Case Study 2 - How pedals were used for tone with Guitar In Old indie

Pedals And Indie

In this case study, I will be looking at how guitar pedals were used in old indie music. I will be looking at a few of the most influential artists of the 80s and see what sort of effects they were using and how they were using them. I will then find videos and websites that will help me use the pedals at my disposal to replicate the sound of some of the musicians I look at it and I will have multiple mp3s showcasing my research on my weekly updates.

The first band I will be looking at is The Cure. I found a great blog post where someone was attempting to replicate the sound of Robert Smiths guitar tone. He gives details the type of guitar that was used for the song he's replicating as well as the system it was recorded through. It states "the base of the guitar sound was a Fender Jazzmaster plugged into a ROLAND JC-120" (Romain, 2010). Unfortunately, I don't have the sort of income that would allow me to go out into the world and purchase the guitar and amp but it is still a useful bit of information to provide someone who's interested in guitars and The Cure, but thankfully he goes on to explain something I can emulate, the pedal set-up that would emulate the sound of the 80s era cure.

He gives a detailed analysis into the settings of the knobs or more specifically where they should be placed, which is useful for me as I'm attempting to recreate or learn how to use my pedals with help from the sound of the cure. According to the source your flanger pedal should have a manual setting of 60%, a depth of 75%, a rate of 50%, and a res of 25%, he then goes on to explain your reverb pedal should have a balance of 25%, a tone of 30%,  a r.time of 40%, and the mode at 10. (Romain, 2010)

There was another pedal description but unfortunately I don't have a delay pedal so I won't be able to use that one but this was still useful to me as I have an Ibanez flanger pedal at home as well as a newer BOSS reverb pedal, so all I need to do is figure out the settings on my pedals and which ones they correlate to on the ones he's using, he mentions "of course, other brands than BOSS are fine to emulate Robert Smith's tone as long as you have a good chorus or flanger" (Romain, 2010).  I have already found a couple of good sources explaining what each of the flanger settings do and I'm sure finding one for a reverb pedal will be just as easy.

I will now be looking at The Stone Roses or more specifically John Squires guitar setup. John Squire is well-known for using a Gretsch and I am quite lucky to have one of those in my possession. I found a good website that has all of John Squires pedals he used throughout his career. It includes a picture and a few paragraphs describing what the effect does and how much it costs.
Here are a few examples:

I was looking for a good description of how he uses his chorus pedal and luckily later on down the website it states the chorus pedal is "designed to give a warm layer to your basic sound" and "Squire has this pedal set up for quite a subtle effect"  (thesquirefiles). This is quite interesting because the other source about The Cure is going to give me quite a strong wet sound on my guitar when it comes down to the modulation effects whereas this source says a subtle effect will be quite nice. This gives me an opportunity to record two different versions of my chorus pedal after trying out all the effects to see which version I prefer more.

Now I will be looking at how reverb and flanger pedals work. First I will be looking at a source which features a video in it as well as a brief description of how to use a reverb pedal. Reverb apparently adds "a sense of space, depth and drama" to your music. (Roland, 2014) Luckily they've done a demo of my pedal as it is a relatively popular pedal.


At around 00:25 he says "the E.Level changes the volume of your reverb, the tone changes the brightness of the sound, the time controls affects the length of the reverb, and the final knob allows you to change the reverbs character." This is all useful information for me(especially with them using my pedal) as I now have a clear understanding of what each of the settings do. He then goes on to give a couple examples of presets to use as a general basis for your sound which is something I'll look at in my weekly updates when I do the pedal mp3s.

The source I will be looking at for the flanger pedal gives you an explanation of how the flanger sound is achieved (similar to the reverb source). Two identical signals are mixed together, one gets delayed by a LFO  creating a harmonic effect. (Beattie, Sam, 2017) The website also features a diagram of how the signal is carried in a flanger pedal.

Both of these bits of information are useful to me as they tell me how my pedal actually works(which once I understand what all the settings do) makes it so much easier to manipulate the sound to what I want. Understanding the effect at it's simplest form is all you need to know how each knob will affect the other.

The page also features brief explanations of the most popular modulation pedals. Chorus, Flanger and Phaser.

Later on in the page, it also gives the reader a couple of presets to use which is something I will be referring to when I do my practical research on my pedals. I plan to use two of these presets in my work and then on the third I will do my own.  To have a psychedelic plucking effect the rate on my pedal should be set to 2, the depth to 3.5, the feedback to 3.5. To get a "molten hot lead" effect which adds a subtle shimmer my rate should be set to 3.5, depth to 2, and the feedback to 2.(Beattie, Sam, 2017)

This is useful for me as I can use these in my weekly updates for my mp3s and then come up with my own going by the sounds these ones produce.