Not wanting to hijack de Melo's thread on showing pedal boards, and wanting to understand something in my old brain, I posted this thread.
So....
Just how many sounds do you really need? Think about it for a moment before you hit the respond button and say you have to have hundreds as you're an international cover band and NEED 150 different settings to cover everyone. Be realistic here OK? Do not confuse effects with the overall sound. OK, now here we go...
Now I've been playing these things since JFK took his oath of office. Then we had little, if any, effects around. We all had about one or two sounds then. Now when Nixon came into power so did the effects. We had a bunch. And by the time Clinton was creating a stain with Monica, our effects were legion. But did we get an equal amount of new sounds as well? Taking a no BS realistic look at things I can say no. Sure we got lots of new distortion, phase, flange, chorus, and delays right? But that's just what they were. The same things packaged in different boxes. Some more classy than another, but overall they made the same general sound.
Then the multiprocessor made the scene. Good grief, those things gave us too much! So many options to choose that one could spend six months with one and just begin to scratch the surface of what it could do. But how many sounds did one get? I have a theory. In fact I figured it all out.....
We got four sounds we really use.
1. Clean
2. Distorted (some more some less)
3. Delayed (loopers are delays that stay on)
4.Special (tremolo, phase, flanged, etc.)
And that's it. No really, it is. Think about it. You get yourself a box full of pedals and in an hour's time you got four sounds. Even from 50 pedals, you got four basic sounds. Then get a big fancy processor and do the same thing. In the end, after hours of fiddling around with it you got four basic sounds. That's it. Four....
I got four similar things programed into my Mustang I amp that are spread out over 24 setting. But when you get down to it they're all pretty much the same thing. And I didn't plan on having just four settings either. I used different amp modes, different delays, changed all sorts of things, but I ended up with four basic sounds. I can go from preset to preset and I have unconsciously dialed in four basic sounds in them all. Did the same thing with a huge Zoom monster processor with 200 patches to build. Of all that horsepower available to me and all those varied forms of everything it all boiled down to basically four sounds. Astonishing yes? No, not really. Remember, we got four basic sounds. I shouldn't have been surprised....Sure we vary them a might here and there, but distortion is distortion. Delay is delay. And so forth.
So blast away at my theory if you like. Take pot shots at it all day but in the end there's still only gonna be four sounds. I'll be polite and patient as you shout and curse me for blasphemy. I'll just smile since I know we got four sounds and sooner or later you'll see it as well.