I am a beginner and have an American telecaster and Roland blues cube amp.
I only practice by myself and one day hope to play blues, country and maybe some rock.
l am thinking about buying a pedal - just for the fun of it - and wondering if there is
a general - go to pedal that everyone buys first before buying other pedals depending on your taste and style.
Any comments will be appreciated.
Thanks.
You don't mention which particular Roland Blues Cube amp you have and I'm first hand unfamiliar with the amp. However a quick bo peep at their website illustrates some of the higher end models already have a ton of inherent selectable effects and voicing features.
So given your genre predilection, be pretty hard for you to go wrong starting with a BOSS BD-2 Blues Driver pedal. Perfect if yours is the few frills portable KISS single channel version.
I think you can try buying Boss ME-80. It offers a wide range of effects, including overdrive/distortion, modulation effects (such as chorus and phaser), delay, reverb, and more. The ME-80 also provides amp modeling, which can simulate the sounds of different amplifier types, allowing you to explore various tones and styles.
Another option is the Line 6 POD Go. It provides a comprehensive selection of amp models, effects, and even cabinet simulations in a compact and user-friendly format. The POD Go offers a wide range of tones and is suitable for blues, country, and rock styles.
My advice would be to use the gear you already have and be able to get every sound out of it you can before buying stuff you may not need.
An example would be to use the guitar controls as Joe Bonamassa explains here...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkGCvLstPrE
And set yourself a goal, only allow yourself to buy a pedal AFTER you can easily do this...
* Dial in a driven tone in your amp, but not ridiculous gain
* Dial back your guitar volume and tone to get a nice crunchy edge of breakup tone. Play some rhythm guitar chops
* Dial your guitar volume up and play some lead chops. Then dial back to the previous crunchy tone and play rhythm again
--- What you have done here is achieved usable AMP distortion which will sound much better than pedal distortion (maybe after upgrading your amp)
--- This is a hugely useful skill
And also try to dial-in your amp to an appropriate setting and use guitar volume/tone that JoeB demonstrated. You have to experiment more to get your single volume/tone controls and pickup controls to get the sounds Joe did, but most of them can be done with a Tele. A quick YouTube search yields...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMnDzEmgUPY
What Joe did not explain is that you need to set your amp to the dirtiest setting that you want to use, then fiddle with the guitar controls to dial the amp back from that.
If you buy pedals AFTER doing these then you will also be able to use them much more efficiently, get more tones, etc.
Good luck with your experiments and remember to use what you already have. Guitar YouTube channels are very good at making you want to buy stuff you don't really need.
If you are playing blues alone, a looper pedal may be the way to go rather than an effect pedal. This would allow you to loop your own shuffle or chord progression to play over and experiment with.
