Most modulation and time based effects sound bad recorded and are better applied with plugins. There’s a reason most recording engineers request you to record guitar tones dry obviously to recreate that live and in the room at a venue this is a different story but with mics it’s difficult to capture the space and bloom you have in room
Not about the shootings but the person who was like it sucks that Adam friedland talks over all his guests the day that an episode with nick wright as the guest came out lol
I don’t think one is bad and one is good, I think they have different applications. Some amps take pedals more transparently (especially Fenders, Voxes pretty good for this too) and are better to record with some pedals than others (my Orange sounds like shit with reverb but the strong midrange is helpful to hearing delay echoes). I have found that you usually need a wetter signal on your pedals to get the same effect on a recording that a somewhat drier signal gets you live. I have also found that intentionally artificial reverbs like plate reverb work better for recording, but regardless of using pedals or doing reverb in post, neither one is an appropriate substitute for simply using a far away room mic to capture real room reverb if you want those darker sounding / decaying types of reverberations. The type of mic you use matters as well. My opinion is this: -can’t fake room reverb. Mic’ing up an amp with a room reverb setting on an amp doesn’t capture the depth of the “room” properly without making the amp sound boxy and weird. -It’s also much harder to make things like background guitars and vocals sound “in the background” by applying reverb in post. -for room reverb / mixing stuff to be “in the background”… it’s better to do that naturally - such as simply standing back further from the mic to sing harmonies than you do for leads / putting a mic further away from the amp… and using a mic that sounds thinner / hollower. When you try to do it artificially it takes a ton of extra mixing and weird EQ’ing to create a similar effect and sometimes it STILL interferes with the main parts in the “front” of the mix -plate reverb comes across much smoother for both recording amps with pedals and for recording software, but they do different things. If you want your guitars to sound washy and echoey, using a pedal (or built in spring reverb on a Fender amp) is better. If you want to use reverb to create ambient noises and drones, or to make one layer of the music sit in a different “place” in the mix without fucking with the EQ and changing its “tone”, that’s when I use post processing reverb in my DAW. -there’s no strict “rules” and often it takes a lot of playing around with a combination of these things to get it exact. My vocals are often a combo of standing back different distances from the mic and adding reverb in post, my guitars are often a combo of my Hydra pedal’s “plate reverb” setting and adding reverb in post
IMO no one can tell the difference between anything live in an audience so a pedal is fine in that instance but for a recording reverb is probably thee effect most in need of specific parameters to tamper it down in a way to be usable, which you just can’t get from a pedal. Hall/room/plate etc. all necessitate different high and low cuts and dampening etc. which virtually every pedal except strymon/eventide are fixed within their different reverb modes. I like keeley a lot and have had several of their pedals (although I don’t think their caverns delay/reverb is good at all) so it isn’t specific to them but looking at your hydra it just gives you the different reverb modes. I’m guessing the cuts are fixed within each mode by the designers. I’d rather have a plugin like Valhalla vintage verb that lets me tweak specifically each parameter of the plugin and especially the EQ of the verb tails/modulation amounts/space and width etc.
And sure I was speaking from personal opinion/perception. For the kind of music I make that is essentially just alternative rock or whatever I am better served being able to tweak it myself vs. just using a pedal when most reverb pedals are not made to be subtle or tweakable outside of their factory sound. There’s a reason “the strymon sound” is a thing and it just isn’t for people like me, not saying worship musicians or people trying to be Radiohead or whatever are wrong. It just sounds bad to me and doesn’t work for my application
Times like this are the only times I feel somewhat neurodivergent ranting about fucking guitar pedals lol but I would also rather apply different styles of reverb and different parameters for different guitars - the rickenbacker is a lot brighter and gnarly than the tele so I have more of a high cut on that reverb - and while I’m sure that would be possible if I had like 10 different reverb pedals or spent $600 or whatever on some Strymon bullshit (I refuse to support that company lol), it’s much easier, cheaper and efficient to just use a plugin after and record dry and have different setups for each guitar