or at least different with another pedal in the chain, there are also some pedals that sound best alone. Compression, for example, tends to wipe out much of what I like about other pedals. Once I started combining pedals in various ways, and getting great sounds by mixing and matching, a pedal that doesn't "play well with others" started looking less useful to me. Maybe the things I'm talking about here are too complex for a three minute youtube clip to convey, but I am going to try to get into some of these issues myself when I eventually buy a webcam. Don't look for this soon, but it is something I'm planning to do.

The last issue is one that matters a lot to me; others may be less concerned. Most, if not all, of the youtube pedal demos involve guitarists playing in styles pretty different from mine. In some cases it seems to me the player is not using the pedal to its best advantage. Not to say that the playing is bad-- (although some of it arguably is) but rather that these players seem to be asking the pedal to work with their style, rather than the other way around. (This, incidentally, is part of the reason for a lot of bad reviews on harmonycentral.com.) Pedals are musical instruments, and you need to learn how to work with them to get the best sound out of them. Of course, this is very subjective and my idea of "best sound" might not be yours. (For example, in general I prefer to avoid chords when I'm playing through a cranked-up fuzz. A fuzz pedal demo that consists mostly of a guy playing really ratty-sounding chords is not such a good indicator for me of what the pedal can do.) I tend to start by looking at what someone like Beck or Hendrix was doing. I figure that Jeff Beck in the late sixties was spending a lot of time at home, playing through a Tone Bender and trying different pick attacks, muting techniques, volume knob adjustments, etc. He was also probably trying different kinds of musical lines, to see how different notes and rhythms worked with the sound of the pedal. Beck's playing style changed and grew to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of a fuzz pedal; thus, I can learn a lot from his example. In the end, I don't want to just play a bunch of Yardbirds licks on my own records, but if I investigate the kind of muting Beck used, for example, I can get a better tone myself. From there I can go in any musical direction I want. Most of the youtube fuzz demos are guys playing generic hard rock/metal licks that don't (to me) suit the fuzz sound very well. I'll mention one specific thing here-- Beck made rests a big part of his style. I think this was to give the listener's ear a break, in part. In the Yardbirds and in his early post-Yardbirds career, Beck often relied on the device of playing an intense short idea, then cutting off the sound abruptly. This is a very dramatic effect; it allows the listener a chance to absorb the often gnarly sounds he's just heard. By contrast, modern guitarists often avoid rests almost entirely. When they run out of things to play, they either play the same idea again and again ad nauseam, or hold a note with sledgehammer vibrato. This is the kind of playing I hear on the rare occasions I wander into a place like Guitar Center. Too often, I hear the same thing on youtube clips, and on commercially released modern rock records.