For any­body not famil­i­ar with the concept: A gui­tar effects ped­al — often called a stomp box, just a little dis­par­agingly — is a sound pro­cessor that is placed on the floor in front of the gui­tar pla­cing per­son. The gui­tar is con­nec­ted, via cable usu­ally, to the pro­cessor: You plug it in on the input side. You con­nect the out­put with even more ped­als or with your gui­tar amp.

The little box changes the sig­nal in ways that may be pre­dict­able or not. The most widely and well-know effect for elec­tric­al gui­tar is dis­tor­tion. That’s the one that gives the elec­tric gui­tar its spe­cif­ic vroooom and roaaaar sound.

There are oth­er types: Phaser, Chor­us, Reverb, Delay, … They are all great.

Really Weird Ones

Of course there are real life ped­als that can pro­duce really weird and at times unpre­dict­able sounds. One of the most sci-fi like ped­als that I own is the Ibanez Digit­al Mod­u­la­tion Delay. It is able to pro­duce delay trails that swirl away into space.

This seems to be a rare piece of gear and one I will nev­er sell. It must be from the 1985 Mas­ter Series (L Series) which is over­shad­owed online by the later Power Series ver­sions, DML10 and DML20. How­ever, accord­ing to the ori­gin­al Ibanez DML Manu­al, it fea­tures advanced spe­cific­a­tions for its time.

You can find some details and even a manu­al as PDF file here: Tone­home > Ibanez DML Digit­al Mod­u­la­tion Delay

The Rock­Board Ped­al­Pe­dia also has some inform­a­tion on it: Ibanez DML Digit­al Mod­u­la­tion Delay on the Rock­Board Ped­al­Pe­dia

A mod­ern clas­sic and reg­u­lar nom­in­ee for weird­est ped­al avail­able seems to be the Rain­bow machine by Earth­Quaker Devices. It is a poly­phon­ic pitch-shift­ing syn­thes­iser – sounds like just the thing you need to make being on stage com­fort­able.

You can get it here, and there are sound samples avail­able: Rain­bow Machine on www.thomannmusic.com