Hello guys.. I have a question has anyone ever ran a entire mix through a guitar effect pedal.. I always try to think outside the box and analog summing has always been something that peaked my interest but it's definitely not a poor man's interest lol. Say you ran a entire mix through a guitar eq do you think there would be any benefit? I would think it would do something to the sound but I don't own a guitar or effect pedal to test this.. I plan on purchasing different effect pedals to run my soft synths through.. kinda a poor man's way of getting some different tones the one that really caught my eye is the solidgoldfx nu -33 vinyl engine.. but always up to hear more seasoned guitar players and people who use the gear and what they think..

 

I didn't do it with a guitar pedal, and not because you want to run a mix through a guitar pedal. But what I did once was try to pass the mix that I had on the PC through a Yamaha console that I have, to see if it improved and gave it some analog touch. Also try to pass a guitar already processed by the console and then to the pc. The truth is that, from my point of view, I found no benefit, on the contrary, it loses body and adds white noise. It is my experience.

 

Guitar pedals are generally not engineered with sonic excellence in mind. Just sayin'.

 

That's pretty cool though.. I guess it would be more of a effect then anything else.. thank you for the info..

 

i run individual sounds through pedals quite often, never tried an entire mix though. it's usually DIs, or parallel tracks i want to affect and then layer in with the main sound

your pedal is going to require an instrument level analog signal at its input stage, and a full mix is obviously much hotter than that. you'd need to send the mix through a converter to morph it into an analog signal, attenuate that signal down to instrument level, process it through the pedal you've chosen, bring it back to a proper level using some form of amplification, and then convert the signal back to digital for your DAW. my gut feeling is that during all that processing you'd be losing something significant and/or creating quite a bit of noise

it's also worth considering pedal type. most affordable guitar EQs are graphic EQs with "guitar-centric" frequency bands, not sure how much use they would be on a full mix. a parametric EQ pedal would likely work better, but the formidable ones approach a similar price point to what an entry level outboard pro audio EQ would run you anyway

i think your idea is worth trying out if you can do it free / cheap, but i wouldn't suggest investing significant money into the experiment. not sure a few electronic components will give you more benefit than you could get from some well deployed plugins these days

(investing in effects pedals for your synths is a different story though!)

 

You could run a mix through a pedal, but the results probably won't be very good.
To experiment I'd recommend trying out some amp simulators that also model pedals rather than going out and buying a pedal - something like Line6 Helix or Bias FX - that way you can keep it all in the box and not have to worry about routing or reamping.

 

I agree with what the guys say:
The "problem" is the digital/analog conversion.

You also have to take into account a very important factor, and that is, where would you pass the mixture? by an effect or guitar amplifier?. Remember that guitar amps have a cut in the high and low frequencies.
It's also true what they said, if it's free, try everything totally, you don't lose anything, on the contrary you learn something. But if you're going to spend money, I'd think about it. And yes, you could pass it through a vst that emulates something analog, although of course, you want to do it with something physical analog, but to guide yourself you can do it. Also another thing you can experiment with would be a "pre amp". The ones that I liked the most are the ones from Acustica Audio,
Acqua, to my ear is closer to analog, and they have several free plugins, you could try to see if you like the sound.

 

As a guitar and bass player, but I also compose, so I mix, these are the things to take in consideration:

- Most guitar pedals are mono. Even so, some are stereo, but these are more expensive.
- Even with stereo pedals, as said before, guitar pedals are made for instruments level, not mix level. By lowering your mix level to adapt it to the pedal, then re-uping it to mix level, you will have more noise, which may or not be of your taste.
- Guitar pedals are usually centred on specific frequencies useful for guitar but limited for a mix, often lacking of low low end. Just to have an idea of that, try any effect you can find in IK multimedia Amplitube, so you will hear it.

- As said before most good guitar / bass pedal are expensive, but I have a compressor pedal that is stereo and cover large frequency band, it also includes a distortion and both can be used in parallel. Electro Harmonix Platform Compressor/Limiter that only cost around 170€ so it's an exception to the rule.

- Even so, experimenting is a good thing, so what you could do is to send tracks / instruments one by one through guitar pedals, and treat it in parallel with the original.

- There are also solutions like buying a second hand analog console, or compressors. Some are very cheap, specially if you are ready to do some basic cleaning and repair.

 

Start with software effects, it's much more effective and cheaper:

Overloud - TH-U Complete
IK Multimedia - AmpliTube 5
FabFilter - Volcano 3
D16 Group - Godfazer

https://plugins4free.com/effects/Modulation/
https://plugins4free.com/effects/Guitar-Amp/
https://plugins4free.com/effects/Filtering/
https://plugins4free.com/effects/MultiFX/

 

Stick to using software fx pedals. The results you get from what you want to do will be very, very different from anything you expected. So with software you don't have to shell out money.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 7, 2022

These days people mix the analog and digital worlds together to get the best possible studio sound. This is one of the best setups:

For the amp and cabinet:
- Use a real amp: this is especially important for a high-quality distorted guitar sound. For clean tones, DI/Digital works fine.
- Use a load box to record the output of the real amp and use cabinet IRs. This allows for silent recording and also huge flexibility for changing the cabinet sound using IRs.

For pedals:
- If you need a clean boost to push the amp, you should use a real override pedal before the amp (e.g. 808, TubeScreamer, etc.)
- If you are into Wah, you should use an analog Wah before the amp.
- If you are playing clean, you can add a compressor pedal before the amp.
- If you are in a noisy environment, you can use a real noise gate pedal before the amp. Some fancy noise gates get a sidechain before the amp and

For other effects:
Just use the digital effects in your DAW (reverb, delay, etc).

If you don't wanna carry your stuff for the live situations, get one of the multi-effect processors (e.g. BlueGuitar AMP 1, QuadCortex, Helix, Axe FX, POD Go, etc). But don't use it for studio or album recording!

 

Last edited: May 7, 2022

I wouldn't run the whole mix through a guitar pedal, but you can definitely use them for different stuff like parallel drum crushing, distorting vocals etc. Toshi Kasai, Sylvia Massey, Joe Barresi and tons of other well known recording and mixing engineers frequently use guitar pedals as outboard effects when mixing.

 

There's no way I would run the whole mix through any pedal, no matter the cost, but for some creative fx on separate sounds/tracks I find them extremely useful, both hardware and software pedals/fx.

Great summing mixers/consoles can be had for cheap these days, but they don't add much to the sound. I use a Soundtracs mixer for that purpose that I bought about 10 years ago because I needed something with many inputs to run all my hardware samplers and synths through. So I didn't buy it for the sound, rather to make it easier for me to have everything connected at all times, but if I think something needs a bit of "console colour" [quite slight in comparison to pedals, mind you] I do sum it with it.

 

Btw, one thing I've found that I really like doing is to run a drum mono room/wurst track through a overdrive/distortion pedal and mix it in with the original track. I normally use some kind of dirty compressor/limiter on tracks like this (e.g Soundtoys Devil-Loc Deluxe), but sometimes I get a better result with a drive pedal.

 

i used to make dub live mixing using pedals and multifx designed for guitars
gives the lofi sound
wont say its usable for everything tho'

 

Never say Never
think about how many effects are used today that before using them was unreasonable. For example, effects that are used like Origin by Cymatics to create a nostalgic feel (like what cassettes used to sound like or Vinyl).
Who knows... Maybe in the future we will have songs playing through pedals.
Creativity has no limits

 

what I do is something like in the vid min 8:30

 

Wow great answer Oly. You're on fire today. A bit like Carlos Alcaraz but with music

 

That was yesterday actually a but thank you for your good words.

Who is Carlos Alacaraz btw?