Certain trends come and go like waves through the guitar world. There are always players willing to hoe their own row, of course, to play what they play and sound how they sound, disregarding whatever might currently be “fashionable” among the madding crowd. But for others, and especially those willing to get mired in the thick of the blogosphere, there’s always some new way to find yourself suddenly rendered uncool.
For quite some time, among a certain crowd at least, the current thang has been playing straight in: going from guitar straight to tube amp, with nothing more than a good cable in between. Everything else you add to the chain, apparently, just further emasculates you. Pedals? That’s cheating—especially when they’re of the overdrive variety and used to achieve your lead sound. The real man cranks up the amp and uses the guitar’s volume to achieve clean to crunch to all-out lead, and that’s that. Anything more is just, well, less; it’s a crutch, and you’re not a “real player” if you indulge it.
Like a lot of guitarists, I really enjoy plugging a fine guitar straight into a smokin’ tube amp and playing my heart out. There’s often a connectedness there in that absolute minimum of signal loss between pickups and preamp tube that represents the purest sonic state of the rig in question and makes the guitar a more expressive instrument in the process. Or at least I tell myself there is. It’s pretty cool when you can do it—problem is, such a setup just isn’t practical for every playing situation. In many cases, jacking straight in might even be detrimental to your performance, and even your overall tone.
The trick is, several variables potentially come into the picture when you urge someone to “plug straight in,” and often the player doing the urging—or swearing by the results—isn’t considering the setup from a wide range of musical genres or rig requirements.
In many cases, jacking straight in might even be detrimental to your performance, and even your overall tone.
Forget the obvious fact that you’ll need an effects unit somewhere in the lineup if you want tremolo, delay, or other modulation sounds, and just consider for a moment the utility of a single overdrive pedal. Adding just one pedal in line between guitar an amp, something as simple as a low-gain overdrive or booster, can often be enough to really juice the tone you elicit from a quality tube amp, and provide a surprising added level of versatility, too.
Often when I’m playing straight-to-amp at home or in the studio, as the situation allows, I come away thinking, “I love this! The tone, the simplicity! I’m going to do this all the time!” Then I quickly realize it just isn’t possible. In many of the bands I play with I’ll also be singing, while sometimes being the only guitar player, covering a lot of ground between rhythm and fills and solos while the drummer is steaming away at 140 BPM. The hallowed “just reaching down to twist your volume knob” approach might seem obvious enough, but doing it accurately while singing the bridge and maintaining a steady demi-semiquaver pick stroke in the rhythm part before your solo kicks in is a lot easier said than done (and not even that easy to say, come to think of it). Step on the right overdrive pedal, however, and the transition is seamless.
From the audience’s perspective, it’s easy to see which is less detrimental to the flow of the show. For the blueser stretching out in an extended jam with several bars to kill in heady contemplation of the next move, sure, reaching down to tweak the guitar’s volume to perfection is a simple enough task. For plenty of others, though, it’s just a great way to blow your transitions.
On top of that, plenty of songs just need some fuzz, some tremolo, some echo, or some wah-wah. Those are great sounds, man, so why should we ghettoize them?
As the guy who wrote a book on effects pedals, and recently put a lot of time into updating it too (Guitar Effects Pedals: The Practical Handbook—Updated And Expanded Edition, Backbeat Books 2014), I still don’t use all that many pedals, even in bands where I really need them, and maintain somewhat of an anti-effects attitude on balance. At gigs I’ll sometimes bump into other players who have read my effects book, and they’ll come up after the set and ask to check out my pedalboard. The response that follows that “voila!” moment is usually a little anticlimactic. “Oh, okay…” (slouches off, puzzled frown…) At most, I’ll have four or five boxes on there, two of which will be overdrive-related, and one of which will be a tuner. It’s usually quality gear (and frequently rotating), but underwhelming in its scope.
The thing is, while I dearly love the idea of going straight into the amp, and frequently fantasize how freeing and enlightening that state of affairs would be, I get great service from the pedals that I do use. They make my performance easier, and make the experience for both me and any listeners more pleasurable; they also help me to sound, live, like some semblance of what I put down in the recorded tracks. Put it all together and I’m a happy guitarist. I don’t need some stud telling me I’m less of a man for chaining together half a dozen crutch boxes between me and my mojo juice.
The “just plug and play” can be great for the jazz guy, classic rock guy, the retro rock’n’roller, the blues wailer, and others in that vein, where the music is either simple enough sonically, or offers scope and breadth for you to mess with those knobs as necessary, twisting and tweaking through the rambles of an extended solo, then dropping it down to slip quietly back out of the spotlight when you’re done. For a huge proportion of us, though, that kind of effort and distraction would eventually lose us the gig. It just ain’t happening, and it’s only detrimental to the creative muse to feel we have to pursue the same bare simplicity.
Dave Hunter is a writer and musician who has worked extensively in the USA and the UK. The author of The Guitar Amp Handbook, Guitar Effects Pedals, Guitar Amps & Effects For Dummies, The Gibson Les Paul and several other books, Dave is also a regular contributor to Guitar Player and Vintage Guitar magazines.