Confessions of a gear noob

[UglyCasanova]

I bet we've all had (and still have) some silly gear misconceptions in our years of bleeps and bloops. What are the ones you look back on in shame?


In the years before I started playing guitar, I never went to shows or watched music videos/live performances, so I had no idea there even were pedals that changed the sound of your guitar, and I actually only discovered it in my second band when I met the second guitarist. He had a suitcase with a DS-1, some Boss DD, a phaser and a Holy Grail. Before this, while not having given it much thought, I believed that:
- Fuzz was just the result of placing the microphone closer to the speaker
- Delay and reverb were simply recorded in a physical space that allowed for the effect to take place

Some other ones:
- I thought Fuzzhugger FX was called Facehugger FX for about a week after I got my first Algal Bloom
- I didn't like my DD-20 because I found if confusing. Even if I tap tempoed, in some modes it just didn't do what I wanted it to. I now realize that I just didn't know what beat divisions were.
- I still don't know what the different parts of a drum kit is called other than 'cymbals' and 'kick drum'
- I never learned any scales
- In one of the first gear photos I posted, I started going into the output of the last two pedals instead of the inputs towards the end of my chain.

NSFW: show

GO!

[01010111]

I remember the first time I played with a delay pedal. It was in a Guitar Center. I fiddled with the controls of some Maxon delay, it made noises, but nothing that it did made any sense to me. I was very VERY confused, and was conpletely turned off delay for years. Now I love and use delay wayyyy too much

The guitarist in one of the bands I was in had no idea that effect order changed how you sounded. I remember he had a problem with no signal once and it took him ten minutes to figure it out. He had two pedals in his chain....

[crochambeau]

In 1995 I bought a second hand Alesis SR-16 drum machine, shortly thereafter I bought an MMT-8 sequencer so I could....

..I'm still not 100% clear on what my plan was, but it had everything to do with the drum machine and nothing to do with synths. It did serve as a remote start, but did nothing else since I was clueless regarding MIDI.

I'm sure there there are a few others, but there's been a lot of beer/what have you between then and now, so I can act like it never happened.

[JonnyAngle]

I had a dd5 and didn't realize you had to change modes to get longer delay times.

[jrfox92]

Back when I first got my Echo Dream 2, I played a show that went completely without delay because, as I found out once it was over, I had hooked it up backwards.

I still have no idea how to use MIDI.

[Boxbie]

When I was 14 I bought a DOD bass eq pedal because I couldn't get enough low frequency out of my horrible 30 watt cheapo bass amp. I didn't realize that the shitty speaker simply wouldn't reproduce anything below 100hz.

[friendship]

Let's just say I would have saved a lot of money and time as a teen if I had bought one solid overdrive pedal instead of letting myself be convinced that I needed a multichannel tube amp.

[kbit]

One of the first pieces of gear I bought myself was a Korg Pad Kontrol cuz I wanted to make beats. I was very confused when I got it and there were no sounds coming. Then I did some research and learned what a Midi Controller was

[PeteeBee]

To get extra high gain I would crank my little practice amp, then run the headphone output into the input of my bigger amp.

[friendship]

To get extra high gain I would crank my little practice amp, then run the headphone output into the input of my bigger amp.

Doing something that's actually cool is not in the spirit of this thread Pete.

[neonblack]

I used to have different eq settings for each song, and had a little piece of paper taped to my amp.

Years later I realized only one setting actually sounded decent.

Also realized I'd have much better results just using pedals to change my sound up rather than fuck with my amp after every song.

[Antlerface]

Oh shit.

Traded a VTM 120 to a friend for a few pedals (DS2, ToneLok Flanger, Crybaby) because the VTM was 'too fizzy' and I didn't realize how important the dip switches were in the center of the amp, and it consequentially turned me off of pedals for a long time.

Traded a sick modded MIM Tele for an Ibanez RG because I wanted humbuckers and didn't understand how much of a pain Floyd's are to new guitarists. Traded back, sold the Tele to GC for pennies because I wanted to buy an Ibanez "Jet something or other" that sucked so badly it's insane that those things made it onto shelves. Never again.

Cared what people thought of my gear and the music I make with it.

I'm sure I'll update with more.

[popvulture]

I played guitar for over 20 years before realizing all the things you can do with the volume knob. Hated fuzz for a really long time because of this. Used to be flabbergasted when I'd see anyone turning their knob down... "but that sounds like shit--why would you?"

[Bartimaeus]

Rather than buy a digital piano, for my first band I bought a dreadful Behringer MIDI keyboard and used it to trigger Garageband's preset sounds (on an old, super slow laptop), which I then piped to my guitar amp I think? Dear lord did that sound dreadful.

When I started guitar I spent way too much time and money assembling a copy of Jonny G's pedalboard before I could play in time... but how else do you get started?

It also took me several months to really realize what a "clean" tone is. My first amp was one of those Valvetronix things, which I'm sure COULD sound decent, but I just made the metal distortion presets sound even worse.

When I first got a modular synth I didn't realize that my oscillators could output more than one waveform at once. I never tried plugging into two of the outputs at once, I just assumed that it wouldn't work. So I bought a couple of more oscillators and tuned them identically just so that I could mix square and sawtooth waves.

[goosekevin]

glad to see so many other people having problems with plugging things in backwards. played a gig with no pedals because i spent about 20 minutes troubleshooting my board before our set (we were on first and it was before doors opened thank god) and spent the whole night so sad because i thought i had broken something but got home and it all worked fine......then it finally clicked and i felt like a fool