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so i thought i wouldnt play with my pedals for a week!

thehangingmist

thehangingmist

Dec 14, 2007
6,367
302
New Delhi, India
#1
and it sucked!:ninja:
a week back i told my self that effects are distracting me from any serious study and i just keep messing around the dozen knobs or stomping on them all the time heh. so alright i packed my board and put it away. firstly i could get a decent tone but i missed the tone vt bass gave me. so anyway i kept going without the effects, 5 days in and i actually just didnt feel like playing at all!

on the seventh day i got the board out and woah! awesomeness :bassist::bassist: i realized that effects not only give me a lot of flavors to choose from but they also make me play more. during the week without effects i dont think i was practcing/playing for more than an hour or two a day but from the time i have switched back to playing with them i am easily clocking over 4-5 hours.
its not just that but its also the sonic landscapes of noise i can come up with when i turn on every pedal at the same time hahaha :hiding::hiding::hiding:
damn! i love my effects
 
#2
Personally, I find that practicing at home without effects is a great way to work on accuracy and spot mistakes. The only time when I practice with effects on is when I am in a band practice situation, or when using effects in which dynamics play a large role, or when timing is important. (Such as when using an envelope filter, phaser, chorus, tremolo, delay, etc)
 
#3
TheMutt said:
Personally, I find that practicing at home without effects is a great way to work on accuracy and spot mistakes. The only time when I practice with effects on is when I am in a band practice situation, or when using effects in which dynamics play a large role, or when timing is important. (Such as when using an envelope filter, phaser, chorus, tremolo, delay, etc)
Click to expand...

i know what you mean and i totally agree with you. over here it was the vt bass' tone i was missing so much that it made me pull out the board. when am practicing now now the only thing on is the vt bass :bassist:
 
#4
I can see how it gets boring without effects. I usually practice without em for an hour or so, and then turn em all on and mess around with new sounds and combinations. The VT is indeed an awesome pedal. I find myself using it quite a bit for that awesome vintage vibe. :)
 
#5
it's very true that any effects during practice will only serve to conceal or glaze over problems in your playing. hopefully one of the intentions of your practice is to build better technique and play with better tone instead of relying on boxes to give you "tone". good tone starts (and ends!) with how you use your fingers to make sounds come out of your instrument and if you have a bunch of stuff in the signal chain manipulating dynamics and whatnot, you are not going to even notice half the stuff in your playing. if you can make it sound great with no effects, then it will sound amazing when you do add them.

frankly, if the effects are on (or the metronome is off), it isn't practice. and i'm not saying there isn't value in just playing, developing, writing, composing, arranging, sound-sculpting, and even just screwing around... but that ain't practicing.

i also do 90% of my gigs with no effects, just a little compression (very little). i'll bring out the pedal board for experimental / trippy / improv gigs but those are few and far between for me anymore.
 
#6
jruberto said:
it's very true that any effects during practice will only serve to conceal or glaze over problems in your playing. hopefully one of the intentions of your practice is to build better technique and play with better tone instead of relying on boxes to give you "tone". good tone starts (and ends!) with how you use your fingers to make sounds come out of your instrument and if you have a bunch of stuff in the signal chain manipulating dynamics and whatnot, you are not going to even notice half the stuff in your playing. if you can make it sound great with no effects, then it will sound amazing when you do add them.

frankly, if the effects are on (or the metronome is off), it isn't practice. and i'm not saying there isn't value in just playing, developing, writing, composing, arranging, sound-sculpting, and even just screwing around... but that ain't practicing.

i also do 90% of my gigs with no effects, just a little compression (very little). i'll bring out the pedal board for experimental / trippy / improv gigs but those are few and far between for me anymore.
Click to expand...

If the band tells you that I missed practice, then that's that. I may have missed one practice this year but if somebody says "he missed one practice of all the practices this year," then that's enough to get a whole lot started. I told the band that "you don't have to give the people a reason to think about firing me or anything like that." If you fire somebody, you fire them to make the band better...simple as that. I'm cool with that. I'm all about that. The people deserve to have a rockin' band. It's simple as that. It goes further than that.


If I can't practice, I can't practice. It is as simple as that. It ain't about that at all. It's easy to sum it up if you're just talking about practice. We're sitting here, and I'm supposed to be the bass player, and we're talking about practice. I mean listen, we're sitting here talking about practice, not a gig, not a show, not a recording session, but we're talking about practice. Not the show that I go out there and die for and play every note like it's my last but we're talking about practice man. How silly is that?

Now I know that I'm supposed to lead by example and all that but I'm not shoving that aside like it don't mean anything. I know it's important, I honestly do but we're talking about practice. We're talking about practice, man.

We're talking about practice. We're talking about practice. We're not talking about the gig. We're talking about practice. When you come to the arena, and you see me play, you've seen me play right, you've seen me give everything I've got, but we're talking about practice right now.
 
#8
I have a Line 6 Bass pod floor model, and as awesome as it can be, I have abandoned playing through it. For some reason recently I have noticed that the natural tones that I get out of my guitars can be heavenly WITHOUT the pedal.

I'm thinking all i might ever need from now on in the way of effects might just be delay or chorus (for the fretless), and maybe an octaver.
 
#9
jruberto said:
it's very true that any effects during practice will only serve to conceal or glaze over problems in your playing. hopefully one of the intentions of your practice is to build better technique and play with better tone instead of relying on boxes to give you "tone". good tone starts (and ends!) with how you use your fingers to make sounds come out of your instrument and if you have a bunch of stuff in the signal chain manipulating dynamics and whatnot, you are not going to even notice half the stuff in your playing. if you can make it sound great with no effects, then it will sound amazing when you do add them.

frankly, if the effects are on (or the metronome is off), it isn't practice. and i'm not saying there isn't value in just playing, developing, writing, composing, arranging, sound-sculpting, and even just screwing around... but that ain't practicing.

i also do 90% of my gigs with no effects, just a little compression (very little). i'll bring out the pedal board for experimental / trippy / improv gigs but those are few and far between for me anymore.
Click to expand...

like i said before, and if you read the post above:ninja:, i dont really practice with effects, but i like what vt does so much that i dont like playing without it! heck i dont even have a compressor onboard or anything to alter my dynamic. i only posted this thread to appreciate effects :bassist::bassist:
not to discuss practice or gigging ya know :rolleyes:


peter6725 said:
But like...What are we talking about here?
Click to expand...

we are not talking about nothing, we are just messing around :hiding:
 
#10
noworreeze said:
I have a Line 6 Bass pod floor model, and as awesome as it can be, I have abandoned playing through it. For some reason recently I have noticed that the natural tones that I get out of my guitars can be heavenly WITHOUT the pedal.

I'm thinking all i might ever need from now on in the way of effects might just be delay or chorus (for the fretless), and maybe an octaver.
Click to expand...

i know what you mean, i really think line6 stuff is no good at all
edit: that also means you need some analogue fuzzy-synthy-phasey-wahwah'd awesomeness :D
 
#11
I'm with the op on this. I use a much larger board of lights and switches at home than I do when gigging. Makes solo practice more fun, and doesn't really interfere with actual practice. Especially if you already have solid technique, what's the harm, it's about the good times. Nothing more.
 

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