Hi, I'm new here and I found that there is a musician section here. I am new to guitar too, Not even 1 year of playing. So all this while i am using a multieffect processor - Zoom GFx707. And I plan to start buying single effect instead. So for a beginner like me, what type of effect should i start to get? (I am not good in effect). Should i get Distortion(DS-1 or DS-2), Overdrive(which one), flanger and chorus (which one), metal zone, wah-wah, delay, or what? And 1 more question, how is it that single effect can perfom better that multieffect. And also which brand is more reliable? I notice that boss effects are slightly more costly compared to others like digitech, ibanez and others. Thanks, and nice forum here~

You can start off with a good distortion or overdrive box first.
I use the Boss DS1 and the OD3, which I think is good enough to cover most of my distortion needs.

Other effects like delay, chorus, flanger, wah can be added when you are more familiar with the guitar and the sounds that you would like to get from it.

My personal take is that MFXs are convenient cos everything is in a package, but the downside is that you might need tinker with it a lot - for presets settings etc. Also I'm not sure about the reliability too.

Single effect pedals are more straight forward, you can treat each of the pedals individually. Cons is that you have to lug them around in a pedal case if you have a few, and of course it might be costlier to get a few pedals which you need vs one MFX which might contain more than what you need.

I still prefer individual pedals because I think they sound better than MFX.

This post has been edited by supercolossal: Apr 30 2008, 10:04 AM

Yup. Agree on what supercolossal said. But THE most important thing.......
What Amp are you using?
If it's a low-end amp, then don't bother with single effects, it's not going to help much. Since you already have a multi-fx, then you're quite in good hands already. If it's something like the Vox AD series or Marshall AVT, then yeah, it's going to help you out.

how does single effect can perform better than mfx? well, most of the stomp boxes are analog while the mfx uses digital processing to simulate many kind of effects and amplifier (amp modelling) and required tweaking a lot to pair with ur amp and to set your own effects... both have its own pros and cons... in term of tone, most of the guitarist prefer analog stompboxes and some hate the digital sounds of mfx because sometimes they tend to sound 'digital'... like blacktrix said, choosing an amp is also an issue if u want to get specific tone that u like and low-end amp wont give any different..

and choosing a reliable brand? its all depend on you... it's not brand to choose but the effect's tone-spec that they offer and usability.. my 2 cents

for me, it would be:
tuner>wah>distortion>delay. add an OD or EQ for solo booster if u wan.

For your information, my amp is 15W Peavey Rage 158. You can view the review here
So is this a low-end amp which means no big difference if i purchase single effects? And since i am new, i notice there is a few knobs in the amp. I have this PRE, POST, LOW, MID, HIGH and also a CHANNEL button. Can simply tell me whats the use of these knobs? SOrry, I am really bad ad this.

well, that's a not bad practising amp.. it is meant for practising only IMO because it doesnt have enough ooomph for gig or jamming.. but i believe it sounds good... and those knobs are your preamp EQ and it has 2 channels where u can switch from clean sound to overdrive sound (but footswitch not supported).. u still can use an effect pedal or more and dont misunderstand that a low-end amp cannot use the pedals at all... it depends on your tone needs... u can consider supercolossal's suggestion on effects to help u choose..

Hmmmmmmm....... quite a decent amp there. The biggest thing I read is that the distortion sucks.

Since you already played around with the 707, you'll know what kind of effects you like to use. Overdrive, Distortion, Chorus, blah blah blah.
But the 2 things that Zoom sucks are it's Wah and Distortion/Overdrive. They sound too digital for my taste.

Get a good wah. Tonezone selling the Dunlop GCB-95 for RM480. Good bargain really. If you want more oomph, the Slash Sig wah going for RM780.
You'll also want some warmth in your overdrive. Something tube based like the Vox British Bulldog or EHX English Muffin would be great. But if it's pure metal you want, look no further then the Metal Zone. If you want something even warmer, but want that metal feel, The BEST I've heard is the metal muff.

This post has been edited by blacktrix: May 2 2008, 01:38 PM

I second that line. It's other effects are quite good though
For me, it all depends on what music you're playing.
First two things in your arsenal should be a good distortion and a tuner (i think ur zoom comes with one built in). I'm actually thinking about a Digitech DF-7 myself, becasue it's rather versatile, and i kinda liked it when i messed around with my friend's one. Any more experienced persons willing to comment on the DF-7?

Hey liew, u have pretty similar thing with mine. I have an Epiphone SG and I'm gonna buy DS-2. Lol, Whats the difference between overdrive and distortion? I can only hear overdrive is slightly "cleaner" compared to distort.

hi dude, most single stomps nowadays are digital also.
Only the higher end more expensive ones are analogue.

As for brands, try digitech, cheaper and equal or better than the boss effect IMO.

Ibanez TS9DX FTW!!!

pedals are for the weak!

hey my current setup is godin sd + smarvo 40 watt (rm 750) not sure how good my amp is + boss ds2 + zoom g2.

Just wondering whether i should aim for wah pedal as the zooms wah sucks big time or maybe change pickups...

currently experimenting with the effects , i play sweet child and enter sandman and other solos without the wah so i dont know whats it like to play the real thing

Single stomps are analog as far as boss distortions and overdrives are concerned. Digital to me would mean having your input signal converted to bits and then processed.
Other time based effects ie. reverb, delay, flanging, chorus are digital even on single stomps, at least the non-boutique ones.
I'm not too sure how multifx's handle distortion and overdrives. Can somebody confirm?

I think most of the traditional single pedals/stompboxes are solid state but not necessarily digital. There should be stompboxes that uses tubes inside i think.

http://www.freeinfosociety.com/electronics...view.php?id=130




I think only multi-fx pedals (especially the smaller ones) should be digital since it would be impractical to fit so many solid state parts to accomodate tons of settings/patches, that's why they tend to have dedicated DSPs inside (their version of intel cpu) combined with their firmware and adc/dac convertors to do the processing.

That's right solid state but not digital, they still work on raw electrical signals instead of zeroes and ones.

Digital is not necessarily bad. Older digital processing pedals sampled the guitar pickup signals at lower rate so when converting modified data back to analog, losses in quality are noticeable.

96khz sampling in some of the new multi-fx units such as zoom g1 captures signal at twice the usual rate that even many PRO gear equipments doesn't.

This ensures that when converting back to analog, the original source of the signal loss isn't noticeable even to most humans.

The only problem lies with the way the sampled data is modified, so that quality is dependent on the chipset's (for example, Zoom's ZFX-3) mathematical functions and algorithm, IE, job of the programmer and also the engineer who designed the CPU. If the programmer/engineer isn't a tone freak or a guitar expert, very hard for him to do a good job. It's rare for you to get an employee who's a code demon and an accomplished guitarist with good gear knowledge so this is why there're not that many good digital multi-fx units out there.

DAC/ADC has gone a long way unlike the old days, it's bound to catch up with analog stuff for quality one day. At least now we don't have to worry about quality losses from digitization (Just up the sampling rate from 48khz to 96khz). Now what's left is just the way the programmers code the emulation/modeling functions to modify the digitally sampled data, and that will affect the type of sound/tone you get.

The digital method is dependent on how many sort of layers of algorithm are performed on the sampled data. For clean sound, make no mistakes. The cleans of the digital are way way too clean and rivals that of any others, if you like it truly clean, because digital processing is very famous for noise reduction and etc in this regard.

For distortion/overdrive, the easy part is replicating the way the solidstate devices work on the data, no problems. It's when other factors that are unpredictable, such as cabinet/speakers and valve tubes (different tubes behave differently) come into action, and also room temperature, size, parts age, wood, how many walls... etc.. all these ultimately affect your sound, and to emulate all these would take quite a ton of processing power and memory, that's why most mfx units and amp modelers would have to cut out some of these parameters from the calculation so you only end up with a tone that is 'clean' in distortion.

If given enough of CPU power, enough of research into physics, maths, algorithms to simulate the conditions that affects electronic circuits, i have no doubt digital technology can reproduce what we want in the real world. Star Trek's holodeck comes to mind.

i actually think software ampsims (with virtual pedal FX) are pretty good these days. i'm no guitarist so i could be completely wrong but i think they sounds good to my ears. revalver is worth checking out, more to amps/cabs emulations.

The king of PC amp modeling would have to be amplitube 2 and guitar rig i think.