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Today I'll be seeing what the Digitech Whammy, the Big Muff and the Vox Wah pedals seem like with a regular piano sound!
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0:00 Introduction.
1:02 Digitech Whammy.
4:05 Huge Muff fuzz.
6:13 My course on Artmaster.com.
7:05 Wah-wah.
8:35 All the pedals!
11:13 Outro.
Click Here To Learn Piano or Keyboard
I would love to see more sound design sort of stuff on this channel!
I was just thinking how keyboards are a bit inhibited (hushed My mouth!).
At 4:48 it almost sounded like you were going to play the electric version of Neil Young’s “Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)” cool sound!
Haha…YES. BUT would also be great for “Spirit In The Sky”. Often imitated, never duplicated. 😅
Those were interesting choices for pedals. Wah with keys, especially a Clavinova can sound amazing. I would suggest using an overdrive over a fuzz as fuzz just gets too chaotic. Modulation effects such as chorus, flanger, phaser, and tremolo all sound good with keys. Time-based effects such as delay and reverb also sound good, especially if you get a good modulated delay to use.
As soon as he started playing with the wah, I could totally hear Stevie Wonder with a wah and a clavinet.
Absolutely correct. He should have demonstrated a capable delay pedal, but like you said, tremolo, flanger and phaser too. He should do a part two.
@@kentl7228yeah when I first saw the pedal choice in the video it really left me scratching my head since i was thinking reverb delay and chorus are no brainers for piano and those are some of the first kinds of pedals I would think to use for a video like this, idk how he thought a distortion pedal would sound good with a piano, I’ve tried it a lot in DAWs before and I can guarantee you it never sounds particularly great 😂
Fender Rhodes and wah pedal was a very popular combination early 70s (Pink Floyd, Alan Parson project spring to mind but there were many others), Chorus pedals have been used extensively with keyboards from electric pianos and early synths which didn’t have in-built effects. Phaser was one Jean-Michael Jarre used a lot especially on the emininet string synth to give the sweeping effect on his early albums.
Tony Banks used a Fender Blender fuzz during the prog days with Genesis. They just reissued the Fender Blender, so there’s a good option. The Big Muff is not a good match for a keyboard, but other dirt can be. A Strymon Deco has subtle tape overdrive that sounds wonderful on keyboards, as does the drive circuit in rotary sim pedals like the EHX Lester K. So any other low-gain effects like that will sound better than a sloppy-sounding Muff.
What floyd songs use it?
The big muff just make the keyboard sound like an electric guitar, which doesn’t make sense to do, unless you don’t have a guitar (player)
Yep, a classic late 60s/70s sound
@@NBrixH First one that comes to mind is Money during the sax solo
A lot of Canterbury-based bands like Caravan, Soft Machine (and other bands that couldn’t afford synthesizers in the 70s) used electric organs/pianos with fuzz and wah pedals hooked into guitar amps. It makes for a really unique sound that would be great to hear again. Guess it became a lot more convenient to gig with a synthesizer than a big setup with an organ + amp.
+ Magma too, especially during their 1974 period (listen to the album Kohntarkosz or the lives Marquee 1974 and Zuhn Wohl Unsai… intense stuff)
In The Land Of Grey And Pink, Rotters’ Club and Soft Machine’s Third are my favourites
@@CentipedeMKDS You took the words straight out of my keyboard. I prefer “Fourth” to “Third”, though
*Mike Ratledge has entered the chat* 😂
Oh man I love Caravan so much.
I think the wah wah pedal would be really interesting to play with just for the two different tones
The Digitech Whammy would work well for synth leads. You’d simultaneously get the full octave pitch bend, similar to Chick Corea on a Minimoog, at your feet; and half/whole step bends, similar to Jan Hammer, at your fingertips on the keyboard. It’s easier to play smaller intervals on the keyboard pitch wheel when the wheels range is a half or whole step. Save giant steps for your feet 😉
The Wah pedal was originally imagined as an effect for organs which (I think) generally take effects better than a piano. If you want a great example of how an organ can sound with something like the Big Muff you should check out the version of ‘Speed King’ by Deep Purple on their Made In Japan Album. Admittedly Jon Lord is running his Hammond B3 into an overdriven Marshall guitar amp but the effect is pretty similar.
All a whammy is an middle EQ pot so you can get the same affect scooping the middle on any amp.
It was a pot circuit taken from a Vox amp. The engineer was playing with the sweep using his fingers on the pot. It was suggested to mount it into a volume pedal. So they did and used it on a guitar. The leader of the company said it sounds like a trumpet with a mute and wanted to sell them for trumpet players. He couldn’t be convinced by the inventors it was a guitar product. He even got Clyde McCoy (a then popular) to put his name on it to sell more units. So a trumpet player who never used it, got a commission for each one sold, which was almost exclusively used on guitars.
@@kentl7228it’s funny because the original Maestro Fuzz was marketed as “make your electric bass or guitar sound like a brass instrument”. It was a FLOP until Keith Richards used it on “Satisfaction”(and he was actually using it to mimic what he thought would be replaced with an actual trumpet!)
@@kentl7228 One of my favourite parts of music/instrument history is that there’s so many examples of people trying to make one instrument sound like another that end up becoming staples of either a particular genre or instrument for completely different reasons, the first overdrive pedals were marketed towards making b sax or brass sounds, as were the wah, and the early uni-vibe, which was the precursor to chorus, phase and flange pedals, was apparently marketed to make your guitar sound like a sitar, hell, the entire synthesizer industry is built upon trying to emulate various instruments and not doing a very good job. I think some of what is missing in modern music creation is that aspect of failed emulation leading to new and interesting sounds. Kinda hard to mess around with a half-assed trumpet sound and get something new when you’ve got 100’s of genuine trumpets available at a click.
i actually loved how the big muff and the wah pedal interacted
This is basically the entire spiel behind “Is it any wonder” by Keane: Just a singer, drummer and heavily distorted electric piano. They use it to great effect; it’s a very unique sound 🙂 Just from the title, that song was my forest thought, and I had to pause this video to relisten… Also, the video is simple, but awesome!
I love that song, but the point is not the effects… They’re cool and all, but it’s the artistry that matters!
Yeah especially on Hopes and Fears. On their later albums they started using more synths and such
@@luke5100 I was actually with Keane for part of the Hopes and Fears tour and I’m not aware of them using any effects pedals, at least on the CP-70B. They did use a number of piano effects on Under the Iron Sea. I’m happy to be corrected though.
@@Saturnuria no clue here about their live setup as I’ve never seen them. I was referring to the studio LP. I don’t know if they used actual effects pedals or plug-ins, but there are definitely effects applied to some of the piano and keys sounds
Keane, and especially their _Under The Iron Sea_ album, was my first thought after watching the video, since they use such a unique piano sound for it that it left a pretty big lasting impression on me. Very glad to see others bringing them up here too!
I did find a video on the making of _UTIS,_ and about 7 minutes in they show Rice-Oxley experimenting with the sound for _Is It Any Wonder?_ with a ton of effect pedals stacked on top of the piano, adjusting some individually and then combining them all. It’s quite a fascinating process that I’m a little disappointed that I never looked into sooner.
Listening back to the _Hopes and Fears_ album, it seems like there are a few tracks that do more minor distortions to the piano, but none of it is as extreme as _UTIS_ and they usually stick to a clean piano sound instead.
Compressor, phaser and chorus pedals are also worth experimenting with. And echo of course 🙂
Yes, chorus pedal specifically would be interesting.
I love that piece at the end, sounds a bit like tape-flutter. Very beautiful.
The whammy pedal with the piano has such a magical sound. It’s reminds me a lot of Thom Yorke’s music, especially “Pink Section”
I’m glad I found this comment. It reminds me of the album A moon shaped pool!
Incubus – Stellar.
There’s a pedal called the Screen Violence by Old Blood Noise Endeavors which was developed for the group CHVRCHES for their last album. It’s a stereo modulated delay and reverb into a distortion (or the reverse, you can change the order), very shoegazey, and sounds incredible with keys.
Nice David! Would love to see a part 2 on this focusing on modulation pedals i.e. chorus, phase, flanger, tremolo, vibrato, uni vibe, etc
Some fantastic sounds to be had with those, and more suited to keys 😊
Man, I really love when you apply the whammy pedal subtly. Gives it a kind of warped tape sound. Just beautiful
Reminds me of Boards of Canada
add a slight reverb and boom, you got a lo-fi soundtrack
Guitar player here. There are no hard rules for pedal order; do what sounds good to you. However, Wah-wah is usually better earlier in the chain, especially before fuzz/distortion. With the Big Muff first, it generates all those high fuzzies and static-sounding frequencies then the wah-wah sweeps those as well as the fundamental tones of the instrument. If you, instead, put the wah first, it sweeps the instrument tone, then the fuzz is applied to that sound. It’s hard to describe, but just try swapping the order of the pedals around to see what you like. No wrong answers if you like what you’re getting. 😎
Wah after muff is at least for me, someone who is into garage rock, almost like the correct way to do it.
you should put your equalizer at the end of your pedal chain though
@@zantetsuken-zero
EQ at the end of the chain does a perfectly valid nice thing… as does putting it at the front of the chain. It just depends on personal preference and what your goals are.
Fun fact, Keane’s entire album Under The Iron Sea (2006) was deliberately recorded using piano/synth and guitar effects, making it completely different to their debut album Hopes and Fears. It has this otherworldly quality to it, what sounds like an electric guitar suddenly has overtones because the chords are built differently to guitar chords.
You could easily turn this into a series, I’d love to hear a phaser or overdrive on a piano
I would love to see what you can do with modulation effects like Phaser, Chorus, Vibrato, or Flanger. Sounds that are never associated with Piano. Delay would also be really interesting to hear.