What pedal/effect-type exerted the biggest change in your playing?

[Mark Hammer]

These are all great folks.  Thanks and keep them coming.

When I first started using an autowah around 1978 or 79, it not only drew my attention to dynamics in my picking, but also to dynamic "flow" throughout the signal chain.  I started thinking about how B behaves based on the dynamic changes in A.  I also found myself thinking about guitar as a percussion instrument more.

While not the same as a modulation pedal with a cyclical change to the tone, I started thinking about my picking that way too, such that I would plan out the extent of sweep as if it were a modulation pedal wih a periodic filter emphasis.

Getting my old PAiA Phlanger also started me thinking about modulation in general.  In particular, when a change in tone occurs cyclically, you need to start planning out your phrasing so that it coincides with certain points in the cycle.  Its like learning to coordinate your day so that everyone is home for dinner at the same time.  The idea of making sure that the right things and note choices happen at the right time has always been a part of rhythm guitar.  I found that my first experiences with a flanger enhanced that.

[Big Red]

I'll have to go with the wah as well. I started practicing moving my foot along with the music before I even got to play one so I'd be able to use it right away  , plus it made me learn how to play solos and lead parts better, nothing sounds better then a good wah solo

[TheBigMan]

For me it'd be when my adapter blew up and I went straight to the amp till I got a new one.  Going with a dodgy food analogy I discovered that the meat and potatoes sometimes tasted a little better with the garnish, but 90% of the time it tasted great on it's own.  I learnt that garnish only tastes good if the meat and potatoes are right.

And now I'm hungry. 

[Ge_Whiz]

1974, bought a busted Fuzz Face for £5 and fixed it. Suddenly I had a box that made me sound cool, ironing out and smoothing over all the incompetent playing, errors and faults. Gave me the confidence not to give up and sell my guitar.

[tiges_ tendres]

For me it was delay.  I used to play a squier strat though either a Boss hm-2 or dod american metal into a home stereo!  Of course that sounded as good as you would expect.

Someone in our band bought a delay pedal, and we were all tranfixed!  Three of us would be kneeling, gathered around this little white and black box on the ground whilst someone else played.  "I wonder what happens when you turn this one?" It was like someone had lifted the tops of our heads off.  We would fight to see who got to play through it.

It just gave us this sense of space, that was lacking in our music, especially when we were all playing through a home stereo system.

I'm much more of an echo man now than delay.  But It was a delay pedal that made me play a little slower, and also be more accurate.  Afterall, there's nothing worse than hitting a bum note then hearing it repeated 10 times!

[SeanCostello]

Does a screwdriver count?

In all seriousness, the moment when I first started whacking a large Philips screwdriver against the strings like a drumstick, and realized that I could get a nice percussive thump by getting the screwdriver itself within the magnetic range of the pickups, was a bit of a revelation.

Many years later, using the same setup through a keyboard-controlled frequency shifter in a delay loop, and varying the rate I hit the strings and/or moved the screwdriver back and forth over the pickup, I realized that DC was being shifted up to audio rates. The pitch of the note was determined by the keyboard pitch, and the amount of chorusing was determined by the rate at which I moved the screwdriver back and forth over the pickup.

In general, I tend to program little one-off sounds, and adapt my playing to the algorithm, rather than adapt the algorithm to my playing. Well, they kinda get mixed up together.

As far as pedals, the Univox Super Fuzz led me to play lots of major seconds that would act as full power chords with the pedal on, as well as unison bends that created a "ripping" sound as the difference frequencies dropped in Hz.

Sean Costello

[Processaurus]

Good question.

The looper section on the green Line 6 made me work, some of that from its limitations actually.  It really shows flaws in your tempo, having something you played right back in your ear like its another musician.  Also you have one chance to get your overdubs right, because there isn't any undo.  That made me less nervous while recording in general, in terms of getting mentally used to dealing with the permanence.
The reverse is cool when you start planning out melodies or chord changes backwards beyond just the "woah, crazy, its backwards guitar".  The pitch 1/2 is good to practice with because if you play something at twice the speed and slow it down, all your tempo errors are twice as bad.  
Too bad mine broke .

[NoFi]

Very Interesting topic.
I'll also have to answer ... a good amp.
The day i got one i discovered how lousy i was. You know, mastering the dynamics, the fact that each mistake comes out loud and clear lol, using the volume on the guitar/the playing to drive the amp, understanding eq...
My amp taught me everything.
And then, i got *another* tube amp and discovered stereo, dry/wet, effects in parallel.... 

But every single thing affects my playing really. The equipment, the age of the equipment, the colour of the equipment lol... and all those things you described in you first post mark, i think they were true for me and i can't say which one was the most important. I hope my playing is the sum of all of them lol.

Recently i built a Vanishing Point and discovered it can be hooked up to many effects to give more radomness or "evolveness" in background soundscapes. And now i'm trying to find a way to blend those soundcapes to my playing, without them affecting the playing and the "legibility" of the melodies. Eww.

[mac]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

Andrew

... and turning the amp off also?... just an unplugged electric guitar or a classical guitar.

mac

[jonathan perez]

PEAVEY JSX

might as well be a big "tweekers delight" pedal for me. 

[Connoisseur of Distortion]

my biggest revelation in my playing wasn't really an effect, it was a change in my picking hand's motion. i had been picking one way for about a year that left me capable of palm muting, picking in both directions, but not much else. one day, while playing on my own, i decided that my technique simply wasn't very efficient. I opted to grip the pick looser and closer, and get my wrist into a slightly off-axis position. the result was pinch harmonics, tremelo picking, picking near the bridge, and a significantly faster downstroke. It was reeeeeally hard to get myself away from my old form, but it has helped tremendously.

No effect can replace bad technique. 

[Transmogrifox]

The biggest guitar effect revelation for me, which changed my playing the most, was when I learned to play in the crack between clean and overdriven.  When I play harder, it distorts, and when I play softer, it doesn't.  Just like the world should be.  It's much more effective, for me, for most situations, than turning a distortion pedal on and off.

I give a +1 on that.  If I must attribute it to a pedal, I would say it was the Vox V810 is the pedal that got me interested, but the real change happened when I got a tube amp.  Then the purpose of the V810 was to push it from this borderline realm to over the top when necessary.

Right now the tremolo is discovering me.  I have never before used a trem regularly, never was very interested in them because they always made me think of hokey '70s cowboy music, and didn't like the one in my amp so much because it drops the volume quite a bit when activated...but as we speak, my rEAgeneration of the EA trem has really been coaxing a change in my style.   I have been using it with my amp's trem to get some interesting sequenced type sounds that are rythmically hard to grasp, so it has really been making me pay attention and sync with it.  It's not an effect that would readily sync with me by any means--but when you find the rythm of multiple trems in series, it's truly inspiring.  I also really like the machine-gun chopping type sound I can get from the rEAgenerated Trem on max depth.  That LFO is so smooth.

[squidsquad]

Hehe...leave it to Mark to come up with another sociological study!

For me...it's a never ending story...and I'm sure I'm not alone.

First revelation = fuzztones & feedback.  Learn to let notes scream & jump harmonics.

Second = using an old tape EchoPlex.  Runaway noise...LOOK OUT!

Much later = using the Electric Mistress to play organ parts from classic 60's tunes.
                    Forced me to try & play like a keyboardist...NO NOTE BENDING!

OT = learning the Korg M1...having orchestral sounds at my fingertips....learning to program my own sounds....build songs out of patterns...program drums (badly).

OT#2 = of course...the computor.  Downloading recording software, drum machines, loops, virtual synths,
vintage compressors, reverb, etc....  Suddenly...everything I ever wanted & could never afford was mine!
This affected me so:  For a couple years I only composed techno music...just because I COULD...and had never done anything like that before.

These days = just a few nights ago I brought a couple DIY pedals to a Turtle concert (local).
The band laughed at my mosfet boost in a tuna can....my reply, "There might be something fishy about the sound but at least it's in tuna!" (sorry).  But when I kicked in the Tube Reamer (no gain limiting resistor),
all heads turned thinking, "Ol Squid's ax is REALLY screamin tonight!"

And with my own Surf/Oldies/Instrumental Power Trio...I'm experimenting running in stereo...trying to get a big full sound...without as much ear damage.

And the beat goes on......

[jonathan perez]

...nothing sounds better then a good wah solo

     yessssss!!!

[lovric]

an inteligent pitch shifter in a digitech multi-effect. especially how chords started to come out as i tried double-stops and fifths and how it gracefully adapted to chromatics.

[WGTP]

VOX TONEBENDER - Fuzz/Distortion/Sustain -  Less anxiety about filling in the holes and the notes lasting until the next change.

Maybe it was learning that turning the knobs all the way up on a tube amp wasn't going to cause it to explode, at least immediately.   

[jorgenkjellgren]

I was gonna be the first to mention tremolo but I´ll settle for being one of a rare few.

The tremolo made me play slower, better melodies on lower strings basically. Wich in turn got me to focus more and more on rythm. Wich made me take acoustic guitar seriously, wich made my struming techique better, and made me play together with the drummer but made me almost stop playing solos. In short: Mike Campbell!!

[Paul Marossy]

Wah pedal.

[Johnny Guitar]

Very cool topic.

The first several effects each really made me reexamine my playing technique at that time (in order fuzz, wah, reverb and tremolo, phaser and finally DDL). But after seeing an unknown Adrian Belew with Zappa (in 78?), my approach to the whole guitar/effects/amp chain changed to a great degree. I imagine it was not unlike seeing Townshend or Beck in 65 or Hendrix in 66/67 for many guitar players in that time.

I'm sure I'm not alone here (by any means) in that now I *really* try to fully explore each effect and adopt new playing techniques to try and get as much out of any effect as I can. I try to get both the "classic" sounds from an effect as well as taking it to a new (to me at least) area of sound.

If I can't make an effect do something interesting I usually figure I'm not being inventive enough. Only later do I think that the effect is a poor example of that effect.

One which I've really been unimpressed with is some sort of Arion flanger I bought slightly broken in a pawn shop which is almost completely uninteresting compared in any way to my MXR flanger. I was also just given a Russian built Small Stone, and I'm fairly disappointed with it now. I'm thinking of doing some mods, but I'm continuing to play with it to see if I can coax more out of it.

John
(hey I love the spell check but it shouldn't it recognize "reverb, flanger, wah", if not "Townshend and Belew." Oh well, forum for nothin' and the spell check's free ).

[Arn C.]

Mine would have to be a phase shifter.   I do not remember the model.  I borrowed one from a friend in 1983.  I had it for a few weeks and couldn't believe what I was hearing.  Before that I only had one pedal.  In 1969 my cousin brought home a fuzz pedal(don't know the name of it)  and I hooked it up to my bass and loved it.  After the bass I picked up an electric guitar and also used the same fuzz with it.   
I still enjoy phasors to this day!

In 1973 I sold my guitars (bass and electric guitar) , my amp and my fuzz pedal to get some beer.
What a big mistake!   Young and foolish!  At the time I never really thought about names of guitars.  Well, the guitar was a fender strat, that sunburst looking ones.  The guy I sold it to is still using it in a band today.....

Sorry about the sad story!

Oh well, as of now, I once again have everything I would ever want or need to play music....

Peace!
Arn C.