by crazynoises » Fri Mar 15, 2013 11:48 pm
What's nice about the pedal is that while it get totally crazy and can do all sorts of weird things, it's very easy to use.
Just one tremolo by itself is very nice just as a regular sort of trem. There's a lot of flexibility in terms of the things to control and the sweep on the knob and it sounds fine (if rather standard in terms of impact) in all those settings. So you don't need to worry about carrying two trems like one for normal and one for crazy. You can bump your other trem off the board unless you are particularly crazy about the vintage Fender trem it gives you on a clean tone or something.
In fact, mine came dialed in with a How Soon is Now sound right off the bat. Then I made a bit of a mistake. In my excitement I started twiddling knobs like mad. Which is a very fun thing to do when you're in an experimental mode because some of the things it does will surprise you. It's easy to think "Okay I've got two trems with two different wave forms at two different frequencies so it should sound like X" on a theoretical level but in practice, it's hard to predict the exact way it will sound. Which is okay, except when you are learning a pedal and then it's very confusing and it's difficult to see how you would use some of the settings despite it being sort of cool to just get lost in the noise.
So then after about an hour of getting more and more confused, I finally backed up and started using my head. The way to do this is to get the general sound you want in your head with one trem. Think of it like having a major tremolo, and then a mini/sub-tremolo effect behind it. Dial in the first trem until it's doing what you want. Then, blend in a bit of the second trem with everything set low. Now you'll hear a trem with a warble to it. Or think of it like a drum beat with major and minor accents. It's a rather conservative way to use the pedal, but it's the easiest way to start off. Then you can start adjusting the levels/blends and other settings to dial in exactly what you want or to get more experimental.
If you ever get stuck, just turn off one trem in the mix and go back to using one trem again. Simple. I've gotten pretty good at using this now, but I still don't think I've come anywhere near tapping its full potential. When you start throwing in some fuzz and even another reverb/delay in the mix (for triple LFO action!!) then you can get into some really super-cool shoegaze/space trippy, swirly, echo, reverse-reverb territory.