Thoughts on the Electro-Harmonix Superego
I've been collecting pedals this year with the aim of messing around with and making some ambient music. Prior to that, I only had pedals which I'd characterize as "useful if I wanted to play in a band" - a Big Muff, a Blues Driver, a delay pedal (DD-3), a chorus pedal (CH-1).
I never played seriously in a band. Life happened and I aged fifteen years. So it goes.
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Grief, hallucinations and exhumed violins: the astonishing music of Richard Skelton
Three years ago, maybe a little longer, I found an article in the Guardian on the music of Richard Skelton. It's typically described as ambient, but maybe best to call it otherworldly. The timbres a musician or composer chooses are important in setting the tone of the piece, and Skelton often chooses the bowed strings, typically detuned. It imparts an otherness to the work, a sense of stumbling on something very strange and old.
I gave him a try. Bought a bunch of his albums on iTunes. Since then, a few more on Bandcamp. I've listened to his music regularly for the last couple of years, really let it get into me.
I write poetry and music, I play various instruments. I always have a long gestation period, and I could feel what was coming.
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For what I wanted to do, I know I needed a drone. I play viola, and I can do it that way (and will one day). Other instruments, too, ones I can record long tones on and take sections of those and repeat forever. But I also play guitar, and have a few electrics. The history of the instrument is so deeply entwined with the idea of effects: distortion and wobbly modulation and everything else. Given what I had, and what I could work with, I thought I'd start with that.
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The only problem is, guitars, on their own, can't drone. A sharp attack, the sound, and then it dies away. The sonic signature of the instrument. It's what makes the guitar, well, the guitar: the bowed strings, like the violin and viola, can sound as long as you want to drag the bow. But listen to the pizzicato of a plucked string on a violin versus the same sound on a guitar. Weak, right? One instrument is designed around that principle, and one isn't.
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Luckily, there are ways to do anything.
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I needed to make a long tone on guitar, as long as required. I read reviews - on YouTube, reddit, forums, and eventually decided to try the Electro-Harmonix Superego. It's a very basic synth pedal of sorts. You can capture and freeze a note, but also control the way the effect slides from one note to the next (glissando), and the pedal features its own effects loop, which allows you to run effects just on the output of that pedal alone. I tried it out at the music shop. Yes, it does what it says. I bought it. I've been playing around with it since.
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Some pedals are so useful that if you play in a band, you'll always have one on your pedalboard. A tuner, of course. Typically, some kind of drive (or two): a Tube Screamer, maybe, with its pronounced mid-hump, or the Blues Driver I mentioned earlier, which is a little more neutral in how its gain stages colour the tone. A delay. Maybe a chorus. The conventional wisdom hasn't changed much since I was in my mid-20s and convinced I was buying pedals that I'd be using for decades as I wrote and performed my own music. Some dirt, some modulation, some delay. (I have a spring reverb tank in my amp, and at the time, that was enough.)
The Superego, on its own, is not one of these. You can do interesting things with it - use its output only, or blend it with your dry tone to, for example, hold chords in the background and play over them. But it's hard to say that this is a pedal you'd use every day in a band environment. It's awkward, it does a very constrained set of things, but there is all kinds of music in here you won't find elsewhere.
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Three modes: Manual, Latch, and Auto. In manual mode, you press the footswitch to grab the tone. After you let go, the note will fade away. I'm sure this is useful but I think I've only done this to verify it works.
In Latch mode, you press the footswitch to grab the sound and hold it. Whether what you've previously held fades away or becomes part of the sound depends on how you've got your knobs dialed in. This is my favourite mode, how I use it most of the time. With the Speed/Layer knob at about 2 o'clock, your previously-frozen notes will slowly fade away as you acquire new ones. The sound held until you turn the effect off by pressing the footswitch quickly twice, or switch to a different mode.
Auto mode is the one I have the most trouble with, confirming the reports I've read online. Those reports often say to use a high-output single coil or a humbucker, because more vintage-voiced single coils will have trouble triggering it, even with full volume. I can confirm that: my Strat has Texas Specials, which provide something of a slightly hotter vintage tone, and I could typically only get this to trigger by really digging into the string. But this is also probably due to my settings: I have the pickups a little lower than recommended, to sweeten the tone and take off some of the harsh treble of the bridge pickup.
Tradeoffs.
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I was disappointed but there are always solutions.
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When I was 27 or 28, I went to a St. John's Music and bought myself a Boss Blues Driver pedal. What better pedal for someone who'd just become besotted by electric blues? I mean, Blues is in the name! But truthfully, until a month or so, I'd barely used it. My amp's gain channel can be dialed back with my guitar so that I can use my volume knob for dirt. I'd always considered the BD-2 something of an ill-advised purchase. But fifteen years later, I read that people were able to trigger the Superego's auto mode by putting a clean boost in front of it. So I tried it out, put the Blues Driver in front and dialed the input to 2 o'clock, the gain to nothing. A clean-ish boost.
There it was. The tone a little coloured and driven, but triggering the Superego every time I plucked the strings. The tiniest bit of dirt. It sounded great. I haven't done much else with auto-mode but there are some very interesting sounds: with Speed/Layer dialed back to nothing, the high notes sound like little blips. Synthy imperfections. 8-bit flute.
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I mentioned above the effects loop. A drone on its own can sound kind of, well, boring. So the effects loop allows the sound to be coloured before exiting to the rest of the signal chain. This is where I admit I've only tried a few things: dirt via the Blues Driver, full-on distortion via the Big Muff, wobbly modulation via the CH-1 and the Fairfield Shallow Water (purchased earlier this year).
I feel like the Shallow Water shines here: you can get all kinds of sounds with it, from warm tape glitch to "I've recorded underwater in a stormy lake", and the former is what I normally dial in. It works well with the sound I'm trying to get. The little wobbles and drops sounding like I recorded on some unused tape from 1982 stored at the back of an attic.
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If you think this pedal isn't for you, you're right; if you think this pedal is for you, you're right.
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Since my 30s I've accepted that I'm no longer young, and the last few years I've felt that even more acutely. My back is often in a bad way. I've had friends die, cousins pass away. My band-playing friends live in different provinces; many have moved on altogether, having given it a better go than I ever did, but finding their way to the exact same result, the same quiet.
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If I ever play live, like, traditional verse/chorus/bridge stuff, I suspect the Superego will stay at home. But at home I've got it laid out just before my looper and reverb. As I've been experimenting with making music and recording it, it's never out of the chain. It is exactly what people say it is: sort of a beefed-up version of the Electro-Harmonix Freeze pedal that provides you with a few more options, something a bit more general while still being a very specific thing. A synth engine, as advertised? I mean, I guess. For me, though, it's just a better drone, a way of getting around the physical limitations of the guitar and getting started with making the music I want to hear.