This is the first in a series of three posts written by Andy on electric guitar pedals for worship.
Actually you don’t need a huge amount of pedals to get going. I’d say that with a good Tube Screamer overdrive type pedal and a decent delay you should be able to reproduce most of what’s required by an electric player in a modern worship band. So in this first post I’ll look at the overdrive, then delay in the next and finally just a few tips on other bits to get you up and running like power supplies etc.
A tube what?
The Ibanez Tube Screamer is probably the most popular overdrive pedal on the planet, with good reason. It produces a range of usable valve amp like tones from mild to heavy, can make a really bad amp sound passable and a good one great. You can use it for blues, country, rock – to be honest most styles that modern worship songs are based on. Most models have a characteristic of a slight mid range boost or ‘hump’ which helps cut through the mix in a live situation, which is part of the secret that makes it so usable.
The Tube Screamer pedal has come in a range of models – TS7, TS8, TS808, TS9, TS10 plus many other variants with the most highly prized being the vintage 808 models which are now reassuringly expensive!
In fact so many people love the 808 that there are now a myriad of boutique companies producing some of the nicest overdrives in the world based on that original Tube Screamer circuit. With so many to choose from its worth checking out demos on YouTube and reviews on Harmony Central before you buy, but ultimately if there is some way you can try one out in a live band situation then more the better. Some have even have options like a second footswitch for more overdrive or a clean boost. However, even if you can’t you should be on fairly safe territory with most of the options here.
So here are some tubescreamer type pedals to try out. I’ve listed them roughly in ascending price order. Whilst anything not made by Ibanez is technically a copy, anything listed below the genuine ones are cheaper and mass produced and above them are considered hand made and of better tone or with more options. The rule always applies. You get what you pay for! However these are all pretty rugged so buying used shouldn’t be a problem and could save you lots of cash.
BTW this is not by any means an exhaustive list so if you have other alternatives that you’ve tried please do comment for the benefit of everyone.
Behringer Vintage tube Overdrive TO800 – cheap way to get started
Digitech Bad Monkey – good value copy
Danelectro Cool Cat Overdrive – good value copy
Boss OD3/SD1 – good value boss flavoured alternatives. Modded versions(below) very good!
Ibanez TS9 – good standard production pedal
Ibanez TS 808 reissue – nearly the price of a boutique job but if you want the orginal….
Maxon OD808 – well regarded alternative to original
Visual Sound v2 808/Route 66/Jekyl & Hyde – these are great! And Bob from Visual Sound presents a section on pedals in our Intermediate Worship Guitar DVDs
Fulltone Fulldrive 2 – dual overdrive pedal – choice of many working pros for years
Build Your Own Clone – if you are hady with a soldering iron, build yourself a very high quality clone with this kit.
Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive – cool peadl that lets you add some clean sound for a bit o ‘sparkle’
Keeley Modified TS9 – people speak very highly of these modified pedals
Analogueman Modified TS808/TS9
Monte Allums.com – do some mods yourself!
Homebrew Electronics Powerscreamer – well priced hand made pedal with tone switching options and a boost switch
Lovepedal – very highly regarded boutique pedal
Klon Centuar – supposedly the ‘Holy Grail’ of tone – with a price to match!
25 Comments
some great pedals mentioned here… the latest and greatest that I’m starting to see is the Line 6 X3 Live.. an expensive pedal (around $800 new) but, its amazing… its what I’m using now.. along with my other pedals…
heres my set up…
http://img.skitch.com/20090505-bbifaehin1gn73kfytap346b35.jpg
oh and I should mention… if your looking for a good distortion, and are a tone nut (like me) the digitech tone drive is the BEST over drive i’ve ever played through.. the tone is amazing
M13 … nuf said.
yea, thats a great pedal too.. combines all the great line 6 effects pedals into 1.. i went with the X3 Live because it provides 2 tone simultaneously with XLR ins, so I use tone 2 on my vox
Pedals, pedals…there’ll always be disagreement on this. The great Lincoln Brewster uses a Pod XT Live straight into the board, and who’d know.
Most amp sims can sound half-decent if you take the time to experiment (many people don’t).
Personally I love my valve amp, and get 90% of my gain from it. No pedal can ever sound as good as a proper valve amp IMHO. You do have to pay for ‘em, however. If it needs a kick, I use an Xotic BB Preamp as a gain boost, to give the crunch sound more sustain. Very transparent pedal, so you need a decent amp gain to start with. Andy Timmons is a user (YouTube it). And the guitar volume knob – a highly under-used tool.
Beyond that, some sort of modulation, either chorus, a soft flange, or a delay. Preferrably both. Anything else is window dressiong, and most folks in the congregation wouldn’t notice the difference anyway.
My rig consists of a Budda Wah, a Marshall SuperVibe chorus, a DLS EchoTap, and a Korg Pitchblack tuner. And the BB.
And an Elmwood Modena 60 amp. Never needed anything else.
Backup? An old Boss GT-3 straight into the board!
Lincoln Brewster uses the X3 Live, not the XT Live… and he uploads his tones to his website.. which is awesome.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkT4tLiH32M
Check out Barber Electronics Direct Drive
Oops, typo!
Lincoln’s video on his set-up is good too.
My pedals: http://www.divshare.com/download/5751709-3cc
The effect I use most in a worship band is chorus – I’m quite surprised you don’t mention this – but I guess it’s a lot down to taste. For electric, particularly on quieter song e.g. where I’m playing arpeggios rather than full-on strumming, I use a single-coil pickup guitar on the neck or middle pickup and add chorus to thicken up the sound and make it a bit more ‘interesting’.
Also I use just a touch of chorus on my acoustic guitar nearly all the time – again it just richens up the sound and makes it more interesting.
What do others think?
I agree with MLH regarding chorus, this is something I have always used, no matter what sort of guitar – from a 12 string acoustic to a strat type electric. Delay is good to have. For claen , via crunch, to rock sounds then do check out the Award Session JD10 preamp, it is very versatile, has XLR out for DI and G12T speaker simulation. AND it is British made, by Stewart Ward. see http://www.award-session.com/jd10.html (and I don’t own any shares!) The AP10 is also an excellent acoustic preamp/DI. As for power supplies, may I thoroughly recommend the ones sold by effectspowersupplies.com. I recently purchased their model with 6 outputs and it powers my Boss CE20, DD3 and my JD10 or AP10 noiselessly. I previously used a Boss power supply with the CE20 and this was far from noise free.
Ah, power supplies. The best I’ve found is the BBE SupaCharger. Quiet as a grave. I used to use the Diago Powerstation, which is a daisy chain, but my rig hummed like mad at higher gain settings, so that had to go.
Voodoo Labs is good too, but very pricey.
Tremolo is really cool too. I’ve got a Voodoo Labs 4-knob version (has a volume control so you don’t get a volume drop unless you want to). Love it!
Have Boss SD-1 as overdrive but currently looking for something with a bit more “umph”, but that cleans up when the volume is rolled back.
Chorus is great, but can be used too much. Stereo Chorus is better, but can’t afford or lug round two amps!
Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2 is great – powers up to 8 pedals, and can handle both old Boss ACA and new PSA pedals. Works for me!
Heard that Bob at Visual Sound has a new power supply (1-Spot?), but I don’t know if it’s on the market in the UK, and not sure how it handles the ACA /PSA problem.
I’d like to hear more about switching units. I’ve read up on Carl Martin, Voodoo Labs and Gig Rig controllers, but there seems to be a big difference in price, functionality and flexibility!
Visual Sound do indeed have a power supply :)
Have been using the 1Spot for about a year now, great little Power Supply, had to search around eBay though to find a couple with the english plugs on them. My rig hums a bit when cranked not too sure whether it’s down to the 1Spot though. Don’t have any money to try any other supplies.
I have an american version of the 1 spot too so if anyone wants to try one :)
some good thoughts here. I will run a specific post on power supplies and accessories in the 3rd part of this trilogy (where darth vadar finds out his dad is actually a fuzz pedal) but just to respond to Tim and Ben on the power supply issue, ive got a couple of 1Spots both 2 pin USA and 3 pin UK models and have found them brilliant. they automatically select the right voltage regardless of what country you are in and ive not had any problems with hum.
If you are getting noise it could be one of the pedals, the combination of your pedal chain or even your cables so do test all the scenarios to locate the culprit.
One of the problems ive had with hum in the past is with including a pedal in the chain that needs its own isolated power supply and so cant be daisy chained. You’d be surprised how many pedals needs this. Certainly old vintage and reissue analogue units like the Ibanez delay, most germanium fuzzes and treble boosters, some pedals that require a non Boss style positive tip and even newer units like the Line 6 echo park and tone core series fall into this category. You could a get a separate power supply which kinda defeats the object of the 1spot in the first place or one brilliant solution ive just seen (but not tried yet) is the virtual battery from thegigrig.com. its basically a 9volt battery sized thingy that you place in line between power daisy chain and offending pedal and it completely cuts out the noise. if your pedal needs 18volts you simply stack up two together.
Has anyone out there tried one of these yet?
A few key issues with power supplies include:
Does the overdrive come from the pedals or the amp?
Do you have effects in front of the amp, in the effect loop, or both?
Do your pedals all use the same type of pin?
Do the voltages vary?
If your amp is the source of the drive, you’re more vulnerable to hum, especially with pedals in front, so the power supply becomes more important (I love my SupaCharger! Does 110 and 220 V too).
Of course, some pedals come with a separate power supply as well.
You can get pins which reverse the polarity for those annoying Line 6 pedals, and boutique ones tend to either use Boss pins, or supply their own (at extra cost!).
At the end of the day you could spend a fortune on pedals chasing the perfect pedal for you. It helps if you know exactly what you’re going to use the thing for.
Then there’s the true bypass vs buffered argument, choice of cables, building a pedalboard…this could run for a while!
Pedals, pedals, pedals!
How about just one……..
Zoom G71ut, all the effects you could ever wish for at a fraction of the price, I’ve just bought one on ebay for £130 good as new.
Check it out…..
http://www.zoom.co.jp/english/products/g71ut/index.php
Hey Boys
I agree with the use of some sort of chorus on electric or acoustic. The entire Line6 XT Live family has enough options to keep any player “interesting” and not needing to load in an amp is a plus. A great relationship with your sound crew makes the XT Live series even easier to use. The Boss Space Echo reissue is awesome for acoustic when it’s just you and a vocalist, really fattens up the sound. You know, I had a 70’s TS10 and sold it, sorta missing it now.
My son has the Visual Sound 808 and its a good pedal.
I prefer the Xotic pedals, I use the AC booster for clean solos and the BB Pre-amp for overdrive – and both together if “loud” really needed!!!
Our sound man likes me to use a compressor to stop the ‘dynamic’ spikes in volume (I use a TRex Comp Nova)
I also like to use some tremelo (Carl Martin Trem o Vibe) from time to time and I too like some chorus ( Rocktron Deep Blue)
For Echo you can’t beet the Line 6 DL4…its just very big on the pedalboard
As for a power supplies I have tried many approaches but now I am using a really good one from Diago and ‘distributing’ it via the Boss TU2 tuner pedal, they even do a converter to run the DL4
http://www.diago.co.uk/pedal-power/pedal-power/
Okay, I’ve just managed to get hold of a Fulltone OCD (overdrive) and it’s awesome. Tried the Keeley modded Sd-1 and TS-9, Fulldrive 2 and Carl Martin Hot Drive n Boost (mk.3) and the OCD was the hands down winner.
Subtle to big rock sounds which cleans up when you turn your guitar volume down.
Try one out if you can!
I am new to electric guitar but have been on keys for years. I just landed a good deal on a full tube valve amp,the 50 watt Crate VFX5212T. I reasoned-why get emulation if I can get the real thing? It has some decent built in effects and sounds awesome. So are we at the point now where emulation sounds better than the real deal? Have the emulated sounds exceeded tubes in quality of sound?
I use a Maxon OD808
passed up a hand wired ts808 reissue
also couple the od808 with a big muff (for those 4 bar solos)
One could also consider more transparent pedals (Analogman KOT, Boss BD-2, Xotix RC) if you don’t like the mid-hump.
Hi Tim,
yes emulation is getting better all the time, but whether they have excceded tube amp i think depends on the application and critically volume levels. If you’ve ever played a Marshall stack in a large enough auditorium that you can turn it up to the volume level where the power tubes really start to drive, its a truely trouser flappping experience! Most tube amps have a sweet spot around 6 or 7 on the volume when the amp has been played enough to really warm up and the speakers push enough air where the tone seems to get almost 3D. and i’ve never found that in an emulator yet. Thing is, that moment is really hard to reproduce, even for a tube amp when its not at the ‘right’ settings/temperature etc. So for most of us who play in church we end up using a tube amp at a volume WAY below what is needed to make it sing. Plus you factor in bad building acoustics, a bad PA system, bad miking, bad mixing etc then the consistancy of an emulator starts to make sense. The other option is to use a small 5-8 watt tube amp. Lots of manufacturers have started building these in the last 2-3 years so there’s loads to choose from.
Hi,
My set-up is:
Boss AC-3 Acoustic Simulator
Line 6 Floor Pod Plus
Line 6 JM-4 Looper
(+ Ebow)
The AC-3 is pretty good at giving a reasonable acoustic sound for slower stuff. The amp modelling capability of the Line 6 Floor Pod Plus is great as it means the unit can plug straight into the sound system (via a DI box) , thus saving the effort of trying to mike up an amp.
I’ve yet to use the JM-4 live, but one day maybe.
Chris