Click bait thread title aside. For years one aspect of EJ’s lead tone has baffled me.
The delay. I could never get the clarity he has, the notes always run together in a cascading mush.
The other day while perusing the net looking for tips to EJ’s lead tone I discovered the “secret” and it’s kind of genius.
EJ places the echoplex before the overdrive in his lead effect line so it’s like this.
Wah -> Echoplex -> Overdrive -> front of amp.
By doing this fast runs “duck” the overdrive avoiding a mush of overdriven notes hitting the delay and being cascaded out.
I did this with a boss dd-3 set to a longer than usual slapback, not even close to what EJ uses and it totally puts me in the ballpark of his violin lead tone.
edit:
it definitely works better with a delay with analog style “lo fi” repeats
Damn so simple but so clever.
I’ve been using my old boss multi effects though and the delay module is hardwired after the overdrive module so I can’t try it.
Something else is his use of an overdrive pedal to tame a loud non-master volume amp. He runs the level out from the overdrive pedal close to off, rolling off a good amount of “ice picky” high end (which is why he’s able to use the bridge pickup in a good amount of lead lines) while allowing the power tubes to be cranked at a lower volume. I adopted both the ducking delay and “amp taming” aspects of his setup a few years back and love it, some of my videos I’ve posted here showcase that.
thanks for this, I thought I was doomed to not use delay on an overdriven amp without an effects loop…
I haven’t tried this, but would using a delay infront of an overdrive into a cranked amp not cause the delays to get really messy and crazy?
@aliendough not if you set up the delay correctly. For example, I found that you can’t use the same blend of dry / wet when in front of the amp compared to in the FX loop; I think the compression brings up the delay level a good amount, so you have to compensate by lowering the wet signal. Also, the tone might shift a tad, so having a tone control to tame the highs is desirable.
Delay in front of amp in that clip!
nice! I will experiment with this tomorrow.
Also worth experimenting with a delay with some sort of ducking feature built into it, especially for those of us who don’t use an outboard OD…
…which I might be doing tonight, thanks to this thread. 