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.
Then the '60s came...
The earliest effects as far as I'm aware were the fuzz box and the booster, but I believe those actually appeared before the '60s.
What absolutely did appear starting in the '60s was the envelope filter, as in the wah pedal.
Also during this era was the refinement of the delay effect. Now if you really want to get particular about this, technically the delay effect goes all the way back to the 1940s, as it came about shortly after magnetic tape players came into being.
However, what most guitarists agree is the "real" delay effect that really set the mark was the Echoplex from 1959. That was the unit that gave the guitarist fine control of delay speeds. And as the Echoplex was improved over time, it also introduced volume controls for dry signal and such. This effect was also one of the first that started as tube-type and then was later made as solid state.
The old timey effect checklist + one modern effect
I'll start with the modern effect first because this is kind of important.
Part of the old timey sound is a loud tube-type amp. The tubes when hot in combination with a loudspeaker that breaks up in a desirable way (like a Celestion) really brings together that nice old sound.
Obviously, you can't crank an amp up super loud all the time, so the next best thing for home recording is something I've mentioned many times before, compression. Get a compressor. No, it will not sound the same as an amp with white-hot tubes blaring a Celestion loudspeaker. But you can listen to it with headphones or your computer speakers.
After that, this is the old timey list:
- Booster
- Fuzz
- Rotary
- Vibrato
- Tremolo
- Tape Delay
- Wah
Let's go over each of these.
Booster can be emulated with a compressor and light overdrive/distortion. You probably already have an overdrive/distortion effect. All you need is the compressor.
Fuzz can't really be emulated with overdrive/distortion because it doesn't bring out the "fat" sound fuzz has. You'll have to buy one. Fortunately, fuzz can be had cheap.
Rotary is very difficult to get right, and not cheap at all. Some would say "Oh, just use a flanger, that works." No, it doesn't. A proper rotary effect needs active switching to emulate the speeding up and slowing down of the simulated rotating speaker, and has to do so in a way where it doesn't sound like a mess. Not easy. It is routine to see better rotary floor effects go for over $200 - especially for the ones that have stereo capability. Rotary is also something you can't just on/off. There's a process in learning how to use it right. It takes time. Nothing about rotary, even with modern pedals, is 100% automatic. There is a learning curve and that's just the way it is.
Vibrato is the effect you go for if you want that hippie-era '60s vibe. I'm not a fan of this effect, and most vibrato pedals sound like a warbly mess. And even on amps that had this effect originally, they didn't sound that great either.
I covered tremolo in detail here, and yes, get this. Very good effect to have, both for old timey and modern sounds.
Tape delay is weird because you can go cheap or super-expensive. There are many delays out there. For the old timey sound, all you need is something that has 300ms of delay time, which is all of them. You can go cheap with this.
Wah is an effect I both love and hate. Love the sound, love the control of the sound, hate the hardware. My favorite wah of all time is the VOX V847A, as it has notably more "growl" and "bite" compared to a Dunlop Crybaby. But I hate the maintenance involved. These pedals use lubricant for the pedal mechanism to work. That lubricant will dry up, so it's required to periodically take the pedal apart, clean it, and re-lube. I can't stand that.
There's only one solution to this: Use optical wah. The Morley PWO Power Optical Wah is such a pedal. No lube at all because it, obviously, uses optical tech to do what it does. No pots to wear out. No lubrication required. Great pedal. The only reason I've not bought one is because it's not cheap and never has been. But it is lower in price compared to the VOX V847A.
Can all this stuff be emulated with software?
With the rotary and wah effects, absolutely not.
For the other stuff, yes.
To get that absolute old timey vintage tone that covers all the bases, you really need that rotary and wah. The rotary has to be purpose-built to the task, and the wah has to be manual style with no software control.
Oh sure, there have been many attempts to emulate the rotary and wah in software, but they're all terrible.
The only question you have to ask yourself is if you need rotary and wah or not. If not, software may cover everything you need. But if it doesn't and you really want "the full set" of all the old timey sounds, spend some cash on that rotary and wah. Both are very nice to have.
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Published 2020 Dec 31