Some time ago I went plu­gin happy. Actu­ally it was more plu­gin mad. I trolled through sites like VST Planet and Audio Mas­ter­mind search­ing for the elu­sive plu­gin that would make my record­ings sparkle. Just the faint promise of breath­ing life into the gui­tars, or pol­ish­ing the vocals was enough to sell me. Soon my plu­gin folder was awash with oddly named effects that rarely did any­thing dis­cernible. Most I never use, but I was com­forted by the thought that I could if I wanted to.

The tyranny of choice. That’s what it comes down to. I played around in a local music shop with a Line6 Pod and was struck by the num­ber of com­bi­na­tions avail­able. With 32 amps and 60+ effects that is over 1920 dis­tinct com­bi­na­tions. It would take quite a while to plough through them all. Pretty soon you’re not play­ing, but rather play­ing around, try­ing to set­tle on the right sound.

If I had to offer advice to those who are look­ing to jump into the effect mar­ket to tweak their music it would be this: Think of how you want to sound first, then limit your choices to put you in that direc­tion. Good record­ing and good pro­duc­tion may dupe peo­ple briefly into lik­ing what is oth­er­wise flat mate­r­ial. One can spend great amounts of time get­ting the right sound to liven up that which is flawed by bad play­ing, record­ing, com­po­si­tion, expres­sion, or what­ever. The audi­ence is infi­nitely more for­giv­ing of son­i­cally imper­fect expe­ri­ences than we are apt to believe, pro­vided the per­former can enter­tain that is.

So for­get the giant multi-effect boxes with their plethora of dis­trac­tion. Instead pol­ish what you have. Learn to com­pose a song that will stand on its own, with­out the aid of high pro­duc­tion value. Learn how to per­form in a way that is expres­sive with­out the use of an expres­sion pedal. You will waste less time flip­ping through pre­sets and twist­ing knobs, focus­ing so intently on the qual­ity of your sound, and will spend more time focus­ing on the qual­ity of your music.

Tags: Guitar Effects, Music Software, Performance, Plugins, Recording, VST

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 5:39 am and is filed under Everything Else. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.