Crayon Sky Music

Electric guitar people! help!?

I have been playing acoustic guitar for 15 years and have become a bit of bad@##@$% on it if I do say so myself, but now I wanna play rock star so I bought a fender strat and a little 5 watt champion 600 tube amp. my question is about pedals….what type of pedal or pedals would you recommend…keep in mind that this is just my learning rig so simple and reasonably priced is what I am looking for…thanks. (oh yeah, I wanna play rolling stones, dire straits, bluesy british crunchy twangy music)

If you’re looking for old rock, get an Ibanez Tube Screamer, preferably the TS808 build (the green one with the big aluminum button). That’s the sound of 60s and 70s rock, period. It warms and breaks up the top end of your distortion, giving you that sweet pie crust of a tone. It’s in the signal chain of about every big rock band. I’d also get a decent reverb pedal. Electro-Harmonix makes top-notch stompboxes that have serious vintage cred.

There’s also another idea….get a POD. There’s a bunch of them out there, and although the drift more twards the newer sounds, there’s plenty of sweet vintage tone emulation on them, and for the cost of a Tube Screamer and a decent reverb pedal, you can get one. You have a Champ, so running the POD into a tube amp with sweeten the sound a little bit.

One last thing…the Champ is an honorable start for a beginning electric guitarist, but you may want to think about finding another amp with a little more versatility, like a used 30-watt combo with a master volume from any of your big-name amp makers. Epiphone has a sweet all-tube amp for cheap.

:::high five to Moonman:::

Fender Road Worn Stratocaster Ibanez TS 808 Fender Champion 600