Helmet effects (pedals)

[land it74]

I know Page and company use them, but what effects are hallmark to their sound or during Page's solos? Example: Betty and tracks like Wilma's Rainbow, Tic, Speechless, etc or stuff off of Meantime or the other albums. The solos feel gigantic and howling...whatever you personally like to describe it as. It's cool! What kind of effect(s) are used?

Anyway, I can't recall if a post explained specific pedals for specific songs. Does their rhythm guitar get straight heavy distortion/gain from the amp or is something subtle being added to make it more of a Helmet style distortion?

[bornannoying]

For solos, Betty era stuff particularly was largely rack rather than pedals. TC Electronic 2290 delay, Korg SDD-200 (I gather that one goes way back to earliest recordings), Digitech DSP-5. Yamaha GEP-50, too. I have the latter, and the early reflection reverb and subtle (i.e. a couple of cents) pitch shift on it are instant Helmet solo. Anyway, I think a lot of it is delay and reverb with such short times that it sounds a lot like a chorus effect. The "Heavy Metal" pre-set on that thing was the default Strap It On rhythm tone, too, I gather, and again... it's instant Blacktop.

I'm pretty sure current rhythm sounds are pretty much all amp distortion. The tone is unmistakeable. My Fryette Pittbull with the gain whacked up sounds exactly like Size Matters, Monochrome, etc. I recall Chris T and possibly Dan using Tube Screamers and variants thereof, but the overall characteristic of the tone is pure Fryette.

[land it74]

Nice! Thanks for the info. I know this topic has been discussed in various forms, but it's always good to get the inside to how these things work.

[bornannoying]

No worries. I can talk about the minutia of this shit 'til the cows come home.

[todd]

Thinking that maybe we should try to create a list of all of the effects used by Page over the years...along with settings if we have them. Would be pretty awesome to have a detailed database for the users here to have. Thoughts??? I have numerous photos at home of various rigs he's used over the years and have clear shots of pedal/amp settings.

[bornannoying]

Certainly not a bad idea. Had basically that on the bornannying site, back in the day, which I still have set in aspic somewhere.

[todd]

I do remember the list from the old site...my thinking is that we take it a step further.
Say we take the MXR Bass Octave that is used for Enemies... Dry is set to 5-6 and Octave is set to 8-9 (out of 10). Get a master list of that stuff. I'm more than willing to do a lot of the work for it.

[bornannoying]

Cool, go for it. We could use some action around this forum.

[lowmantotempole]

Last October in NYC