Everything in this story boils down to one single event: my old audio interface breaking down and needing to be replaced. What I got was something considerably more modern and high-capacity, making it possible to record my guitar directly without any noticeable latency. For the first time ever, I was in a position where I could really explore guitar plugins. And boy, was I in for a surprise!
To make things abundantly clear: the quality of the amp simulations was exactly what I expected. It is digital technology, so it is basically a given that it gets cheaper and better with time. Instead of trying to squeeze a computer into an amp, a plugin is about using the greater capacity of the PC (or Mac) to make a computer sound like an amp. Sure enough, the plugins I tried not only managed to get my strings to feel like they do through a loud tube amp. They were also remarkably touch-sensitive, allowing me to use picking dynamics and my volume control to control my articulation and tone. That in combination with some sort of black magic in the audio interface also gave me all the sustain and flow I wanted without having to resort to an external compressor.
What changed everything was the multitude of pedals and rack effects built into the plugins. At the click of a mouse, I could connect a CE-1, an Electric Mistress, a Fuzz Face or even a Leslie sim. Are the sims completely accurate? I couldn’t tell, and honestly I don’t care. As long as the sound is usable, I don’t care if they’ve copied a cheap Amazon pedal. Instead of having to bring out my pedalboard, connect guitar to pedals to amp to interface, I could just pull up ready-made presets and get a consistent sound from session to session. I noticed that I got just as much out of noodling with the plugin as I had with my pedals and amp, and after a while, I realized that I hadn’t used the board for more than a year. Once I got the notion that I wanted a seven-string guitar, that accelerated my plans to sell off most of my gear.
I might have mentioned it on here already, but about two years ago, I switched my pedalboards around, keeping the big one at home and the small one in the rehearsal room. It felt like the logical next step. After all, it didn’t take long for me to figure out that five of the pedals saw 99.5% of the usage. Not long after that, GNH started shifting ever so slightly from a more progressive, psychedelic, improvisatory rock band to something more akin to traditional 80s heavy metal. That required a slightly different selection of tones, including chorus over distortion, which meant that I had to dump my MXR Analog Chorus in favor of something digital and decidedly less noisy. After rehearsing weekly with this selection of effects for the better part of two years, I have yet to feel that there’s anything missing. Once in a blue moon, it occurs to me to get some kind of harmonizer (I did briefly consider using electronics to drop a regular guitar to B standard), but it’s been a while since the last time.
In the end, I kept ten pedals: the five I keep on my pedalboard in the rehearsal room, and another five that might come in handy and/or that I just don’t feel like trying to sell. I just hope that this time, I will have finally learned my lesson. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result every time. That I managed to scrape together enough cash to get the seven-string by selling all that stuff does not change the fact that I paid even more for it if you put everything together, it was just that I did so over a period of six years. Going forward, what I should do is deposit the equivalent of a pedal into my guitar savings account. instead of taking the circuitous route and purchasing something I ultimately find that I don’t get that much use for. Selling stuff on the Swedish equivalent of Craigslist is one hell of a lot smoother now that they have a third-party service for administering payment and shipping, but it is still a lot of work shooting the pictures, writing the copy and then sitting around waiting. This time, I was fortunate that I bought all those pedals before the prices shot up, so I didn’t lose all that much. But I haven’t been that lucky in the past, and I will likely not be in the future.
elevea 