"Experimental" Effects

[DarkAxel]

I like people that succesfully put weird shit into standard scenes

or make weird shit with standard and ordinary stuff

[ural]

Few players who describe themselves as "experimental" really are. If they really are, what if they use a Tube Screamer? Depends how, I guess.

Bitcrushers are "experimental" . Those are probably the only gift from digital computer world to our analog domain.

Maybe this is player's creativity and method not particular "pedal" that makes things experimental? Think Derek Bailey.

[sylnau]

Mark Ribot as an example...
He is an experimental guitar player to me...
But he's not using tons of weird fx... just clean or overdrive most of the time.

[autopilot]

experimental depends on the player creativity and use, some people can get experimental with just a delay and a tube amp, making swells, creating walls of noise via their pick and attack technique and chords/harmonies progressions, while other prefer to use lots of stomp boxes to create different layers and stack them.

To me an experimental gear, is something that pushes you and modifies the way you play, for example for most people ring mods are weird, because they sit put some settings and try to play their stuff hoping it will add some magic textures and make it more cool, instead of sitting and trying to know the fx and how it work with their style of playing and write music. Playing the same progression, you start rewriting and adjusting. Like a true experiment you start with an idea sometimes you achieve as you thought, sometimes you find out it wont work, sometimes you find another way to do it, which results are greater/more pleasant to what you thought.

I think both the builders and users are to blame.

[Adoom]

The inability to "turn off the normal" would eliminate options.

I love my FUCK and my delays, and all the odd sounds I can get with using my gear in a way that to me is exciting. I can make some pretty wild sounds with normal sounding things, but sometimes, I just want a distortion or straight delay, and if I have to get another pedal or two to do that, fuck it.

It's always the person using the gear. No pedal will make you Miles Davis, or Jimi, or anyone for that matter. Those dudes were pretty experimental.

Erm, you mean this bastard won't do that?


Next you'll be saying companies slap pictures of famous musicians on pedals to market them to players?
Say it ain't so!

Well. The Digitech Dan Donegan will make you sound like Dan Donegan. No matter what instrument, genre or skill level you throw into it.

[theavondon]

The inability to "turn off the normal" would eliminate options.

I love my FUCK and my delays, and all the odd sounds I can get with using my gear in a way that to me is exciting. I can make some pretty wild sounds with normal sounding things, but sometimes, I just want a distortion or straight delay, and if I have to get another pedal or two to do that, fuck it.

It's always the person using the gear. No pedal will make you Miles Davis, or Jimi, or anyone for that matter. Those dudes were pretty experimental.

Erm, you mean this bastard won't do that?


Next you'll be saying companies slap pictures of famous musicians on pedals to market them to players?
Say it ain't so!

Well. The Digitech Dan Donegan will make you sound like Dan Donegan. No matter what instrument, genre or skill level you throw into it.

Bummer?

[Adoom]

Yes. Bummer.

[Bellyheart]

I'd say pedals that play you or pedals that sounds specific to themselves in a real specific way(ie Freqbox).

[McSpunckle]

I kinda feel like true experimental gear is more a combination of gear. Feedback loops with the right pedals, the right pedals stacked, etc.

There's lots of really expensive gear (like moog) that you can control externally to get some really weird shit, too. I guess that's true of anything with CV...

Also, most experimental music that's just made for the sake of being experimental is boring.

[Gearmond]

Few players who describe themselves as "experimental" really are. If they really are, what if they use a Tube Screamer? Depends how, I guess.

^^^This^^^ To a lot of people, slathering a song in reverb makes it "experimental". You have to be open to the potential of what the pedal can do, otherwise you will just be wasting your time and $$$. I was watching a Gearmandude review of a ring mod that I was interrested in, and he just played standard blooze licks and admitted that he had no idea how to use the pedal. Some pedals are instruments unto themselves and your guitar or bass is simply the controller. Moogerfoogers come to mind as an example of this. If I am using my bass murf I am sometimes "playing" the pedal more than my bass. If the pedal can lead you into new sonic territory, then for you, it can be experimental.

seconding the This. particularly in regards to music as a whole. making noise music with pedals? im sorry, thats not experimental in the least.

experimenTATION is what it is, at best. and experimentation, in my opinion, is not necessary experimental because how i'm using it, its specifically related ot the individual. experimental applies to music, not the musician, imo.

i guess "experimental" in terms of instruments is a set of controls/interface/tools that have not been combined and/or made before. you can make experimental music without experimental instruments, however.

hell, not to toot my own horn or anything, but the effect I used on Winslow's tree is something that only Montreal Assembly is just starting to get tackle (and im p much a guaranteed customer when it does come out), and not even the companies that are the big names in pitch shifting effects. by which i mean an expression controlled multi-octave non-sequential octave/doubled-note sweep. which is an experimental effect that can only be made (so far) on gear that very few people consider experimental (multi-fx).

just look at what fuzz was originally intended for; saxophone emulation, and all the places it went.

[veteransdaypoppy]

hmm.. iunno. this is a tricky subject. the Beatles were experimental for their time.. so was Davie Gilmour and the Pink Floyds. but the gear they were using wasn't that weird. weird for its time, maybe.
i like to think of experimentation more in the way a song is developed. throwing tremolo on a bass isn't new, but it's totally weird. and it's definitely not an unusual effect, but it's not the first thing you think to use when you're recording a bass track. yeah, many effects are marketed as being experimental, and i don't necessarily agree with that if it's a really standard pedal. that's an attempt to appeal to a crowd that won't like the product, and that's silly. however, i like being able to switch off the crazy if i'm just fucking around in a mellow mood. i agree that it's cool playing to a pedal as opposed to with a pedal, but if i wanna switch off the craziness and i've spent over 50 bucks on something, i feel i should be able to.

in my limited experience, effects and pedals in general are considered experimental in themselves (sans reverb, duh.) most of the bands i see playing don't have MBV pedalboards, not even the most far-out ones. i've come to learn that songwriting comes first and effects should highlight a mood, more than anything. there's a place for them to be the focal point, in that "what the fuck is that sound!?!?" kinda way, but if the song blows then i doubt most people will even get to that point. that's why Loveless rules. cuz the whole album is like "damn this song rules, and what the fuck is that sound!?!?"

i mean i've made a Timmy and a Pharaoh sound like the craziest space orgy and they're well known pedals. they don't do anything that is insane or experimental. if you're fucking good, you can make a tube screamer sound like the woods behind MLC's place when he's rockin in that crazy Sunn O robe. "experimental" is in the player, not the pedal. i think.

[Ghost Hip]

i've come to learn that songwriting comes first and effects should highlight a mood, more than anything. there's a place for them to be the focal point, in that "what the fuck is that sound!?!?" kinda way, but if the song blows then i doubt most people will even get to that point.

Totally agree, over the past year or so I've been moving in this direction which is part of the reason why I started a thread on it. I feel like the more I develop musically the more I look for unique effects rather than wild and crazy effects. Most of the pedals on my board are pretty tame by themselves, but still unique. And when I stack them is when they get interesting.

However if my pedalboard was taken away I feel I could perform any song I've written with just one dirt pedal at my feet. If I can't play the entire song clean and have it be interesting then I'm not too sure it's a good song. Not to say a song clean as more true or credible than a song with layers of effects (everything sounds better with a layer of fuzz right?) but I feel if a song can speak for itself then its going to sound even more amazing with fuzz or what have you.

[StopReferencing]

Is it in the pedal?

Can be, in the design, for sure.

the user?

Mostly this. Experimentation occurs in relation to context, ya know?

the knobs?

When it's the pedal, sure.

What pedals have expanded your playing, sound. or technique?

When I was good at guitar, I was just using an OD-3 and a DanEcho.


I think the Moog CV stuff really expanded how I approached guitar playing for a while - the idea of manipulating a signal that wasn't an audio path was pretty heavy lifting at first. Almost felt like I was interacting with another musician if I'd blend the wet/dry correctly.

Ring modulation forced me to think differently - I used to use the Moog one basically as an analog Whammy pedal, but then I got a Randy's Revenge and the regular ol' ring modulation (without any frequency manipulation, I mean) was so unexpectedly full and beautiful (especially compared to the Moog, Jesus) that it really encouraged me to engage with that sound/dynamic in my playing (which is hard).

Octave fuzz introduced me to hitherto unknown amounts of intermodulation in chords; really love a lot of those fucked almost-static-y sounds some octave fuzzes can achieve.

[CaptainWampum]

Something isn't experimental until it's experimented with. Making weird noise isn't experimental, it's just makes the rest of us look bad. It's been said and said again, but it's all in the player.

[Gearmond]

anyways lately with my college pedals (looper + sea machine) i'm expanding more with my improv vocabulary and just kinda trying to break out of the "cheap" jazz chords like 000222 002033 and 000210/010210 and trying to connect the ideas of emancipation of dissonance with a pretty melody/harmony and generally creating a sort of new dialog for guitar playing.

i guess the breakdown is experimental sounds v. experimental music, and for all the nasty sounds we can get out of our boards and messing with pedals, at the end of the day, its still stoner rock, shoegaze, noise, etc. whereas you can have someone like say Tosin Abasi who is expanding the dialog of guitar more than most pedals/pedal based guitarists have done in the past decade or so.

and you could also argue that "experimental" is the new "progressive" which i personally hold to be generally true with the use of the word. like i have Dirty Projectors classified as progressive rock in my library.