Pedals to make an electric guitar sound old timey

If you don't have the amp for this, pedals are available to help you out to get this sound.

What is old timey? In the world of music, any published song that is over 15 years old is considered an oldie. That technically means any song from 2006 at the time I write counts as oldie music.

However, when guitar players want an old timey sound, they're usually referring to decades much older than that. Specifically, the 1950s and 1960s.

It used to be all about the amp

In the 1950s, guitarists really didn't use pedals much, and instead used whatever effect the amp had installed in it. And yes, I said effect, as in single effect, because most amps didn't have multiple effects in them.

It wasn't really until the 1960s where pedals became a normal thing for guitarists.

Amp effects, generally speaking, were limited to four things. Reverb tank, tremolo, vibrato and rotary.

The reverb tank was just a spring in a box. Tremolo is in some respects was supposed to emulate the rotary effect, but ended up being it's own stutter-type sound (I talked about that recently). The rotary sound came from organs that had a rotating speaker for a wob-wob-wob-wob type of sound. Vibrato is a modulation effect that changes the pitch of the sound up, down, then back up again.

Published 2020 Dec 31