Effects units are electronic devices that alter how a musical instrument or other audio source sounds. Some effects subtly "color" a sound, while others transform it dramatically. Effects are used during live performances or in the studio, typically with electric guitar, keyboard and bass. While most frequently used with electric or electronic instruments, effects can also be used with acoustic instruments, drums and vocals. Examples of common effects units include wah-wah pedals, fuzzboxes and reverb units.
Effects are housed in amplifiers, table top units, "stompboxes" and "rackmounts", or they are built into the instruments themselves. A stompbox (or "pedal") is a small metal or plastic box placed on the floor in front of the musician and connected to his or her instrument. The box is typically controlled by one or more foot-pedal on-off switches and contains only one or two effects. A rackmount is mounted on a standard 19-inch equipment rack and usually contains several different types of effects.
While there is currently no consensus on how to categorize effects, the following are seven common classifications: distortion, dynamics, filter, modulation, pitch/frequency, time-based and feedback/sustain. Rock guitarists derive their signature sound or "tone" from their choice of instrument and effects.
Read more about Effects Units: Formats (form Factor), History, Boutique Pedals, Other Pedals and Rackmount Units
Famous quotes containing the words effects and/or units:
“Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another—secret and passionate and intense—which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)