Ray finally managed to receive the shipment containing his huge collection of pedals. In 2006 he started collecting pedals of various types and meant for various acoustic purposes. Since then, he collected around 150 pedals.
I’ve discovered the full potential of pedals just a year ago, thanks to the electronic music workshops I am attending in my institute. Today for our third rehearsal session he brought me the Fulltone Full-Drive 2, a overdriving pedal, the DigiTech Whammy, a foot-controlled pitch shifting pedal, and also the Pigitronix Infinity looping pedal, which I had already the chance to try.
As last time, I added to my bass guitar, trough the Insert input, a copy of the dry signal looped with the Pigitronix. Then I’ve created an auxiliary chain that included the Fulltone followed by the Whammy. This combination gave a really interesting timbre to the bass guitar sound, a kind of timbre that I wasn’t certainly expecting: the Whammy crazily enhances the already rich harmonic content of the Fulltone and the Wammy’s foot-expression pedal allows me to shift the pitch of this harmonic content.
The overall soundscape created by these new pedals “lives happily ever after” with the tape chorus echo. To me, there is something really captivating about a overdriven delay feedback, especially when passing through a tape loop.
I would like to spend a few more words on describing more deeply the various effect units that we are going to use for our performance.
It is one of the first foot-controlled pitch shifting effects ever invented. This “art piece” by DigiTech emulates that “whammy” sound created by the vibrato bar on certain guitars. Differently from a vibrato bar, the Whammy has a much more enhanced pitch range while remaining strictly tuned to the dry signal. To get a concrete idea of the Whammy’s, give a listen to Pink Floyd’s Marooned.
DigiTech is a U.S.A. (Sandy, Utah) is company specialized in hardware and software audio effects.
In the 90s it was acquired by Harman International Industries. A part from the Whammy, the company is also well known for the Time Machine Delay (digital) and the Smart Shift IPS33 a IPS33B.
Fulltone in the USA was one of the first finely hand-crafted pedals (see https://blog.andertons.co.uk/learn/boutique-guitar-pedals) founded by Michael Fuller. He’s known for his humble but committed approach to fx-crafting. The high quality can be heard and touched. He’s known also as the inventor of the 3PDT switch, a electronic component that enables fx builders to build true bypass pedals with a LED.
This pedal is a latency-free looper, with a very simple but eclectic structures that gives you lot of creative freedom.
It has the possibility of recording, playback, dubbing, erasing and de-erasing any incoming signal.
It is provided with a 24 bit / 48KHZ recording engine: the quality of the original signal remains like untouched.
Roland Tape Chorus / Echo RE-501
“As one of the most iconic tape delays ever designed, the RE-501 is the last child of Roland’s dynasty of electro-mechanical effect processors. With onboard chorus, spring reverb and noise reduction, this unit sounds so lush… it’s hard to go back to anything else once you’ve tried it.
This box contains a specialised tape recorder that can create delay effects, commonly known as echoes, together with a spring reverb and a chorus effect. To create the delay effects, incoming audio is recorded onto a loop of magnetic tape then replayed via one or more playback heads before being erased by incoming audio as the end of the loop is reached. The delay time between echo repeats is adjusted by varying the tape speed. The length or intensity of the echo effect is adjusted by changing the amount of echo signal fed back into the pre-echo signal.” (sourced from: https://www.doctormix.com/blog/roland-re-501-chorus-echo-tape-delay)
