Guitar Pedals For Drums

Introduction

I want to take a second here to give a shout out to my good friend, Nick Loux, who actually took lead for this episode of the JHS show. The following article is based on his genius and meant to be read from his perspective. You’re definitely going to get more out of this article if you take a quick break and watch the JHS show episode “Guitar Pedals for Drums” first. Don’t worry. We’ll wait.

Sincerely,

Josh

Drummers have envied their guitar players for hundreds, nay, thousands of years for their ability to adapt and adjust their sound on the fly. I think all drummers (and all reasonably empathetic guitarists) would agree with me on this: IT’S NOT FAIR!

So, let's remedy that. Let's learn how to use guitar pedals on drums.

Yeah, I know what I said, and I stand by it.

People have been putting weird effects on drums for a long time. You can hear slap back delay on the “When The Levee Breaks” drum sound. You can hear gated reverb on all kinds of different ’80’s drum tracks. And, in the name of science, we took seven guitar pedals and experimented to make some crazy sounds on drums, because why should guitar players have all the fun?

Just in case you want to replicate this experiment at home, let me explain how we set it up:

We used the Radial Effects Reamper to route my drums through the guitar pedals. Basically, this allows me to take one of my drum tracks in ProTools and send it into this box through an effects loop, which is where my guitar pedal will be. Then the affected signal will come out of there into a new track that I can blend in with the rest of my drums. There are dials on the front to let you adjust how much signal you're sending in and how much is receiving.
There are a few different controls on the Reamper you can use to dial in your sound. You can flip phase, you can blend your dry and your wet signal, or you can select one or two effects loops. For the sake of the experiment we only used one effects loop, because two is just insane.
For microphones, we used an RE20 on the kick and an SM7B on the snare. I have two overhead setups. One is stereo. One is mono. For the stereo setup, we used the Aston Starlight condensers. These have a high pass filter, plus three different voicings you can use. They actually also have lasers** on them for making sure that they're pointed in the right spot, which is bat-crap crazy. For the mono overhead, we used the AEA R84, but we turned it on and off depending on the pedal we used.

**Yes, we are living in the year 2020. Everything is laser-based now, the same way that everything was atomic in the ’40’s.

So, let’s get to the fun part and see what happens when we play with drums and pedals.

Keeley Caverns Delay & Reverb

The first effect I used was the Keeley Electronics Caverns Delay & Reverb, and I ran the snare through it. Again, you’ll definitely get more out of this if you’ve already watched the JHS episode we based this article on, but I’m going to give the best description I can without actually playing this for you via video.

I used the Keeley Caverns Delay & Reverb like a gated reverb sort of sound, and I had the blend all the way up. I also triggered the delay on a few accents so that it has this weird runaway delay sorta sound, which was super cool. I loved it.

Pro-Co Rat & BOSS NF-1

I actually used two pedals together here to get the best possible sound: the Pro-Co Rat and the BOSS NF-1. When I tested this out with an actual drum riff, I used the Rat to distort the crap out of my mono overhead.

I really like crunchy drums, but what I like even more than crunchy drums are gated crunchy drums, which is why I added this BOSS' NF-1 noise gate after the Rat. The NF-1 really gates the sound and adds this really clappy, old drum machine sort of sound that I can blend underneath the original signal. I do want to note that I opened up the gate just on the fills, so that during the tighter parts, it would just be this really tight clap.

The end result? The sound gets super distorted and adds some really cool dynamics.

Line 6 FM4 Filter Modeler

I got a little wild with this next one; I used the Line 6 FM4 Filter Modeler on the kick drum. I love bands like Radiohead and the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala, ‘cause they have all kinds of weird filter effects on their drums. This was especially cool because I actually made these presets and flipped between them, so I used a Growler preset and an Octa Synth preset, and at different points in the song I flipped between them so that we could get a different dynamic.

I also ran the noise gate again after the FM-4, so I could just focus on those kick hits. Every now and then the snare bled through, but that was honestly a really interesting effect. Pro tip: it’s not a mistake as long as it sounds cool.

The Anasounds Spring Reverb

One thing we proved definitively in this experiment? The Anasounds Spring Reverb sounds really cool on electric guitar (which you probably already knew), but it sounds even cooler on drums. What’s great about the Anasounds system is that it’s an actual spring reverb tank. Like a real spring reverb...real springs. So I ran my stereo overheads through the reverb to get some spooky, space cave vibes.

Because #science.

BOSS SY-1 Synthesizer & Caroline Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay

The last pedal I tested was the BOSS SY-1 Synthesizer on the Organ setting. And I know what you're thinking, “What kind of crazy lunatic would put a synthesizer on their stereo overheads?”

Me. I am that person. You're just going to have to deal with that.

The resonance of the toms actually triggered the BOSS SY-1 in a weird way. Believe it or not, it made a sort of melody. The melody was so good, in fact, that I used the melody that came off of the toms to inspire the bass track, which I think is pretty cool.

Not only did I use the BOSS SY-1, I also threw in the Caroline Kilobyte Lo-Fi Delay to add some rhythm, and it sounded amazing. Caroline Guitar Company is incredible and I love everything that they do. In the episode, I also used the noise gate to help out with any extra noise. Using three guitar pedals to add effects to your drums may sound over the top, but when you actually hear this, you’ll know why we used all three. They each add something pretty fantastic.

Conclusion

Some of the coolest innovations in music production have come from people using gear in ways it was never meant to be used, like cranking your amp until it distorts, or chaining tape machines together to make delay, or using a broken channel strip to record fuzzy bass. All that to say, don’t be daunted just because the pedal has ‘guitar’ written on the box. We can -- and have -- created some truly unique music in mixing guitar pedals and drums. There are tons of guitar pedals out there just waiting to be used on your drums.

So, a quick warning out there to all you electric guitar players who made it through a whole video about drums: your drummer friends made it through, too, and they are probably foaming at the mouth right now to try out a pedal effect on their drum kit. If you can hear a trembling in the ground beneath your feet, that’s probably a stampede of your drummer friends running to your doorstep to demand that they borrow all your pedals.

So just be prepared for that. #sorrynotsorry