Fig. 1 — This schematic illustrates a stomp with soft- and hard-clipping characteristics.
The cold, hard truth for guitar players like myself is that playing dynamics are first found in the hands. We might hope to find an instrument, effect box, or amplifier that can recast our ham-fisted guitar approach into something more nuanced, but for better or worse, there's nothing that's going to change our poor Johnny Ramone impressions into “Sultans of Swing."
Let's assume for the moment that you've developed the technique and taste required to have a dynamic playing style. You've moved beyond just hitting the notes and have endeavored to imbue each one with a particular attitude. How do we preserve that hard-fought dynamism and keep it from being obliterated by our stompbox designs?
Touch-sensitivity has become a bit of a buzzword in the effects marketplace. It means many things to many different people, but it might be easiest to describe by what it isn't. A piece of gear with limited touch-sensitivity offers little to no variation in output when a dynamic input is applied. A Townshend windmilled 6-string barre chord produces a shotgun blast of sound. A slight tickling of the strings? A similar scatter shot. This insensitivity isn't necessarily bad (i.e. the Guess Who's “American Woman"), but if you can play a single note 100 different ways, in some circumstances you might want a device that produces just as varied an output.
To make a pedal dynamic, responsive, and touch-sensitive is a bit of a black art. Effect circuits don't have to be complicated, but even the most elementary of circuits can produce sonic complications that belie the simplicity of their schematics. Since there's no closed-form solution for what sounds good, and pedal designers typically use components in ways that make electronic datasheet authors despondent, it's good to try to develop some conceptual rules of thumb and then refine them in real-world applications after the fact. Let's take a simplified look at op-amp clipping and dynamics.
In Fig. 1, you can see an operational-amplifier-based gain circuit with both soft clipping and hard clipping. These two types of clipping have been covered in these pages before, but I'll sum them up here. In soft clipping, the two diodes are in the feedback loop of the op amp, and once a certain threshold is reached, those diodes begin conducting and reduce the gain of the op amp in a limiting action. For higher gain settings, this abrupt reduction in gain can be a relatively hard limit, but at lower gains, the transition into limiting is comparatively gentle in onset. The hard-clipping diodes are capable of a more brick-wall characteristic. At a certain threshold, the diodes become an effective short-to-ground and, depending on the surrounding components, can truncate the input wave very aggressively. As you increase the input signal past the clipping threshold, you get very little change in output.
Ibanez Tube Screamers famously use soft-clipping (although this has led some forumites to mistakenly call anything with a similar setup a Screamer derivative). Pro Co RATs use hard clipping to good results. Some pedals like the Nobels ODR-1 use both clipping styles in the same circuit. So can either scheme make a dynamic effect?
The answer depends on a host of specifics, but here are some general rules of thumb. At lower gain settings, the soft-clipper circuit might feel more dynamic as the limiting characteristic isn't as aggressive. This is where a tube-like voicing can be found. The hard-clipper setup does live up to its name, but, counterintuitively, can still feel dynamic under higher gain. I believe this is due to the fact that it's somewhat easier to play “under" the hard-limiting action. While the soft-knee function of the soft clippers begins compressing and limiting sooner, the hard clippers stay open longer and then abruptly close. So light playing can sneak through unlimited, but once the circuit begins distorting significantly, more gain and more input doesn't add a great deal of dynamic difference. I've watched players like Tom Bukovac play a hard-clipping RAT and really manipulate their signal right around that threshold, staying shy of it when needed and launching over it deftly.
Disciplined hands and well-trained ears can coax dynamic range from almost anything, but pedals can certainly help or hinder the process. Don't buy pedals based on their schematics but listen and consider how those schemes might influence your playing and approach to your instrument's sound.
After Billy Joe Shaver died, I went down the rabbit hole and found a man who lived life to the fullest.
Billy Joe Shaver left the arena in October of 2020. Although I'm a longtime fan, his death didn't make me sad. For one thing, in spite of a less-than-health-conscious lifestyle, Shaver lived almost five years past the U.S. national average. He also managed to pack two lifetimes worth of experiences into his 81 years on this planet.
Career-wise, Shaver racked up some incredible accomplishments. He earned hall-of-fame songwriter status with covers by Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Kris Kristofferson, the Allman Brothers, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, and Waylon Jennings, to name a few. Shaver also had a successful career as a singer, raconteur, and actor. A few years back, Shaver had a heart attack onstage while performing, but still finished the show. He'd planned on gigging the next night until the doc nixed it. If it wasn't for COVID-19 sidelining his work for 2020, Shaver would've been booked right up to the end.
Shaver's personal life was just as remarkable as his career. He was jailed in Mexico at 15, dropped acid with the Dead, and was married six times (three of those marriages to the same woman). Shaver struggled with his demons, which led him to do things like drive his car through the plate-glass window of a car dealership while intoxicated. He also lived up to his outlaw cred by actually shooting a guy (“right between the mother and the f**ker") outside a bar near his home in Waco, Texas.
I went down the rabbit hole after he died. I read several of his obituaries, listened to an NPR Fresh Air interview, and then re-watched the Billy Joe Shaver episode of Mike Judge Presents: Tales from the Tour Bus (Season 1, episode 5). What struck me most about his life was the winding road that led Shaver to his career in music.
On his 17th birthday, Shaver joined the Navy. Once discharged, he worked a long line of dead-end jobs, from roofer to rodeo clown. By the time Billy Joe was 28, he'd put aside his love of music and was working in a local lumber mill. One day at work, Shaver's right hand got caught in a machine, cutting off two of his fingers and leaving him less than Django had to work with. About the accident, Shaver told NPR: “I'd been writing all that time. Since I was a little kid, I'd been singing and stuff. And I just never had got serious with the guitar yet. And so when this happened, right at the very moment it happened, it just hit me right in the heart that I wasn't doing what I was supposed to do. I guess if I hadn't had these things cut off, I probably wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now."
Armed with a few self-penned songs, one good hand, and a vague plan of doing something in music, Shaver set out on his new life. Since he had no car nor money for bus fair, Shaver decided to hitchhike to L.A. According to Saving Country Music, “Billy Joe stood on the side of Interstate 10 in Texas, waiting for someone westward bound to pick him up. And he waited, and waited, and nobody stopped. Eventually Shaver got so frustrated, he switched over to the other side of the highway heading east. The first car that passed him stopped, picked him up, and took Shaver all the way to Memphis, Tennessee. He then made his way to Nashville, where he soon had a job writing songs for $50 a week. The rest is history."
Shaver's life story feels like a classic heroic odyssey. The hero knows he has a destiny greater than the life he's living. He doesn't know where to go or how to do it, but he knows in his gut that he is supposed to go someplace and do something. What appears to be obstacles are in fact the Fates, God, the universe, or dumb luck guiding his steps to get him where he's supposed to be. Who would've imagined that losing your fingers would make you think, “time to get serious about guitar?" Who could've guessed that a trip to L.A. from Texas lands you in Nashville? But had he not cut off his fingers he might have been just comfortable enough to stay in the wrong place. If he had money for a bus, he would've gone to the wrong city.
My biggest takeaways from my Shaver binge are:
1. Don't get too attached to your plans.
2. Passion leads to our purpose.
3. The only thing keeping you from your destiny is yourself.
This year has most of us thinking a bit more about life, death, and meaning. I'm not saying Shaver found the meaning to life, or even if there is one, but it's beautiful to see a life fully lived. That dude rode every ride at the carnival, then left when it closed.
I met my guitar teacher, Mike Hoover, when I was in 8th grade. Forty years later, I’m still learning from him.
“For us to live any other way was nuts." —Ray Liotta as Henry Hill in Goodfellas
Never imagined I'd be here, but currently I'm homeschooling my 4-year-old daughter. Teaching has taught me that beneath my Zen Hippie Cowboy façade lies a rigid nerd, weirdly unforgiving and bad at concealing my frustration at both myself and the student. I'm the kind of uptight teacher I would've dreaded as a kid. My incompetence makes me appreciate the good teachers I've had in my life.
For a person who doesn't seem particularly bright, I've spent a surprisingly long time in school (17 years). In all that time, not a single educator taught me a fraction of what my guitar teacher, Mike Hoover, taught me.
I met Mike in 8th grade. By then I'd been playing violin (poorly and mandatorily) in the school orchestra for four years. My mother had also signed me up for group guitar classes during the summers, where I learned my basic chords. Sitting in a circle strumming “Tom Dooley" felt about as fun as math class. Sensing this was going nowhere, mom signed me up for private lessons at Hansen Music, a local music store where electric guitars and amps lined every wall, and long-haired dudes in bell bottoms hung out and jammed, sometimes past closing time. Mike greeted us at the front desk looking like a member of the Outlaws and smelling like he'd just smoked a left-handed cigarette. I was a little surprised my mother left me in his care. Like that old Buddhist proverb: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear." Mike was my guy.
In the first lesson, Mike sat across from me with his tobacco-burst Les Paul Artisan and showed me the first position of the pentatonic scale. Mike explained how you can make your fingers dance around that box and come up with melodies. I played some chords while he ripped some blues. It was the first time I saw lead guitar up close: Truly, at the time, this was coolest thing I'd ever seen. Then he said, “Now I'll play the rhythm and you take a ride." That was when playing notes became playing music—something I'd never experienced in four years of orchestra.
My brain's reward system gave me a serious hit of dopamine and I felt positively high. I've been chasing the dragon ever since. This set me on a lifelong, often ill-fated, wildly frustrating yet immensely satisfying journey. For better or worse, this is where I belong and I'm grateful to be living my life rather than one of the other more obvious, yet ultimately wrong, options. I'm thankful to my mother for being cool and to Mike Hoover for the guidance.
Not only did Mike unlock music, he taught me you can actually make a pretty decent living playing it. To illustrate the point, he hired me to play in his band and paid me way more than I'd ever made in my many crap teen-friendly jobs. Gigging with Mike revealed the working musician's playbook. Mike taught me to appreciate guitar craftsmanship and tonewoods, and to write off gear purchases on my taxes. He taught me to wear something cool onstage so you look like you're in the band, not a member of the audience (and write-off those clothes as well). Mike taught me to tip when somebody pours you a drink, even if it's on the house. Perhaps most importantly, Mike taught me that being a musician means you're selling fun, so have as much fun as possible, and if you're not having fun, pretend you are and usually the fun will kick in. He also cautioned me about having too much fun and taught me how to overcome a hangover. My father calls Mike my music father; that's accurate.
I called Mike tonight to tell him about the 1980 Gibson L-5S I recently purchased. In 9th grade, Hansen Music had this guitar on the wall. At first I thought it was just a Les Paul. Then Mike pointed out the deep-carved, figured maple back with a matching wooden control cover, the ornate binding wrapping the thin body, and the 3-piece L-5 maple neck with abalone inlays running up the ebony fretboard to the flowerpot on the bound headstock. I've wanted one ever since and can't believe I bought the same guitar I saw 40 years ago. As an added bonus, the L-5 had been played for decades by a local guitar hero, Ron Schuster (whom I mentioned in my last column). Mike pointed out that Ron's mojo is on this guitar. Civilians think the concept is nonsense but we know that the mystical is real. When I offered to send the guitar to Mike, he laughed and said, “No man. If I don't play my two Les Pauls, they get mad at me and start acting up. They always get resentful if I leave them alone too long." Four decades later, this guy is still teaching me. Mike is the Zen Hippie Cowboy: I remain the student.