Effects are the best part about playing an electric guitar. A really good guitarist can sound just as good playing an acoustic guitar as an electric, but stomp boxes and multi-effects units can do a lot to create a distinctive sound, or at least a sound that fits the mood of the music. Of course, no pedal is going to turn a two week novice into Eddie Van Halen; Solid playing comes first.

Although guitar amplifiers were originally conceived as a means to project music more effectively in large and loud clubs, electrification opened up a Pandora's box of sonic possibilities with hundreds of pedals on the market. The possibilities are endless; The TalkBox solo on your death metal song might sound weird to some people at first, but they might get used to it and it might become the big thing. You never know. Who would have thought people would rip off Korn's sound? But they did.

Link Wray, composer of the epic rock instrumental, "Rumble", is credited with the first use of distortion when he punctured the speaker cones on his guitar amplifier. This paved the way for generations of progressively louder bands, from Hard Rock and Heavy Metal, to Punk Rock, Thrash, and Death Metal and more recently to Nu-Metal and Emo.

Distortion can be anything from a warm "Fuzz" sound, which makes the guitar sound more full and a little bit more buzzy, to various "Metal" distortion petals that offer shrieking, jagged, ear-splitting high gain alterations to your guitar's sound.

Even bands that people do not generally think of as "heavy" will use a little bit of Overdrive.
Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton made the Dunlop CryBaby Wah pedal an element that many guitarists wanted to add to their arsenals, in order to add an extra dimension of expressiveness to their solos or rhythm playing. Today, several different companies also make wah pedals, such as Morley, Boss, and Danelectro.

Reverb is a faint echoing effect that I don't happen to like, but is still popular with many people for it's ability to increase the sustain and body of notes that are played.

Crazy and interesting sounds can also be made by a variety of other effects such as octave pedals, pitch shifters, flangers, phasers, tremolos and rotary speaker effects. There are also drone-imitating Sitar simulator pedals, and Ring Modulators that will make your guitar sound like clanging bells. It seems like new gadgets get invented every year.

You can get one or two super high quality, heavy duty stomp boxes, which can be a little pricey for the average musician, or you can get a more economical digital multi effects processor that gives you a variety of choices.

It all depends on what you want to play and how you want to sound; You might want to have a psychedelic sound that uses 20 different sound effects a night, or you might be an electric blues player who sounds perfect with nothing but an overdriven amp. The key is figuring out which kind of player you want to be and taking the steps necessary to become that player, whether that means perfecting your playing or getting the perfect sound.


by Billy Sunshine

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