Once you've established your microphone and your amplifier sounds, you might want to add effects boxes to your rig to further alter your overall sound. For harmonica, the first two most sought-after effects that add to your sound are reverb and echo.

Reverb is short for reverberation, which is the bouncing of sound waves off of many different surfaces in an enclosed space at one time. If you've ever been in a large empty room and shouted or clapped your hands, you've heard all the “extra” sound that's left bouncing around the room after your original sound has ended — that's reverberation. Each of the many individual reflected sounds reaches your ears at a different time, which is why the reverberation continues after the original sound is gone.

Because reverb is often built in to amplifiers, it is not being looked at as a separate effect in this chapter, but be advised that reverb is also available as a separate effect if you end up with an amp that doesn't come with it.

Echo is the repeated reproduction of the original sound. If you've ever shouted across a canyon and heard your words repeated a couple of seconds later, you know what an echo sounds like.

Echo effects are created electronically using an analog or, more commonly, a digital delay. Adding delay adds excitement and three-dimensionality to your overall sound. What the digital delay is doing is making a copy of your original sound and then repeating it after a short delay, hence the name.

Echo can be added in a couple of different basic ways. Having just one echo that is placed very tightly against the original sound creates a doubling effect, as if two harmonicas were playing exactly the same thing. Having just one echo with a little more separation from the original sound creates a slapback sound, which is like the sound of an instrument bouncing once off the back wall of a room, giving your notes a concert-hall quality. The more space between the original sound and the echo, the bigger the “room” sounds. Having more than one echo repeat after your original sound is called regeneration because the output from the delay is being fed back into the input over and over again. This creates the sound of multiple echos that fade in volume as they repeat.

Note that the “feedback” knob is the one on digital delays that controls the number of repeats of the echo.

One note of caution with digital delays — you have to be careful that the timing of the repeats does not interfere with the rhythm of the song you're playing. Repeats of your sound that are not in time with the rhythm will throw the whole band off.

The next track is going to try adding effects boxes to the setup with the Blues Junior. It will add a Boss Digital Delay.

FIGURE 12-7: Boss Digital Delay — demo

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Another useful effect for harmonica players is distortion. You'll recall that turning small amps up loud produces a desirable distortion that is characterized by a smooth hornlike sustain. The amp is producing this sound because it is being overdriven by the high-volume setting. This type of distortion is created electronically by using an effect called an overdrive that produces the same effect by overdriving its own internal amplifier. If you're playing through a large amp that you can't turn up loud enough to produce natural distortion, an overdrive is the solution to getting the sustain you want at lower volumes.

Note that, although using effects to create this sound works well, a good tube amp that has a nice distorted sound and a good microphone will create that classic Chicago sound better than any configuration of effects boxes.

Using the Fender Super Reverb setup, the next track will add a distortion box, specifically the Boss Overdrive. This is to simulate the natural distortion you would get from overdriving a tube amplifier.

FIGURE 12-8: Boss OD-3 Overdrive distortion — demo

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One more effect that sounds good with harmonica is tremolo. Tremolo is created by running the volume control of the amplifier through a slow wave form that uniformly raises and lowers the volume at an even pace. This subtle wavering of the volume overlays the sound with a pleasant texture. Many amplifiers, including the Fender Super Reverb discussed above, come with built-in tremolo.

Now, there are boxes that will make tremolo sound, but nothing in a tremolo sounds as good as an old amplifier. This next track uses an old Gibson Skylark tube amplifier with built-in tremolo.

In general, smaller tube amplifiers are preferable. They overdrive easily and they minimize the problems with feedback.

FIGURE 12-9: Gibson Skylark amp tremolo — demo

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