Pedals to make an electric guitar sound old timey

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.

Published 2020 Dec 31