Your First Pedal
- Thread starter Danno
- Start date
My first pedal was a Shin-Ei Fuzz-Wah like this one:
I bought it from a German electronics supplier for very little money.
Interesting thing about it was that at that point of time I was not aware that the heavy sound on my Deep Purple, Kiss and Queen records was not done by the master`s hands alone but with the help of distortion.
Until then I thought that distortion is something to avoid with an amplifier!
So this cheap little box was a major revelation. (Same as learning that you don`t hold a pick with three fingers and super-thick strings mean that you cannot bent them easily.)
I bought it from a German electronics supplier for very little money.
Interesting thing about it was that at that point of time I was not aware that the heavy sound on my Deep Purple, Kiss and Queen records was not done by the master`s hands alone but with the help of distortion.
Until then I thought that distortion is something to avoid with an amplifier!
So this cheap little box was a major revelation. (Same as learning that you don`t hold a pick with three fingers and super-thick strings mean that you cannot bent them easily.)
GDGT
Electromatic
You were smarter than me! At some point in that era I got an Arion Stereo Flanger because a) everyone else had a chorus, who wants to be like everyone else? and b) stereo, baby! I don't know what I thought was going to happen with that. (Narrator: nothing ever happened with that.) However, that pedal can self-oscillate, which I confess I have used.
Chris Lamping
Electromatic
First pedal story: I'd played guitar for nearly 30 years and never owned a pedal (except the Fender volume pedal for my pedal steel). I wasn't playing steel much anymore and had a huge Nashville 400 pedal steel amp that I thought 'it's a good amp, if only I could get some dirt in it, I could play guitar with it.' If you know those amps, they are clean, clean clean. I bought a Danelectro Daddy O because it was the best reviewed I could afford at the time, thought the Marshall Guv'ner circuit paired with an articulate amp like that would be cool, plugged it in, and that amp cut the signal to the point where it was clean! (and barely audible-- that's a loud amp).
I'd read that the guys in Wire had Music Mans, then that Joe Strummer did too, also that they were fantastic clean amps (pedal steel is still around), they were way under the radar then, found one on Craigslist, sold the Nashville to a fiddle player and ended up with a Music Man 112 (with "Phasor"!-- free pedal, sort of) and a couple hundred dollars. That wasn't just a Daddy-O, it was a Sugar Daddy-O!
I still have it, but realized that I never actually liked distortion in the first place, just a little overdrive. Those metal box Danelectros are great pedals, though, I have an original Holy Grail and prefer the Dan-Echo (my second pedal), it does the former and can get really, really crazy. If you have one laying around, they're really worth dusting off.
I'd read that the guys in Wire had Music Mans, then that Joe Strummer did too, also that they were fantastic clean amps (pedal steel is still around), they were way under the radar then, found one on Craigslist, sold the Nashville to a fiddle player and ended up with a Music Man 112 (with "Phasor"!-- free pedal, sort of) and a couple hundred dollars. That wasn't just a Daddy-O, it was a Sugar Daddy-O!
I still have it, but realized that I never actually liked distortion in the first place, just a little overdrive. Those metal box Danelectros are great pedals, though, I have an original Holy Grail and prefer the Dan-Echo (my second pedal), it does the former and can get really, really crazy. If you have one laying around, they're really worth dusting off.
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