Lone Wolf harp peddles cost an arm and a leg. Guitar peddles can be a lot cheaper. Have you guy's used guitar peddles with your harp. If so what peddles have you used. How did you find them good, bad, indifferent.
I find the subject fascinating although, I don't own an amp, I'm still curious as to which peddles people find useful.
Since you don't have an amp, I'd recommend not a pedal, but a multieffects like Digitech or ZOOM. They're almost the price of a single pedal, you can record direct to computer, play at home with earphones, or use with a cheaper keyboard amp. You can experiment with many kinds of effect (delay, reverb, chorus, octaver, etc), and when you decibe which would suit best for your sound, you could invest more on a pedal. You can buy these things cheap if you search for a used one.
I'd like this to be a thread about the peddles other people are using that are not Lone Wolf. Personally I shall be getting an audio interface and mic to play into BlueDadi and Amplitude 4 the free version. In a few weeks caronavirus has thrown a bit of a spanner in the works Holding on to money for the moment.
I picked up an RP350 really cheap and got a Vocal 300 free (both Digitech) on Craigslist. There are hundreds of hours of experimenting, which might even qualify as practice, in any multi-X pedal. And, you can do it into headsets.
On the subject of building a $1500 pedal board, 1)not many people can authoritatively weigh in on that, and 2) personal preference is going to weigh heavy in all the choices.
In addition to the digitech stuff, which I am reluctant to use in public, because it looks a little cheesey and invites too much criticism, I have a Zoom MS-70CDR which is very inconspicuous, has a wide array of options, and can give me some reverb and delay clones.
https://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/MS70CDR--zoom-ms-70cdr-multistomp-chorus-delay-reverb-pedal
Last Edited by Thievin' Heathen on Aug 16, 2020 12:57 PM
For playing out on non blues gigs (or sitting in at a blues gig) I usually sing and play harp straight to the PA through my Ultimate 58 and use various playing techniques to get different sounds. Sometimes I have used my "sit-in amp", an EHX 44 Magnum to a 10" Lil' Buddy speaker that gets reasonable warmth and breakup. These have been my most common approaches to playing out for gigs or sitting in.
However, I have used pedals on some occasions over the years when I wanted a blues sound or different sounds to the PA. At one time many years back I used a Blues Driver pedal.
More recently I used the cab simulation output of a Bad Monkey without turning on the pedal's distortion. I didn't like the thin sound of the Bad Monkey distortion for harp when the pedal was turned on. I could not adjust it to get the sound I wanted. However, using the PA cabinet simulation output of the Bad Monkey pedal powered but NOT TURNED ON worked OK for a warm breakup using a CM element Brown Biscuit mic at a gig. If you have access to a Bad Monkey pedal it is worth trying out.
My current favorite pedal board choices for a blues sound from pedals to PA is the Joyo American sound with a touch of slap back delay from my Dan Echo pedal. I could add my old Ibenez Soundtank Super Chorus Pedal if I thought I needed the chorus effect, but I usually don't bother. I try to keep it simple...
For recording, I have used an obsolete Digitech Genesis 1 effects unit.
I like that it offers a variety of effects while offering control knobs like an amp. You don't program the sounds, you adjust them with knobs. It offers a couple amp models that work with harp (tweed and blackface) and more amp models that are too high gain for live harp playing. It is plastic and table based, not a pedal, and would not be very roadworthy. Still, it offers a lot of options and has knobs. I only played out with it on one occasion. I had not yet figured out which settings would work best for loud live playing at that time and struggled with feedback in a live situation. I have since learned what would work live: always think low gain.
However, the Digitech Genesis 1 worked pretty good for recording on a 2014 forum challenge, playing along with the backing track to Rollercoaster. The challenge was to improvise something different over the Rollercoaster backing track NOT Little Walter's approach. This was harder than you might think, since Little Walter's playing immediately comes to mind when you hear the backing track.
I posted two tries at this: one diatonic, and later one chromatic. I used the Genesis 1 modeler with different settings for each track. I am posting the unlisted tracks here to demonstrate the Digitech Genesis 1 effects unit in response to this thread.
EDIT: I did not change settings mid song, so the effect is the same start to finish on each one. Each track used different settings, though.
Diatonic improvisation track:
And a chromatic improvisation attempt:
The text in each video describes the settings, harps, mics used to make the direct audio recording.
The challenge thread is here, in case someone is bored and wants to give it a try:
