Guitar Gear

Did I just say that? A gear slut saying to get rid of gear?

Okay, I have to admit that the title was mostly meant to be an attention-getter. BUT… There really is a serious side to this, and no, it has nothing to do with evaluating an emotional response to gear. What the subject of this post revolves around is this simple question that I’d like you to ask yourself:

How much am I hiding behind my gear?

To answer that question, try this:

1. Pick a song or solo that you know very well – the more complicated, the better.
2. Make sure you’re plugged in and have all the effects you normally use to play it.
3. Play the piece. It’ll probably be the same, familiar thing you know so well.
4. Now, turn off all your pedals, set your amp’s reverb to 0, set up the amp for maximum clean headroom such that no matter how hard you attack or turn up the guitar volume, it will not break up.
5. Replay the song/solo in its entirety.

How did it sound?

Chances are good that you may say something similar to “Ouch! That wasn’t very good.” <or in my case, my reaction was filled with muttered expletives> It can be a humiliating and sobering experience to hear yourself play without effects.

I discovered this “humiliation” when I first got my 1958 Fender Champ, a 5 Watt, single-knob amp with a 6″ speaker. I was all set to do a review and provide sound samples, and when I sat down to record the amp, I sounded like shit! 🙂 I switched guitars and still sounded horrible. It was then that I realized that it wasn’t the guitars that sounded bad, it was me. And it also made me realize that I had been hiding behind my overdrives and reverbs and delays – for a long time.

So I delayed providing sound clips for a long time until I did a little woodshedding to work on my technique. It would be months before I felt comfortable playing that amp.

But there were several positives that came out of that process:

1. I learned to be so much more expressive with just my fingers. With nothing to hide behind, everything had to come through me, just me.
2. Using a totally clean amp helped me find my own, authentic sound; that base tone that no matter what guitar or amp I play, I sound like myself.
3. The few months that I spent on my technique got me into this mode – and this is the crux of the article – where I felt that I just didn’t need certain pedals – especially overdrives. I could rely on the amp for that.
4. I also came to the realization that what pedals I would use going forward would be accents to my sound as opposed to defining my sound.

At first, I reduced my pedal board to just modulation pedals; specifically, chorus, delay, and reverb. If I needed overdrive, I’d just overdrive my amp. But after awhile, I started back some overdrive pedals, simply because I like the sound of my favorite pedals like my Tone Freak Abunai 2 or EHX Soul Food. I’ll occasionally have a wah in the chain (though now that I’m playing a lot of reggae, it’s more often than not). But for the most part, I went from having a 12-pedal board to usually just using a PedalTrain Nano.

I will say that your mileage may vary. But if you’re like me, you may very well find that you just don’t need a bunch of pedals to get your sound.