Redid my live pedalboard today

[John 14:6]

Looks great. Are you happy with the Drop pedal? How do you use it?

I had the Drop pedal and sold it. It sounded great in the videos, but to my ears it sounded very artificial. In its defense, I was playing with a band at church and key changes are extremely common in that musical environment. I guess I was hoping for some magic box that would let me learn my guitar parts from the recording and then never have to adapt the parts to new keys, I would just step on a pedal and drop everything three full steps and everything would sound perfect. It did not last long on my board, but I am not the average user it was designed for. Maybe you can make it work well enough for a half step drop if it sounds good enough to your ears or use it more as an effect to get a "something is weird with that tone thing" going on if that is what you are after.

 

[mrmega]

We are tuned 1/2 step down so we use the drop pedal to take us the additional 1/2 step down so that the Motley Crue and Slaughter tunes we do are in the same tuning as on the albums, which would be D. Even the bassist uses one and they track very well. Not sure how they’d work going any lower but for our application they work great. Playing the Crue stuff in the right tuning sounds huge.

Thank you for the feedback. I was given one as a present but haven't used it live yet.

 

[mrmega]

I had the Drop pedal and sold it. It sounded great in the videos, but to my ears it sounded very artificial. In its defense, I was playing with a band at church and key changes are extremely common in that musical environment. I guess I was hoping for some magic box that would let me learn my guitar parts from the recording and then never have to adapt the parts to new keys, I would just step on a pedal and drop everything three full steps and everything would sound perfect. It did not last long on my board, but I am not the average user it was designed for. Maybe you can make it work well enough for a half step drop if it sounds good enough to your ears or use it more as an effect to get a "something is weird with that tone thing" going on if that is what you are after.

Thank you for the feedback. It's starting to sound like it's good for a half or whole step but not for much more than that. I'm not going to say anymore because I don't want to hijack marshallmel's pedalboard thread. I didn't want to be rude and ignore your kind reply either


Hey marshallmel, I was glad to see the Ibanez SC10 on your board. Those are great and don't get enough exposure in my opinion. I like mine a lot.

 

[John 14:6]

We are tuned 1/2 step down so we use the drop pedal to take us the additional 1/2 step down so that the Motley Crue and Slaughter tunes we do are in the same tuning as on the albums, which would be D. Even the bassist uses one and they track very well. Not sure how they’d work going any lower but for our application they work great. Playing the Crue stuff in the right tuning sounds huge.

I think what I was trying to do with the Drop pedal was unrealistic and not a fair test. Most Christian churches play a lot of the same popular songs, but key changes are common and if a guy sang the song on the recording, a female may end up singing the main vocal part or a guy may sing what a woman sang on record. Some of the songs were obviously written by a guitarist and may rely heavily on say an open D or B string. Key changes can just crush something cool going on with a guitar part. The number of steps I was dropping was hard to pull off convincingly with the pedal. I did think about keeping it to drop a half step and play along with Van Halen and Dokken records in standard tuning. I think the way you and your band are using the Drop pedal is much more along the lines of its intended use.