Need help with guitar amp effects.?

Question

I recently started playing guitar and am having difficulty with my amp, it has four pre-sets none of them I like but it gives me the option of quite a few effects and I have no idea what they do to set up my own pre-sets with them, so if anyone could explain what they do or what kind of music they are generally good for that'd be terrific

I like punk rock/hard rock/metal/ect and the effects are

Drive/Bass/Mid/Treble/with two k***s that have Chorus Flange, Phaser, Tremolo and Sweep Echo, Tape Echo, Reverb, thanks for your time

Answer 1

that description of k***s sounds like a Line6 amp... is it?

my buddy has a Line6 head for his marshall stack... i'm not fond of it...  :/  

that guy that gave the other comment... he pretty much laid out the goods on the table for ya.

Answer 2

The most important thing is to get a good basic tone; adding effects to a bad tone usually only makes it worse, and in many cases will ruin a good tone too. Use sparingly: effects are best employed to make certain parts of a song more interesting, or to enhance your solo sound.

Anyway, for a rock tone, I'd start out by setting the EQ k***s (bass, mid and treble) to the 12 o'clock position (we call this "flat" EQ), turn off all the effects and turn the drive down low until there's either no distortion at all or very little. Now turn the distortion up slowly to find the amount you want. Then add or subtract bass, mid a treble one by one until you get close to the sound you want. As you do this, you'll learn how each control affects the sound you get, so you'll be able to go back to tweak it until it's just right. For rock, you'll generally find that you want fairly low mids and high bass and treble. The classic Metallica sound, for example, is achieved largely by "scooping" the mids out of the tone, or in other words having the mid k**b turned way down to around zero.

Chorus, flange and phaser are quite similar effects known as "modulation" effects. They tend to thicken the sound up and, at higher settings, produce a pulsing or swooshing effect. The clean sounds on a lot of metal recordings tend to have a bit of chorus on them.

Tremolo adds a kind of shimmering effect - if you look up the Link Wray song 'Rumble', you'll hear the tremolo effect on a Vox amplifier being gradually increased throughout the song.

Echo and reverb should be self explanatory. They're used to add a little "space" to your sound, with echo having a very distinctive "slapback" sound which you'll hear a lot on reggae records.

Hopefully that'll get you started with some sounds you like, but the really important thing is to learn by playing around and seeing what happens - Tom Morello pretty much made his name by messing about with effects!