BORED OR BOARD?

You know that feeling when your playing seems stale? You don’t dig your tone and you’re sick of always sounding the same? I’ve been there, and I’m sure plenty of you have too.

I actually enjoy practising, working on technique and learning new tunes and licks. Sometimes, however, there's seemingly nothing that will get you enthused. A good approach to overcoming this type of situation, and hopefully re-establishing some creativity, is digging into the effects world. It might be time to delve it into an effect you’ve never used before, or try out the latest and greatest offerings. Doing so might even reaffirm that what you’ve got is actually cool! Either way, this momentary shift of focus can create a new approach to your playing and indeed offer some new tones that in turn make you approach the instrument differently or play with a new intent.

WHAT SHOULD I DIG INTO THEN?

Chorus was a staple of the late 70s, 80s and early 90s. Used to widen your tone or add body, it can be as subtle as some extra depth to more watery, throbby modulation. There are some killer recorded slap tones with chorus and it can be great when combined with a pick too. Try kicking it in with some long notes in the intro or verse and let the depth and rate controls be your guide.

Often lumped in with distortion and overdrive, fuzz is a seriously great effect to experiment with on bass. The sustain, attack and way it interacts with your touch makes fuzz a very unique sound that can be almost clean sounding and sustain through to raucous and splitty.

Perhaps more commonly used on guitar and keys, the mighty delay pedal is not to be overlooked. Spacey, ambient repeats and rhythmic tails or shorter slapback type doubling tones. Delay can also be handy for single note, higher lines to add some body and width to parts (even try ping pong or panned delays to get the stereo field really moving).

Synth. I mean, this is a trail that could take a long time to investigate fully and may lead to many other directions on the way. Warm, round, flubby vintage type analog sounds, more filtered keyboard type tones and spacey vibes that react to every little nuance in your signal chain.

With the number of options on the market and the sheer amount of new companies and releases each year, it can certainly be hard to keep up with the latest pedals. Yes, it might cost you some hard earned $$$ but a pedalboard rejig/update/addition can do wonders for your creativity and perspective. It might even help you narrow down your tonal pursuits by either discovering a new favourite or discounting some options.

BY NICK BROWN