Pedals Vs. Rack Effects
- Thread starter Lucid_Lunatic
- Start date
Re: Pedals Vs. Rack Effects
I love racks and honestly dont understand the whole pedal thing if you are trying to achieve good sound for good money.
Pedals are great for very very simple setup you need one or 2 effects and nothing else ? -> go for small pedal board.
Do you need something more complex, switch channels, switch more effects at the same time control volume etc, more profi setup and dont want to dance on pedal board ? -> rack.
I dont see why people buying the big pedal boards, they spend big money 1 or 2K just of stompboxed when they can get the same or better sound with 300 dollar lexicon unit 1U rack that is controllable via midi by default and you click on one button and have exactly what you wanted. I realize its a lot of settings etc and its easier to setup pedal, but, if you play live, you will see that you need to put a lot of duck tape to keep the pedal board settings at one place, almost impossible on tour, that solution is not reliable at all.
Another thing that i dont understand is the cables, i just switched to wireless guitar connection and i can tell you that this change my sound so much, it became much better signal now i have top end, i used to play on 15 feet cable and i realized that there is soo much loss on the cable that the signal that goes to the amp is already ****ed before even playing anything.
Same with pedal board but multiply by 100, when you have bigger pedal board, there is a lot of cables and not just that, the pedals each have different input/output levels, what that means is that even though your guitar cable signal was pretty ok, before it reaches the amp, you signal loses all top end and will be most likely so altered that the amp will sound like ****.
Give you example, I was on the show where the guy have big pedal board, he plugged in and the sound was already bad, as soon as he stomp some pedals, it couldnt hear anything just bass and drums, another band didnt have pedal board and plugged straight to the amp, i could hear every single note.
This is what i like about the rack, very good organized, minimal cable management, consistency and same sound every single time, this is something that the pedal board cannot give, just cant.
Also, pedals are much more expensive than rack units a very good pedal board is at least 1K dollars, for that money you can have all effect on the planet midi control and still save some money.
I love racks and honestly dont understand the whole pedal thing if you are trying to achieve good sound for good money.
Pedals are great for very very simple setup you need one or 2 effects and nothing else ? -> go for small pedal board.
Do you need something more complex, switch channels, switch more effects at the same time control volume etc, more profi setup and dont want to dance on pedal board ? -> rack.
I dont see why people buying the big pedal boards, they spend big money 1 or 2K just of stompboxed when they can get the same or better sound with 300 dollar lexicon unit 1U rack that is controllable via midi by default and you click on one button and have exactly what you wanted. I realize its a lot of settings etc and its easier to setup pedal, but, if you play live, you will see that you need to put a lot of duck tape to keep the pedal board settings at one place, almost impossible on tour, that solution is not reliable at all.
Another thing that i dont understand is the cables, i just switched to wireless guitar connection and i can tell you that this change my sound so much, it became much better signal now i have top end, i used to play on 15 feet cable and i realized that there is soo much loss on the cable that the signal that goes to the amp is already ****ed before even playing anything.
Same with pedal board but multiply by 100, when you have bigger pedal board, there is a lot of cables and not just that, the pedals each have different input/output levels, what that means is that even though your guitar cable signal was pretty ok, before it reaches the amp, you signal loses all top end and will be most likely so altered that the amp will sound like ****.
Give you example, I was on the show where the guy have big pedal board, he plugged in and the sound was already bad, as soon as he stomp some pedals, it couldnt hear anything just bass and drums, another band didnt have pedal board and plugged straight to the amp, i could hear every single note.
This is what i like about the rack, very good organized, minimal cable management, consistency and same sound every single time, this is something that the pedal board cannot give, just cant.
Also, pedals are much more expensive than rack units a very good pedal board is at least 1K dollars, for that money you can have all effect on the planet midi control and still save some money.
thunderkyss
New member
Re: Pedals Vs. Rack Effects
eight years
eight years
Re: Pedals Vs. Rack Effects
I used a rack system for a wile. I ran a mesa boogie triAxis and a 90/90 power amp with a couple rack units and a furman power meter for all the power plugins and controlled it all with a midi pedal board. I ran it in stereo between 2 2x12 cabs. It was a real monster system. The tone was clean and bouncing the signal in stereo was a very cool effect.......think -Rage against the Machine, Ghost of Tom Joad-where hes ping ponging distortion back and forth. you can do all kinds of cool things like bounce the slight delay between cabinets or run chorus to just one side or sit and tink with compression ratio's and really cool stuff with tone. A rack for me gave me alot of options that the normal guy never gets. my friends used to come over and say......"what patch did you make this week?" When I jammed, I had plenty of control and tone to fill any gaps. My problem was, I started to play through a few amp heads and found all that great raw tone that the Rack was compressing and squashing out of my signal. to be honest, wile my rack system was big hug and clean it also kinda sounded sterile and cold. alot of players would then use EMG pickups to try to force a certain tone thru all the signal to get a standard tone quality through all the signal squashing. I tried EMG's, Bartalinis, and what ever else but in the end, I found a good old amp head with passive pickups just sounded always about 25 to 30 percent better so wile the rack is a really cool conveniance with alot of features and big clean tone, to me is sucked the life right out of the tone. it also added latency through the signal path and I really hated that. I try to use analog effects when I can becouse I think they sound good. I freely admit I like the Strymon El Capistan and the Strymon Flint but I think most rack stuff depending on the effect sounds kinda cold, big but cold and lifeless. everything goes in circles, rack stuff may yet come into its own again but for now I like pedals and I would just use a better foot controller for all your pedals which lately seem to have come into their own.
I used a rack system for a wile. I ran a mesa boogie triAxis and a 90/90 power amp with a couple rack units and a furman power meter for all the power plugins and controlled it all with a midi pedal board. I ran it in stereo between 2 2x12 cabs. It was a real monster system. The tone was clean and bouncing the signal in stereo was a very cool effect.......think -Rage against the Machine, Ghost of Tom Joad-where hes ping ponging distortion back and forth. you can do all kinds of cool things like bounce the slight delay between cabinets or run chorus to just one side or sit and tink with compression ratio's and really cool stuff with tone. A rack for me gave me alot of options that the normal guy never gets. my friends used to come over and say......"what patch did you make this week?" When I jammed, I had plenty of control and tone to fill any gaps. My problem was, I started to play through a few amp heads and found all that great raw tone that the Rack was compressing and squashing out of my signal. to be honest, wile my rack system was big hug and clean it also kinda sounded sterile and cold. alot of players would then use EMG pickups to try to force a certain tone thru all the signal to get a standard tone quality through all the signal squashing. I tried EMG's, Bartalinis, and what ever else but in the end, I found a good old amp head with passive pickups just sounded always about 25 to 30 percent better so wile the rack is a really cool conveniance with alot of features and big clean tone, to me is sucked the life right out of the tone. it also added latency through the signal path and I really hated that. I try to use analog effects when I can becouse I think they sound good. I freely admit I like the Strymon El Capistan and the Strymon Flint but I think most rack stuff depending on the effect sounds kinda cold, big but cold and lifeless. everything goes in circles, rack stuff may yet come into its own again but for now I like pedals and I would just use a better foot controller for all your pedals which lately seem to have come into their own.
Re: Pedals Vs. Rack Effects
Since this thread was posted, pedal sound quality has certainly surpassed racks available in 2008. There are good rack effect around today, too, but unless you are going with a Fractal or Kemper rig, you can get just as good effects in pedal form.
Since this thread was posted, pedal sound quality has certainly surpassed racks available in 2008. There are good rack effect around today, too, but unless you are going with a Fractal or Kemper rig, you can get just as good effects in pedal form.
