Recording - July 2011 - 13

This is because compression basically works by controlling your signal’s dynamic range—it tries to make louder spikes quieter, but more importantly in this case: it also makes the quieter parts of your signal louder. So any background noise that might not normally be all that noticeable—say, some hiss coming from one of your distortion pedals, or a faint 60 Hz hum somewhere in your signal—will also be made louder as part of the process when your compressor raises the signal chain’s noise floor. By putting your dynamics processor at the very beginning of your pedal chain, you reduce the number of possible noise-generating factors that could be boosted. Your noise sources at the start are things like your guitar itself (pickup wiring and shielding, etc), the cable between the guitar and the first effect (an excellent reason to make sure to use a good-quality one), or things in your environment that could be creating noise and/or hum such as neon lights close by, dimmer switches in your room wiring, etc. Now, some pedals are just plain noisy by nature—such as various forms of distortion or fuzz, or an older pedal in your collection that still sounds awesome but is just getting a little hissy with age. I typically like to keep these as early in the chain as possible, either immediately after the guitar to better interact directly with your guitar’s pickups (more on this in a bit), or immediately after the compressor as we just discussed. This is because the noise these kinds of pedals generate can quickly start to “snowball” as you turn more and more of them on in your chain, such as when stacking certain overdrives with distortions to create composite tones. The earlier they are in your pedal chain, the more control you have over what other effects

to be very responsive to both fast staccato playing as well as remaining smooth as sustained notes fade out. There are options available from Rocktron, BOSS, and others as well. Keep in mind that you’ll typically want to avoid placing noise reduction pedals after any kind of effect that fades down over time, such as a delay/echo whose repeats each get progressively quieter, or a reverb with a long fading tail. A noise reduction/gate pedal will tend to either entirely kill the parts of the tone that become quieter than the threshold setting (i.e. the last quiet echoes from your delay pedal never get a chance to sound), or react in unnatural unpredictable ways as the signal slowly gets quieter (i.e. making the long reverb tail start to “sputter” as it fades out instead of doing so smoothly). Power and cabling issues Another factor to consider is how you power your pedals: your power might be the source of hum you’re hearing due to ground loops, etc. If every pedal you own came with its own separate power supply unit (“PSU”), using all of them might help prevent these problems, but could also end up leaving you with a big, cluttered “wallwart pile” to deal with. For this reason many people like to use a PSU with a series of isolated power taps such as the Voodoo Labs Pedal Power 2, which can help eliminate the possibility of groundloop issues altogether. Others might prefer to use a simpler PSU such as the Visual Sound 1-Spot (or the Godlyke Power-All featured in this issue) that lets you daisychain many pedals together off a single unit. For some applications this might improve matters (or at

Ask yourself: what are you personally trying to achieve with your chain of pedal effects? Your pedalboard should be a unique reflection of the sound that you hope to achieve.
they might interact with. By keeping your various “dirt” pedals together and early in your pedal chain, you can help avoid going crazy trying to zero in on where that annoying noise is actually coming from. Another advantage of keeping your various noisy pedals together is that it allows you to use something like a true-bypass loop switcher to “slice out” wide swaths of these culprits from the signal chain altogether. When bypassed, your signal won’t even pass through their combined circuitry at all, but you can still bring them back in as needed. This can also allow you to “preset” combinations of these pedals by turning them on while the true bypass switcher still has them switched out of your signal path—and then bring them all in at once with a single click! You can also use one of the various noise reduction/gating pedals available immediately after these hiss-monsters to gate out all of the noise that falls below a threshold level that you determine, thus making sure that the spaces between your notes and chords stay as clean as possible. However, keep in mind that any noise in your signal that’s also louder than that threshold level will come through blended with your notes. These kinds of processors don’t actually “clean” this noise out of your actual signal: they only address it when it’s standing alone by itself. Try out various types of these pedals to see which one works best with your specific kind of tone. Typically you’ll want one that you can adjust so it can react fast enough to your own playing dynamics—such as how you might palm-mute quick distorted notes and chords—without being so overzealous that it chomps down too hard and fast on the attack and decay at the beginning and end of those notes themselves, making them “mushy” and losing clarity and definition. I personally like the ISP Technologies Decimator Noise Reduction pedal, which I find least not make them worse), while for others the shared power could create ground loop hum. Try out the various options available to see what the best match is, but remember one crucial point: make sure that you use the correct type of PSU for your specific pedals. Some might need 9 volt or 18 volts DC, while others might require AC instead of DC. Don’t make the mistake of assuming that just because you found an adapter that physically fits in the power jack for your pedal on one end and fits into your wall’s AC jack on the other, that it’s automatically the right one: you could very easily end up with a “Cheetos Pedal”: quick-fried to a crackly crunch. Finally, there’s the matter of cabling to consider—connecting your pedals as well as between your guitar and pedalboard, and between pedalboard and amp. You should try to get the best quality cables you can to avoid things like intermittent connection crackles—but you should also remember that cable length and capacitance can also directly affect your overall tone. This is quite a hot-button topic that goes beyond the scope of this article, but a good rule of thumb to remember if you’re using passive pickups is: the longer the cable and/or the higher its capacitance—the more likely it is to start rolling off the top-end frequencies of your guitar’s signal. Whether or not that’s a good or bad thing ultimately depends on the tone you’re looking for. Moving in stereo I’m always surprised at how many people own stereo effect pedals but have never bothered to set them up in stereo to hear how they sound. Even more surprising are the reasons they give when I ask them about it, many of which seem to be based on a general misunderstanding what stereo can actually provide for them. These range from inaccurate blanket assumptions that
RECORDING JULY 2011

Recording - July 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - July 2011