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

[Mark Hammer]

It was snowing here this morning, but it was close enough to spring the other day (I was raking the yard) that I feel like asking a spring-type question.

Sometimes, you try a pedal, and it makes you do a double-take.  I don't mean that it sounds so good, or that it perfects something you had only been able to do poorly before.  Rather, I mean you plug in and you find yourself playing stuff, or thinking about what you'll play in a fundamentally different way.  You have to change how you think about the instrument.  You have to learn new ways of doing things.  You have to grow.  For some folks, it might be as simple as a wah and syncing their phrasing with a tone change, or even just using reverb and giving notes time to breath.  For others it might be the first time they ever used a delay that went longer than 300msec and made them need to think about layering whole phrases in a call-and-response way.  For others, it might be the first time they had to think about a sequenced/stepped/time-synced effect, like one of Zachary Vex's Seek pedals, or the Adrenalinn.  For still others, it might be the first pedal they ever used that involved generating something atonal and dissonant, like a ring modulator.

So here's a question for everyone.  What effect, whether category, or simply brand/model, struck you as changing how you approached your own playing, or how you played with other people, giving it  a real whack on the side of the head?  What was it that you needed to start thinking about differently?  What did it add to your skill arsenal as a musician?

Again, I don't want endorsements or testimonials of quality.  I want to know what changed in YOU.

[Peter Snowberg]

For me I would have to say it's the envelope filter. I had to suddenly think about the guitar sustain and the release characteristics of the envelope detector at the same time in order to get the desired effect. I guess it helped me with dynamics to some degree but I'm a nerd and not a musician. 

[Melanhead]

a boss DS-1  ... before that I was player guitar through a bass amp and a flanger ( back in '83 ) .... You could imagine my excitement as a 13 year old discovering distortion! ...

[syndromet]

Well, the discovery of the overdrive at the age of 13 was huge, but I guess what changed my playing the most was to learn how to realy use delay and reverb.

[The Tone God]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

Andrew

[Gladmarr]

Oh, it was the delay, definitely.  I went from a hardcore/punk guitarist to a drones and soundscapes guy overnight!    

Then I'd have to say the wah, because I've never really used one right.  I like to use it to bring out one note or a swept range of notes in a chord rather than the wah-wah soloing stuff that it usually gets used for.

yo.

[geertjacobs]

Our band made a huge step forward when I brought a DD-2 for our guitar player.
More importantly we used the stereo outputs into two tube amps.
Suddenly we could sound "big" without the need for a second guitarist.
Think U2, Jane's Addiction, Tool,...

[puretube]

WAH first chronologically,
envelope folloWah: bigger change.

[Marcos - Munky]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

Andrew

This is a great one.

My vote is for delay too. I played with delay jamming with a few friends, it was something that I did in the same time, just used a friend's Zoom 505-2 delay, but didn't changed anything in my playing style. Now I built a PT-80 and had more time to play with it, and discovered that it's cool to play with the repeated signals and time to breath between the notes.

Also, fuzz changed me too (who didn't changed?). Think about an 13 years old boy playing in a clean guitar or acoustic guitar, then the father cames and gives his old Wah/Fuzz pedal.

[bwanasonic]

#1 Turning off the Dyna-Comp. I used the DC in *always on* mode for years.

#2 Envelope Filter. This ties in with #1 in my rediscovery of dynamics. A great exercise is playing scales, etc. with the envelope filter (turn the sensitivity down a bit), striving for a consistent triggering of the filter on each note.

I probably should renumber these and put wah at #1, as that was really my first effect ( I bought a wah before I even properly owned a guitar!).

Kerry M

[pi22seven]

+1 Wah.

I'd tried wahs before just goofing around. But when I got mine it really made me think about phrasing, playing more like a horn player even without the wah.

DD-3 made me think about washes of sound to fill up our 3 piece.

[Jay Doyle]

#1 Turning off the Dyna-Comp. I used the DC in *always on* mode for years.

Well, I would have to agree with you, though mine is a Ross, and learning to play with it ON was just as big of a change as it was when I turned it off.

Compression is a whole new realm of playing in my book. I can FLY around the fretboard with my comp on and know that despite differences in my picking, the notes will all come out at the same level. Though you lose the dynamics...

Big time trade off.

I also used it for purely practical reasons in a band to keep my level constant whether I was clean or heavily distorted. (I ran my distortions INTO the comp, opposite of what you are supposed to do but it worked for me.)

[Jeremy]

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.

[Steve Newton]

the first mind expander = Chorus - suddenly a clean tone was interesting.

But the real change in playing came with my first Echo unit, a light went on in my head "that's how it should sound!!!".

Of course the real magic happened with the 2 together.

[mojotron]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

Andrew

Yep, I switched from an Ibanez RG with a ART "all in one processor" (delay and flanger on top of everything...) in the '90s to just a Strat and a Deluxe Reverb since about 2000. I played that way for a long time - totallys changes your playing when you have to get the amp/guitar to do everything. Now, I'm somewhere inbetween using just analog stuff and reverb for the most part.

[Jayco]

Kerry,

I'll second you on the "turning OFF the Dynacomp"...  I was the same way until recently.  I bought myself an Orange AD-30HTC head and 2x12 cabinet and was having trouble getting a sound I liked with my "usual" setup (read: Dynacomp always on)...  I turned it off and suddenly realized a whole slew more tone out of my amps.

Now I use the compressor as an effect (to crystallize clean sounds or to help with pad-style effects etc)...  

The next most influential pedal for me was my old Washburn analog delay... don't have it anymore, but it was very cool from both a texturing and an effect perspective (Analog delays are great when you tweak their knobs real-time... all kinds of strange sounds).

Jim

[psiico]

That'd have to be the autowah.  I once read Joe Satriani saying something about controlling the voice of your note by how hard and where you pick the string and at what angle.  It sounded a bit over the top to me at the time until I tried an autowah and I could really hear exactly what he meant since the effect builds off those variables.  I now find myself paying attention to the differnet tones I get playing notes different ways wether I'm using the autowah or not.  I'm not saying I'm good at it, lol, just that I'm paying attention.  To be honest, I now prefer an autowah over a regular wah, I can control the autowah better.

[MartyMart]

It has to be "analog ( analogue !!) delay" for me too, the "atmosphere" and "cross rhythm's" were
and still are an inspiration.
It's the No 1 effect that I come back to, time and time again 
( recorded a part with one again today )
Never did like a "digital" and what I consider "sterile" delay unit !!

MM.

[gez]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

You beat me to it!  The biggest change that happened in my playing was when I bought an amp with no built in reverb.  It highlighted all my flaws and really made me work.  I only use reverb for recording now, can't stand it otherwise.  Effects are the icing on the cake...or should be! 

[skiraly017]

How about turning the pedals off and playing straight ?

Andrew

Yup. A real eye opener for me, especially when I got an amp that had such a great clean tone that anything in front of it just seemed to screw it up.