My primary, perhaps even exclusive focus in guitar music is to learn and play old country blues, including tunes by such luminaries as the Rev. Gary Davis, the Rev. Robert Wilkins, Elizabeth Cotton and Etta Baker. These tunes were mostly played on acoustic guitar; however, there are enough images out there to indicate that the country blues players were not immune to the charms of the electric guitar… Nor am I, and I play the blues tunes I’ve learned interchangeably on a combination of five different guitars.
I think one of the most fun elements of playing electric guitar is the great range of possibilities when it comes to sculpting a sound, as compared to an acoustic flat top.
Besides the guitar itself, which offers some tone control, electric guitars also have available tone sculpting capabilities with the amplifier itself; however, as depicted above, the marketplace offers a wide variety of pedals to enhance and sculpt the tone emanating from the guitar/amp combination.
To date, I’ve mostly restricted myself to adding tone modulation to my country blues tune such as tremolo, reverb, or delay, along with some compression beforehand, but I’ve been loath to experiment with or add in overdrive or distortion tone modification, which is currently so popular in rock and roll music, especially heavy metal. Those aforementioned tone modifications can have a huge impact on the listeners response to the music and can easily destroy the aesthetic of a country blues tune.
Well… I am still totally uninterested it big time distortion and wild horses could not get me to sit down and listen to a metal band, but I am going to stick my toes in the “distortion” waters a bit.
I decided to throw my infrequently used Boss Equalizer under the bus and remove it from my pedal board (it is sitting safely in its original box waiting for a rainy day). In place, I am going to put in a pedal that can add some tasteful crunch to the guitar’s signal. I do already possess a Mesa Boogie Tone Burst which can add some slight tone fattening but has limited impact, which is what it was designed to do; however a different pedal is required to get a more noticeable crunch.
The pedal choices for tone modification include overdrive, distortion or fuzz devices. The changes wrought by distortion and/or fuzz devices are so over-dramatic they offend my sensibilities, so I decided to acquire an overdrive, which I think will be more manageable and not destroy the aesthetic of a country blues tune. There are so many of these things on the marketplace that a decision can be overwhelmingly impossible to make from the perspective of my somewhat shallow knowledge base. So I decided to jump into the deep end and trust Mesa Boogie again by grabbing a pedal that was designed to add more crunch to the signal than the Tone Burst mentioned earlier.
Fortunately for me I had the great good fortune of getting a nice discount from Bob of Bob’s Guitars and acquired a Mesa Boogie Flux Drive. Bob has a history of taking good care of his constant customers, which I am. It did not hurt that this particular pedal had been languishing on Bob’s pedal shelf for years and he probably viewed my testing the pedal out as a decisive moment to finally unload it!
Well… my initial experience is very positive with the Flux Drive… the device works by pushing the valves in my Fender Princeton into modestly aggressive overdrive and adds a nice sonic crunch that does not obscure the essential elements of the tune I am playing… Check me out at open mic night because I will probably use it for at least one tune!