Effects are a Fact of Life
Whether We Like them or Not
(And I Started Out Not Liking Them)
An old friend once told me that if they couldn't figure out a way to defeat a naturally occurring effect they would figure out a way to put it in a pedal and at least profit from it. I tend to think that this is an extremely accurate way of looking at the subject of effects.
Effects Are (gasp) Natural
In this world of stomp boxes and digital modeling it's easy to forget that many of the effects we see on the shelves of music stores have their roots in natural phenomena.
Echo
One obvious example is Echo, something most of us became familiar with early in life. A tiled bathroom makes a fine echo chamber, so does an empty school gymnasium. Anyone with a few gigs under their belt has learned that there are "live rooms" where echo can be troublesome. There are also acoustically dead rooms that are usually much easier to play without annoying echoes bouncing around and throwing off you timing. On the other hand, a little bit of echo sounds good and adds dimension to the sound so once a room is perfectly echo-free it's nice to add a bit of controlled echo effect to bring the sound to life.
Reverberation
Another common natural effect is reverberation, a relative of echo. Reverberation is basically caused by a number of echoes building up and then decaying. Think of it this way; if you walked into a large empty room that is acoustically live and clapped your hands loudly one time the echoes would come back to you at slightly different times and would collide uniquely based upon where you are in the room. The collision and decay of those echoes are the natural phenomena of reverberation and every room has its own reverberation characteristics. For year this effect has been synthesized using spring-based units which do an amazing job of making this effect available to us upon demand.
Delay
Delay seems self explanatory and simple but it can have profound effects on sound reinforcement in some situations. The speed of sound has dominion over this effect and because sound moves pretty fast, 1,116 feet per second, we don't notice it in small rooms. While we are able to discern delays of as little as 20 milliseconds a delay does not really command our attention until it reaches 150 - 300 milliseconds.
One demonstration of delay that is part of everyday life can be noticed anytime a jet airplane flies over at a high altitude. The sound from an airplane 5 miles above you takes over 23 seconds to reach the ground. The light reflecting off of that airplane takes less than 1/37200 of a second to reach the ground, so an airplane appears to be considerably farther ahead of where the sound seems to come from. In fact, an airplane traveling at 550 MPH would have traveled 3.6 miles forward before the sound it created would reach you on the ground. The relevance of this will become obvious in our next subject.
Phase Shift
In the early to mid '70s Phase Shifters were popular effects pedals and can be heard on many guitar and electric piano recordings of the era. Phase shift itself is a natural phenomena, one that occurs especially in large venues. Imagine a concert being held in a football stadium. If the stage is at one end of the stadium the sound from the stage takes nearly 1/3 of a second to reach the far end of the stadium. If there are supplemental speakers at the far end of the stadium their sound will be heard 1/3 of a second before the sound from the stage arrives causing the sound to become garbled and at the very least irritating to listen to. The answer to this is called a straight delay, a device that delays the signals to the remote speaker so that they will be in phase with the sounds coming from the stage. I recall once being in a venue where there was uncompensated phase shift going on and I ended up leaving early with my ears ringing and a headache.
Distortion
No effect seems to generate as much interest as distortion. Simply stated, distortion is what happens when an amplifier can not deliver the signal accurately. Distortion can also happen if speakers are asked to deliver more than their rated power.
Distorted guitar sounds have been with us for a long time, probably starting within minutes after the first electric guitar was plugged into the first amplifier. With early electric Blues artists the sound was most likely a consequence of using small, inexpensive amps and turning them all the way up to try and fill a larger venue. Some Rock 'n' Roll acts of the '50s had a degree of distortion as well but distortion as a deliberate effect really came into its own during the psychedelic era of the late '60s. Perhaps the defining moment came when Jimi Hendrix delivered a highly distorted rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at the Woodstock festival. By an amazing coincidence, I just realized that I am writing this page 40 years to the day after Hendrix' first performance of this at that iconic event.
Amazingly, this is one of the easiest effects to produce without any pedals, in most cases just crank up and amp and it will give you the full spectrum of overdriven sounds the higher you crank it. Of course you do need some wide open spaces and earplugs if you intend to do that. More than a few guitarists have literally deafened themselves seeking the ultimate in tube amp distortion. Crank up only at your own risk.
For those of us not wanting to risk our hearing there are numerous overdrive/distortion pedals and they seem to command a lion's share of the attention given to effects. In the early days many of these pedals were relatively blunt instruments that basically converted the output of a guitar to a fuzz sound. They sold like hotcakes back in the early days of effects pedals. Nowadays there are a wide array of such pedals available that range from mild overdriven sounds to heavy distortion to harsh fuzz.
Compression
This may be the most pervasive yet least understood effect of them all. It is a completely natural phenomena stemming from the fact that our perception flattens as volume increases. In other words, louder sounds are perceived more smoothly. One of the reasons it's so difficult to capture the sounds of our favorite Blues or Rock bands is the fact that we tend to use much less volume at home than these bands do in concert and even recording settings. Compressors simulate this to some extent but obviously cannot do it all.
The recording process usually adds some compression as well, especially recordings made on analog tape. In the analog days it was common for recording engineers to "push the tape", saturating it slightly beyond its dynamic range capabilities and thereby compressing the sound by 3 to 6 db. In the digital world such compression would invite harsh distortion but it was common in the analogue era. For this reason many Classic Rock era recordings are examples of this technique in action.
. . . and all the others . . .
The effects I list above are but a handful of effects that can be bought in today's market. There are numerous others as well, chorus pedals, flangers, envelope filters and any number of obscure niche effects that have been used over the years to varying degrees of success. In most cases these effects have in one way or another mimicked some naturally occurring phenomena or in some cases, such as flanging, a recording engineer's trick.
