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Live performance - have analog effects pedals had their day?

#81
40Hz said:
Even my guitarist SO, who prefers to play through old school design Fender tube amps said she thought the Katana Artist sounded more than acceptable enough to use in virtually any gig.
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I had a Katana, not the artist, so perhaps they improved things, but I found the gain channels pretty bad. I preferred to run the clean channel (which is stellar) with pedals. I figured what was the point if I'm just running the pedals anyways to get the sound I wanted and I sold it. I think that modeling and digital effects will keep improving but imho it's not there yet.

Back to the OP and partially in response to the above, I do think it's just fine, and maybe preferable to some, for gigging.
 
#82
Bassheart365 said:
So you mean bringing a laptop to the gig?
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I did this once, plugged my bass into the interface, and used its out to send it to the mixer, I did some insane stuff with like 4-5 bass tracks all EQd and compressed differently etc. Was fun, but I do not want to haul a laptop and interface around all the time. Definitely works, though, I could buy a USB midi footswitch to go with it too.
 
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#83
Al Krow said:
After several years of gigging with just bass, lead, amp, cab and band, I started down the slippery slope of pedals 15 months or so back and wondered whether to go down the multi-fx vs dedicated pedals route.

I came to the conclusion that multis, other than the really high end stuff, were not bad and a great intro into particular effects but couldn't really compete with dedicated pedals, particularly in the 'harder' emulation stuff e.g. synth, filter, dirt, polyphonic octave up but were pretty decent at some of the other 'easier' stuff e.g. delay, flange, chorus, tremolo, with compression and octave-down somewhere in between. I ended up getting a couple of the more budget Zoom multi-fxs (MS-60B and B3n) and a bunch of dedicated pedals.

Then the Helix and Helix HX came along. They are hitting the 'definitely good enough' level for a lot, but not quite all yet, effects - and let's face it in a live band mix the audience is not going to notice the last 10% difference between what the Helix is doing and a dedicated analog pedal on those effects where the Helix gets close - I know that is still not all of them. Importantly (for me anyway) the HX is also not much more than the cost of 2 or 3 decent analog pedals.

I'm now working with a couple of guitarists (one who regularly deps for us) in a function covers band. Our main guitarist has a traditional analog pedal board & Roland Blues cube amp; the dep has a Line 6 Helix ('full fat') and a relatively cheap Alto FRFR. The overall costs of their gear are about the same. I love the ability of the dep to programme his effects and have everything 'preset' for each song and effortlessly reorder if we decide on a different set list content or order. When it comes to linking songs our 'main' guitarist will be switching pedals on and off, faffing about tweaking knobs and in terms of song 'flow' spending around a minute between songs. Might not sound like much but if you have a dance floor audience it's not what they want.

One of our fellow bassists posted his board recently with a Helix HX and I'm rapidly coming to think that this is very much looking like the 'future' for live music; if so is the corollary for live performance that analog pedals have had their day?

View attachment 3052240
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Multis have been pretty capable at many things for a good while, IMHO, sufficient for live work. That's especially true of synth, especially as you can tailor patches easily for a variety of sounds.
 
#84
Frank77 said:
(Question: What does "dep" / "deps" means ?)

Not at all.

Digital multi-effects units have certainly improved a lot since I got rid of my Boss ME-8B, but a lot of their effects still sound gimmicky (IMO - the presets in particular are more often than not cartoonish and unusable) and I'm not interested in a large footprint unit that needs a dedicated wall wart if just 2-3 effects are good enough to me. I have gone back to dedicated, individual analog boxes. 6 boxes cover pretty much all my needs, anyway.

Also, your guitarist is doing it totally wrong, IMO: Stompboxes should be tweaked during soundcheck then left alone. A full minute of dead air is unacceptable, given that most of the tweaks will go totally unnoticed to the majority of the audience, anyway. Your guitarist needs to simplify things by finding stompbox settings that work for the entire set. Then all he'll have to do is switch them on or off as needed. It seems like common sense, which apparently is not that common! :laugh:

BTW, multi-effects guys can also create dead air by getting lost in their menus under stress (I've seen it happen), so multis aren't a fail-safe, either.
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I had an ME8B to replace my ME6B. Sold it and kept the ME6B!
 
#87
I have an HX and I really like it. I’m not using the full blown helix because I’m
Happy with my amp of choice. I also use a VT bass at church on a silent stage. It’s probably not as great as every individual stompbox but it covers a lot of ground really well.

This new wave of multis has come a
Long way and I think they will get better. It’s not like the old ME50B I started on and I think it’s great.
 
#88
2010P said:
I respectfully emphatically disagree with this. In the very early 90's, way before we had any of the options aailable to us now, I played with a guitarist who was a genius with effects. He had about six pedals and he was constantly kneeling down to tweak parameters all set long. The key was that he had it all choreographed and knew his pedals so well that it became just part of the show rather than these weird awkward pauses between sets. And he wasn't using these pedals simply either. He was creating soundscapes as well as holding down rhythms and lead. So I think it takes a special talent to be able to pull knob tweaking, but by no means should one absolutely never move a knob all set.
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It's hard to change to and from a pair of patches repeatedly in a single track like that, though. Whether that's an issue depends on the use case, but I wouldn't want to spend $1000 on a set of boutique pedals I couldn't do that with
 
#89
Mister Boh said:
I had a Katana, not the artist, so perhaps they improved things, but I found the gain channels pretty bad. I preferred to run the clean channel (which is stellar) with pedals. I figured what was the point if I'm just running the pedals anyways to get the sound I wanted and I sold it. I think that modeling and digital effects will keep improving but imho it's not there yet.

Back to the OP and partially in response to the above, I do think it's just fine, and maybe preferable to some, for gigging.
Click to expand...

The Artist is a different beast. It uses their Wazacraft speaker and everything in the amp was set up and fine tuned with that speaker in mind. For gigging it Id definitely prefervthe Artist model. It does sound better to my ears. For home use the 50 would be fine for me. And I agree that even with the Artist it’s not there completely yet. But it is workable in its current form. And the fact it’s firmware based means you’re not stuck with what you’ve got today. They’ll continue to develop it.

But I’m curious. Did you load the companion app and get into the nitty gritty details of configuring it to your own tastes? Or did you just go with the stock setup?
 
#93
InternetAlias said:
Would a sane person claim that tube amps (including tubes, which are part of them) are not more fragile than ss amps?
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For 40+ years of playing pro, I've always owned tube amps, always owned SS amps, too. I've accidentally dropped tube amps at about the same rate as SS amps. In every case, sometimes they break, most of the time they don't. I've also had SS amps quit working on me all of a sudden at approx. the same rate as tube amps. Once in a while I have to replace a tube, which might give a slight edge to SS as tube quality does vary, but tubes ain't light bulbs. And I generally see a lot of SS amps sitting on the shelves at repair shops as well, more than tube amps, usually. This may be because SS outsells tube, but the fact they're there in the first place means they're not by any chance immune to breakage.

So yeah, a sane person would say that. At least a sane person who's had much experience with both.
 
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#95
To be honest with you I went the individual pedal route after every multieffect unit I tried only had about one or two patches I'd use and didn't feel like the expense of buying them were worth it. As I learned about signal processing I found I could get a better (for me) sound with individual pedals.

C/S,
Rev J
 
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#96
Rev J said:
To be honest with you I went the individual pedal route after every multieffect unit I tried only had about one or two patches I'd use and didn't feel like the expense of buying them were worth it. As I learned about signal processing I found I could get a better (for me) sound with individual pedals.

C/S,
Rev J
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I didn't think people actually use the patches that come with multi effect units??? I always thought you buy those to make your own, I know I always did. The one I am using now has 0 stock patches I'd use.
 
#97
InternetAlias said:
I didn't think people actually use the patches that come with multi effect units??? I always thought you buy those to make your own, I know I always did. The one I am using now has 0 stock patches I'd use.
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Most people build their own patches off factory patches if they find a sound that's close enough to what they want, especially if they're new to it.
 
#98
To be honest my work around is the fact that with the exception of a Pigtronix Bass Envelope Phaser, Boss PQ3B Parametric EQ, Ashdown LoMenzo Hyperdrive, and Boss Looper everything else in my board are tc Toneprint pedals. But once I found the toneprints I liked I pretty much leave all of my knobs at noon with the exception of a couple of thing's I'll adjust on the Sub N Up and turning down the mix knob on one of the toneprints on my Flashback x4.

C/S,
Rev J
 
#100
IMHO no...digital no matter how well built will never be as reliable as analog...

I have a portable TV my parents bought me at Sears in 1976...still going strong...care to know how many Digital, Plasma, and LED TV's have come and gone in the last 10 years?

That being said i just ordered a SA Aftershock...lol
 

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