On November 2nd at 1:30 pm in the West Hall Room of Mint Music (116 Bond St.) a fascinating workshop was put on by Danny J Ricardo, a popular guitar instructor at Mint. The workshop was about how to use guitar effects pedals, and Danny was just the guitarist for the job, having had over thirty years of experience playing, and honing his sound using effects on the electric guitar.
The challenge of navigating the large and ever-expanding world of guitar effect pedals for beginner and intermediate electric guitarists, mostly boils down to the lack of systematic knowledge. Sure there are endless hours of tutorials on YouTube about guitar effects and how to use them, but as Danny and other educators have noticed, those tutorials often gloss over the basic fundamentals needed to understand guitar effects in a deep way. Basics such as signal flow, the basic mechanics of amplification, what various pedals actually do to the signal, pre-amps verses amps, cabinets, and defining common terminology are often glossed over in such tutorials. Students get information overload without being able to integrate the information with the proper basic knowledge.
Danny covered a lot of ground in his talk on effects pedals. He showcased many effects using his own personal guitar rig that he uses for performances. He also augmented his usual setup with some extra exotic pedals such as a whammy, MXR Compressor, a loop pedal, an EVH Phase 90 pedal, a Digitech Flanger and more. He explained how a pedal can alter your sound, from subtle ways like a light Chorus pedal, to exaggerated ways, like heavy delay feeding back.
Attendees learned the difference between distortion and overdrive; phase, flange and chorus; and reverb and delay. Tangentially, he spoke to the importance of amps, preamps, cabinets, and cables, in the process of creating tone. Even different lengths of guitar cable can change the tone created through guitar effects (cable length can influence resistance and impedance). And let’s not forget another important ingredient to electric guitar tone: the guitar itself! While providing interested students with the fundamentals, Danny also emphasized that there are no rules to guitar pedal usage. There are surely some standard techniques, but students should seek originality through experimentation. If someone feels the curiosity to try putting a delay pedal at the start of their signal chain, for example, they should be free to try it. Maybe something amazing and new will be discovered!
Attendees were asked only to bring their curiosity and a pile of questions. All in attendance were thrilled when Danny gave them a chance to experiment with the pedals themselves. Elizabeth Szotak, a new student at Mint who attended the lecture had this to say about the workshop: “As a beginner, the content in the workshop was incredibly informative and the showcase of each effect along with how to use it really helped my understanding.”
What’s Danny’s favorite pedal, you may wonder? One of Danny’s favorite things to do is play with delays: long delays, short delays and everything in between. You can easily get lost in a long, spacey delay sound or you can hone-in a subtle delay for just a little extra something. Danny plans on showcasing his SE 3000 by Roland, an impressive remake of four different delay pedals in one.
Danny is also a composer and audio engineer. After graduating at the top of his class from Bishop Marrocco/Thomas Merton, Danny studied jazz at Humber College, and later audio engineering at Trebas Institute for the Recording Arts.
Lately Danny has been playing over a hundred gigs a year with the Shania Twain Tribute band he is a member of. He is a seasoned veteran of the Toronto music scene but isn’t interested in things like name-dropping. He is always happy to play with anyone and believes what matters most is finding a way to work together with other musicians of whatever background and find a common ground and vibe. If you like what you hear on stage then he is happy. In projects like the Shania Twain Tribute band, he feels he can be himself. He feels freedom in using his sound in that musical environment. Having the freedom to be himself in a project has been a great blessing and is of central importance to Danny.
He also loves teaching. It’s just another one of the many facets that make Danny feel like a whole musician. He likes getting fresh students with zero experience and seeing how far he can assist them on their musical journey. Not many experiences are as amazing as taking someone with no experience and over time, getting them to the point where they can freely jam with their teacher. Having a hand in giving them joy and empowerment through music is a great way to spend one’s time. He also feels he is paying it forward because many people taught him, and he feels the need to pass that spirit on himself. Music education is a cycle of gift-giving and students become teachers themselves and continue the spiral. Danny says he steals from his heroes all day long, a tongue-in-cheek way of acknowledging the importance of his predecessors. After all, the great Twentieth-century Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky once said, “Bad composers borrow. Great composers steal”. We all yearn to feel a part of the unbroken musical continuum. Danny has been playing for over 30 years and has been teaching for almost 27 years. When your teaching years are nearly as long as your playing years, that shows true dedication to the craft of teaching.
Danny’s instagram handle is: @dannyj.ricardo
