The One Thing EVERY Guitar Player Needs (in my opinion)

[Music] so [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so i love fuzz it's without a doubt my favorite guitar effect ever more than anything else this is a desert island effect for me and over the past several years i've collected dozens of fuzz pedals and i think over the past couple years i've become somewhat of a fuzz evangelist trying to convince people in my comment sections in my videos and and friends of mine that the way of fuzz is important i think this effect has had such an impact on guitar playing over the years it has stood the test of time it was one of the first guitar effects some of the first pedals ever made were fuzz pedals and it's still being utilized today but you can do way more with a fuzz than just crazy spitty making your amp sound like it's going to explode type sounds so in this episode of gear talk with rhett i'm going to try and convince you why you need to have a fuzz pedal on your board [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so so before we go any further let's talk briefly about fuzz circuits and what they actually do fuzz pedals are actually pretty simple circuits there's not a lot going on but there are a few key components here first and foremost are the transistors now a transistor is a small electrical component that we use as an amplifier inside the fuzz circuit and we achieve the fuzz distortion fuzz sound by overloading those components now there's two common types of transistors that are used in fuzzes most often germanium and silicon now more often than not a germanium fuzz is going to be a little bit smoother in the top end it's not going to be as bright and brittle and harsh as a silicon fuzz will be germanium though is known for being somewhat unreliable it changes its sound based on things like temperature that's why there's stories of players keeping their fuzz faces and other germanium type fuzzes in the freezer before a session or not wanting to use them outside in hot gigs because it completely changes the sound of the fuzz and that's one of the main differences between germanium and silicon silicon is much more stable it is not affected by things like temperature change now you can use other types of components than transistors to achieve a fuzz sound you can build fuzzes with clipping diodes for example like the uh mythos golden fleece or you can use op amps but essentially all of these components are working effectively in the same way which is to say that they are clipping your signal they're distorting your signal giving you the fuzz tone now i have an entire section of my tone course devoted to fuzz which you can check out down below we go into a little bit more detail in that course now fuzz circuits and overdrive and distortion circuits work in a similar way you are clipping some kind of amplification device a diode a transistor an op amp and generally they just have a different response than many overdrives and distortions do but there absolutely is a crossover there are a lot of fuzz pedals that can get into overdrive territory and a lot of overdrive and distortion pedals that can get into fuzz territory so one of the main reasons i think you should have a fuzz on your board is you can use these as incredible tone shaping tools they're not just for crazy distortion and high gain sounds i mean they're certainly great for that but you can use a fuzz pedal to do things like fatten up clean tones and that's something i love to do especially on tracks so here i've got one of my favorite fuzz pedals of all time this is the jax celeste buzz tone this is a germanium fuzz and it's based off of the the fuzz that sid barrett used on the early pink floyd sessions uh piper at the gates of dawn now let me show you what i'm talking about i've got my esquire here going into the fuzz and from the fuzz i'm going into my hi-watt custom 20 and then into luna and you can hear how i've got the fuzz set currently it's pretty gamey [Music] now believe it or not we can use this fuzz to dial in a really fat clean sound that's actually going to help your guitar cut through a mix better than it would on its own so all i've got to do is find the sweet spot on my guitar's volume knob to where it starts to clean up a little bit but there's still a little bit of drive a little bit of saturation coming from the pedal now this is one thing i always look for in a good fuzz pedal how well does it clean up with my volume knob because you really have an infinite amount of tonal possibilities available with a fuzz you kind of dial in your maximum amount of gain that you want and then use your volume knob to control how much gain is actually coming from the pedal so to show you what i mean i'm going to play a little lead line over a track that you might not think of a fuzz for but this is the perfect sound for this kind of pedal [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so there you could immediately hear the guitar cut through more and yes there was a little bit more gain coming from the pedal but you could tell when i kicked it on the amount of gain that the pedal is set for that immediately cleaned up as soon as i rolled off the volume knob on this esquire now use a different fuzz with different transistors and a different tone circuit and you're going to get a slightly different effect but this is something that you should absolutely try out in your own rig at home now there's more to a fuzz than just the type of transistors or op amps or clipping diodes in its circuit and i think this is where people start to get a little confused and somewhat intimidated because the world of fuzz pedals is deep and vast and seemingly never ending bottom line is if you're new to the world of fuzz it can be really tough to decide what type of fuzz pedal to start off with what should you go for and i think this is the source for a lot of the animosity towards fuzz that i see at least in my comment sections on videos i've done in the past the important thing is to do your research if you have a favorite player or favorite type of sound do a quick google search and try and find what that player what that band was known for using and then try and find a fuzz pedal or circuit that fits under that category and after a few years if you're anything like me you'll end up with a few dozen different fuzz pedals in your collection that you just can't seem to part ways with okay so another great use for just about any fuzz pedal out there is to use it as a way to fatten up your rhythm sounds this works especially well if you're playing in a band where you might be the only guitar player or if you're recording a track where you have one guitar that you want to have a little extra weight to you have maybe a riff or a rhythm part that you want to help just add some girth to fuzz petals are great for this because they're adding a ton of harmonic distortion there's so much extra harmonic information coming from the fuzz itself that it really adds a lot of weight to your sound so for this example i'm going to use the jhs 3 series fuzz and i've just got my novo here going into my custom 20 again with a slightly broken up sort of rhythm sound this is something that i would use for a lot of riffs or any kind of rhythm parts on like a rock track for example sounds great but listen to what happens when i kick on the fuzz now it's especially apparent when you're playing in the key of e and you play this major third interval in fact this is one way i like to test fuzzes a lot to see how they respond and how they handle intervals because not all fuzz circuits handle chords or intervals very well so playing this interval here can give you a good idea of how that fuzz is going to handle chords [Applause] now you may hear that and think that's way too distorted there's way too much fuzz that sounds harsh and spitty and you may not think that you would want to use that for your own sound but listen to what happens when i put it in the context of a mix with drums and bass and possibly another [Music] guitar oh now probably my favorite way to use just about any type of fuzz is as a lead tone fuzz is a great effect for this for a few different reasons first of all it adds sustain now the way it's doing that is actually sort of like acting as a compressor if you've ever used a compressor before your overdrives to get more sustain for your lead sounds or your single note runs fuzz is essentially doing the same thing by clipping your signal it's acting as a compressor and depending on how you have the fuzz set and how you have your amp set and how they're interacting with one another you can get singing violin-like sustained think eric johnson think david gilmore i mean the list goes on and the second reason is depending on how you have your fuzz set it can help push the mid-range frequencies of your guitar that's going to help you cut through the mix and get you that singing smooth violin like solo tone now for this example i'm using the royal tone from bae and this is cool because it actually has its own mid circuit a mid boost circuit but i'm not actually going to use that for this example here so i've got my amp set pretty much the way i've had it this whole video slightly broken up but nothing too crazy and you can hear the amount of sustain i've got going on right now [Music] not much at all so listen to what the fuzz is adding so you can see right off the bat i'm getting loads more sustained than i was without the fuzz on and it's also pushing that sort of upper mid-range bite that's going to help this guitar cut through now there's one other thing that i like to do when i'm going for those really long sustained sort of violin like solos and that's add some delay and reverb now i've just added some tape delay and plate reverb to the tone and you can hear the difference [Music] so this tone i'm gonna use slide four because the delay repeats and the reverb is so long the trails are so long it's not gonna lend itself very well to super fast playing it's more melodic lines and so when you throw the slide into the equation that added sustain from the fuzz the mid-range kick from the fuzz paired with the delay and the reverb are going to give you a really great singing lead sound me [Music] so so that's why i love fuzz and that's why i think every guitar player out there needs a fuzz on their pedal board if you want more information on the pedals that i used in this video those will all be linked in the description box down below some of those links are affiliate links which means if you buy something through that i will earn a small commission which really helps me out in running this channel so thank you if you want more information on how to support the channel you can check out my tone course down below check out the green room down below as well i'm also working on a brand new video course which is going to drop very soon on the nashville number system so keep an eye out for that don't forget to follow me on instagram rhett shawl subscribe to my youtube channel if you haven't done so already and check out my second channel backstage journal down below as well i'm getting ready to launch season three of the backstage journal podcast there i'm also doing weekly live streams over there as well that's a lot of information to drop the end of the video thank you guys so much for watching hope you enjoyed it my name is rhett shull and remember there is no plan b you

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 132,857

Keywords: jimi hendrix, fuzz pedal, fuzz face, Fuzz Pedal, rhett shull fuzz, rhett shull amp, rhett shull novo, rhett shull slide, guitar pedals, best fuzz pedal, guitar effects, fuzz pedal shootout, Tone Bender, JHS, JHS 3 series, Fuzz, Macaris

Id: 7loXjKi9mUk

Length: 15min 31sec (931 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020