Finding My Base Tone
The last week has been difficult and the coming weeks might very well be worse. At lunch on my WFH days I've been kind of just idly fucking around on guitar upstairs. I brought up my brother's shitty old Marshall MG10CD practice amp from 25 years ago, brought up my Strat, and my old CH-1 chorus pedal too. And have just been messing around. Strumming chords, just anything to push things out of my mind for a bit.
And I realized that if I wasn't going for a "chorus sound" (that big, watery tone out of countless shoegaze and dream pop songs) I still wanted a bit of subtle movement in my clean tone. If you watch a lot of guitar videos on YouTube (and that feels like it's been me the last year), you see a lot of people talking about how they like to keep a low gain overdrive pedal on as their base sound, for a tiny bit of breakup when they dig in. But for me, I want that tiny movement you get from a mostly-dry but still-there chorus pedal. The sound just feels more alive.
So that's something, I guess. Finding out what I like (CH-1 always on, E. LEVEL 11 o'clock, EQ 11, RATE 1, DEPTH 1) while I deal with some difficult things. I hope the coming weeks are better. But I don't know. I just don't know.