Yesterday, a course that Scott and I filmed last year went live on SBL – titled ‘The Essential Guide To Bass Effects with Steve Lawson’.Â
The course is broken up into effect types, and is a broad look at what each of the effect types do and some ideas for combining them. We talk about the influence that effect order has on your sound, why it’s often important for bass sounds to have the dry signal as well as the processed one, why there’s no such thing as a ‘one size fits all’ pedal for any one type of effect, and an exploration of what’s actually going on with each effect type.Â
What it doesn’t have is ‘here’s how to set this pedal to get this sound’ type demos. Partly because those kind of product demo videos are available in their thousands on YouTube, it’s also because the single most important thing you can do to your music with effects pedals is to experiment, try things out, and the more general guidelines for how to understand what a pedal type does and how it may be applied are a much better start point for that experimentation.Â
Curiosity is an essential component in any creative journey. A point that Scott makes brilliantly in a recent interview with Musical U founder, Christopher Sutton – here’s a video of Christopher talking about things he’s learned from Scott, from Adam Neely and from me… It outlines a curiosity and creativity-driven pathway through music learning really well, and dovetails really well with the intended learning pathway through the effects course…Â