i use the boss mt  2 metal zone distortion pedal. at first because i traded it from a friend who wanted a 32oz of bud ice and a pack of camels so i figured it wasn't a bad investment for about 7 dollars. then later i added a boss tu-2 chromatic tuner pedal. and if you play live show you know its such a bummer when the guitarist has to unplug find his tuner and light to see the needle. this pedal so cool you just step on it and it cuts the signal to the amp so you can tune up super quick without unplugging or turning off any other pedal. and it works really good as a mute.

i just experienced a decimator noise reduction pedal and i relish the silence that it provides.

but as for my current 2 pedal set up it allows me a lot of freedom and i play a mixture of punk, metal and hardcore. just the simple catchy punk rhythms and a light amount of metal leads like when metal was still good like when they wore make up. and some of the hardcore style break down bridge parts. the good kinda hardcore before girl pants and eye make up and their parents not loving them.

check it out some examples of this
myspace.com/dumptrukkk
groups called NDT   

I have no pedals but welcome to chordbook civicstar....

GuitarZen

Ok first off, the whole self loathing thing is called emo and is very much not metal. The girl pants is scene and is also the polar opposite of metal. I'll excuse the confusion this once. For the record I refuse to recognize break-down as anything close to metal, the use of an auto-tuner is never acceptable, and the only ***core music is the original Hardcore; bands like Strife and Earth Crisis. I see the current adj.-core bands as an attempt to attach sub genre descriptions to metal beyond your broad thrash, death, black, etc. classifications. While I do enjoy many of these bands' music, I do not recognize the labels as they do not serve a useful purpose. Musical tastes are highly personal, but I feel that those are among the rules of metal.

That said, I'll leave my soap box behind me. I apologize if I offended.

For the record, there are still bands that wear makeup. Dark Funeral, Immortal, Dimmu Borgir, to name a few. I'm sure Cradle of Filth does as well, but I feel they've been on a downward trend since Nymphetamine.


On to the gear!

Pedal wise, I'm currently using a Digitech Hardwire HT-2 tuner, Dunlop wah (the original noisy one), and Digitech Whammy. They're arranged in that order and are in front of my amp.

On occasion I'll throw a Boss GE-7 in with a flat setting and the gain cranked to provide a pre-amp boost. I may some day invest in a Maxon OD808 or similar, but who knows.

Since the latter two pedals do not feature true bypass, and because my amp's effects loop isn't switchable, I may invest in a loop pedal at some point to solve these issues. Radial Engineering makes a good looking one. I think the idea of essentially adding true bypass in front of or in the amp's effects loop is a good one. I have noticed a slight alteration of the guitar's tone in front of the amp and I think it's dropping my gain a bit. I'm afraid to put those pedals in the loop for fear of what they'd do to my tone.

Welcome to the board by the way!

What's the rest of your rig consist of? What kind of amp, guitars, etc.?

I don't loath myself i love me and the only reason my pants are kinda tight is i gained like 30 pounds after my daughter was born and am to cheap to buy new pants and shirts oh well. and i could of sworn i said hardcore before make up and girl pants
i think i was taken a little out of context with the genre. the tuner is just a pedal in line so i don't have to unplug during shows and is more of a convenience and shows the audience you came to play not take forever tuning. i would have got the boss tu-1000 chromatic tuner but it was more then my average car payment.
and i meant like original metal from heavy stuff like slayer to early stuff like kiss. Kiss not really being an influence of mine but other member of my group and they wore make up and it was kinda funny and that's what i meant by metal bands that wear make up. i cant stand a lot of the nu metal like dimebougur sorry for the miss spelling and deiacide and cradle of filth  they loss a lot due to boring vocals just sounds like noise after a while.

And hard core i was staying true with bands like Mad ball from NYC, war zone, agnostic front, sick of it all, uniform choice, minor threat. They are more like some what reformed criminal types that play music now instead of running drugs and gangs. and true hardcore like that you can understand the words is pretty simple to play and has break downs just cool little sections to slow down or speed up. Now hardcore has turn to metal core which is as you stated and i agree heavily emo.
And my parents tried to give me everything they could to help me grow up and I'm not white so i really have nothing to complain about and i tried to get my hair to do that flippy thing in the front you know the super bangs but to many dudes where buying me drinks and i let it grow into an Afro and they ladies dig that.

But for me I'm a punk thru and thru its more of a life choice its what i grew up on i still say the sex pistols are one of my top 5 favorite bands i dig the sound and the ideas behind a lot of it except political jargon i just wanna have fun.

other equipment include a marshal 1960 A lead cab got it like new for 250 couldn't pass it up. and an ibanez tone blaster 150 watt head. don't jump down my throat its solid state but it does exactly what i need it too. also own an ibanez gio gax70. kinda like a sg copy obviously much cheaper. the gio guitars are like the ibanez base models but it plays like the expensive ones and holds a tune.
i also have a custom lead II combo amp pretty rad little thing. and a 12 string acoustic and a 6 string acoustic electric not really any notable brand but good sound. and a classical guitar and a fender strat copy it says fender but somebody put it together and wired everything to the volume pot so it sounds distorted when ever you turn it up. and a fender squire which has been under construction getting 2 humbuckers coming up on 6 months now. but hey the guys a pro doing it for free just got to be patient.

oh and i forgot i had questions well one.
the loop business on the front of my amp i don't really know what the practical application for it is
you said you where using yours so how would i use it and what is its purpose please a better explanation
then repeating the tittle its a "loop station"

and i never really saw the purpose of having pedals that do like 50 different effects
i want one to do what it says like distort or tune or boost that way all the sudden you step on
your pedal and you sound like the b52s instead of slayer.
much the same with a whammy bar don't really like how people use them outside of blues
guitaring. like when your sitting with a bad ass flat black acoustic with the f hole no circle sound whole
with that big bad bigsby arm on  it in gold thats what tuff is.
but that pig squeal dragon force sound gets old super quick 

Kids today,, I have an amp, and that is it. I do well to play one note at a time. And welcome to chordbook. I kind of wanted a digitech bad monkey stomp box, but it would only make my bad playing a different kind of bad sound.

its nice to have more options with electric guitars but i still play the first guitar i ever got for my 22nd birthday the most and it's acoustic

The Style you play dictates the effects you use.I don't play Metal so I don'y need any thing but  an in -line tuner, and a little reverb and Chorus.I The reverb  is a wonderful tool for playing back up to  the vocals. But I must admit that I am very old School.Please don't get so caught up in the effects so the guitar has no sound of it's own. the simple beauty of a guitar riff should be what your after, Like I said I'm very old School.

i try to write everything on the acoustic first and then i enhance and simplify it was the electric. the pedals i think you give you an arsenal of sounds that you can play with to keep you creativity flowing. i wouldn't say pedals are the only thing or no pedals but i agree there is a limit i think 3 is the max i would want to have come into play and one would be to tune one would distort and one to silence. Even with all the fancy stuff the guitar won't play itself and cheap or expensive effects don't stand in for lack of skill. where your limited people hear it.

my gear is a single cry baby wha wha pedal into a chorus pedal into a compressor mostly i just use the wha pedal if anything at all. a clean tone with the bass turned all the way down to give it richness. neck pickup also gives a deeper tone so thats where it stays. i have a distortion pedal but i cant affourd nine volts for all of them and i only have 3 power supplies. bestof all i am happy to say that i run the effects loop through a fender 4x10 deville with a touch of reverb going onit as i think tha reverb is the essentil guitar effect. set it at about 7 of 12 .
i would like a nice delay pedal and a looping station but they are pricey so i have to wait. as for what style i mostly like blues and rock with a touch of bluegrass and some classical to boot .

yeah i feel you buying batteries sucks especially if you forget to unplug and its dead in a day.
if you get the one spot 9v adapter plus a daisy chain you can power quite a few pedals with
one power supply i think mine does fine so i power my two pedals plus my friends one. and
if tyhe bassist wanted to plug in his pedal there still 2 free plugs on the daisy chain.

Its allways good to have back-ups for everything when playin live.  You never know when the representitive from the "Murphy's Law" firm is going to pop into a venue you may be playing and reak havock upon your gear..

Jim.

PS:  Dont forget extra duct tape..... "Very important"

Jag, Amen to the Duct tape. Never leave home without it.

For the record, they're spelled Dimmu Borgir and Deicide. Dimmu Borgir means Dark Castle in Norwegian.

I checked out those bands you mentioned being Hardcore. While not the stuff I remember, I can definitely hear it and they're what I'd expect the genre I used to love to have evolved into.

I was in California and into the Hardcore scene when it morphed into emo. I quit the band I was in when our vocalist wanted to stop being Hardcore and go emo. I ended up putting the guitar down because of it. I've loathed the genre ever since.


That again said, the Marshall 1960A is a great cabinet. I own one myself in fact, although I paid a lot more than you did. As for your Ibanez head, don't let anyone tell you anything discouraging regarding your use of a solid state head. Good tone is by no means limited to tube amps. Not only that, but a solid state amps don't have to warm up or cool down before/after use, and you won't be spending $150 - $200 any time soon to retube your amp. Besides, if it works for you there's nothing wrong with it. As someone once said, "Your tone is for you. Your music is for everyone."

Loop pedals and Loop Stations are separate things. I was referring to a loop pedal, such as the Radial EFX. Basically it's a pedal with two effects loops built in and true bypass. A loop station is a pedal (or rackmount device, etc.) that can record and play back a piece of what is being played through it. In pedal form you basically hold down a pedal to begin recording, and when you're done you let go. It'll either start playing or has a button/pedal to initiate playback.

Using an effects loop is quite easy so long as you bear a few things in mind. First, things will sound different in the effects loop than they will before the amp. Your amp has two stages. Preamp and power amp. The preamp is the part that shapes the tone, and the power amp is what gives it volume. The effects loop exists between the two. It goes roughly like this:

Preamp -> Effects Loop Send -> Effects Loop Return -> Power Amp -> Speakers

A big rule to remember is to not put any gain oriented effects in the effects loop. No distortions or overdrives should be used there as they alter the impedance of the signal and will often take it out of the power amp's input specs. They'll also sound horrible. Usually you'll want to try things like delay, reverb, and wah through the effects loop. The signal path would look like this (assuming a reverb pedal):

Effects Loop Send -> Reverb Pedal Input -> Reverb Pedal Output -> Effects Loop Return

There are different types of loops and different details about them that may come into play, but none of those things should affect just messing around with them and seeing what sounds good.

Mort did you try out the Bad Monkey? I've heard some good things about them both as overdrive and as pre-amp boosts.

shaidtan wrote:

Mort did you try out the Bad Monkey? I've heard some good things about them both as overdrive and as pre-amp boosts.

No I have not, the Digitech website has sound clips of each of their products. I could have gone two or three different ways with the boxes, but I really don't need one at all at my level.

Ok i think i understand the loop stuff thank you, maybe ill try it in the future.
yeah i know a lot of those black slash fantasy type metal bands have
deep meaningful foreign names but it always feels like I'm fighting
a dragon or storming a castle to save the princess when i listen to most
and i realized that not everybody can be epic 24 hours a day with
all the metal spikes and boots like cradle of filth and what not.

and i remember the days hardcore broke in to a said pittance
of self loathing but i remember the good times. if you have been to
any hardcore in cali recently every band just has a violent
name
guns blazing fast
stand your ground
fight for life
die to live

Just that kinda mumbo jumbo
Shaidtan what are some other bands you dig out
could always use more good metal influences
and if you haven't heard of a band called Ale Storm
check it out if you don't like their music just enjoy
the leads singers white roland keytar with blue flames

I play what we used to call soft rock, nowadays I guess it's "singer-songwriter," and blues.

I orignally set my pedal board up for my 'lectrics--'72 Tele custom RI, std tele and custom built hartail strat--the first and third are set up for slide, little higher action and flat wound strings.

After several years of experimentation the board looks like this: Morley ABC switch, Planet Waves tuner, BBE Optostomp compressor, Bluetube overdrive, Digitech digidelay, Digitech CR-7 stereo chorus. All this is run into a Behringer Xenyx 1204 mixer, thence into two Fender Deluxe 112 solid state amps which function as powered speakers.

When I was playing 'lectrics it worked out pretty well, but now I run a Martin D15 for standard tuning, a '47 Gretsch Synchromatic 100 in open D, and usually the Strat in open C into the Morley switcher. I use the chorus and a plate reverb in the Behringer for everything, Bluetube only with the Strat for Elmore Leonard type slide, and the delay for a pseudo 12 string sound. I've been quite pleased with the way the acoustics sound through the board. I've also been known to play a Galveston spider bridge dobro, a Regal biscuit metal body and an old Wilson (Yahri) classical through it.

freep
that sounds killer do you have links to you playing with any
of that gear or even your more recent acoustic stuff.
just with all that stuff you had going you gotta know what your doing
kudos

Just got my hands on a rocktron nitro clean boost pedal no longer
and i just a chump with a distortion pedal i can boost
my clean parts for the ladies very excited. i figure when i fill
my 5 spot dasiy chain that will be enough and i
never use more then 2 pedals at a time im either tuning or
distorting