In The Style of The Edge (U2) - part 1

Lesson Sample

Lyle: The Edge (Dave Evans) one of rocks most under-rated guitar players, is the guitarist for the band U2. Edge uses many types of effects, plays strong rhythm riffs and uses many different guitars, all combined to bring his music many different sonic textures. To understand one of Edge's most signature sound or style, you'll need to know a little about his gear, like guitars, amps and fx. Here's a picture of his main fx rack:

rack


Lyle: It's loaded with enough stuff to launch a small space shuttle! This rack is filled with digital delays, compressors and pitch shifters mostly. Very high-tech stuff to produce clean delays and reverbs just like in a studio. Edge uses stomp boxes new and old, here's a look:

pedals 1


Lyle: You can duplicate many of the Edge's fx settings with your own signal processors.

pedals 2


Lyle: The Edge uses many old stomp boxes from his early days so he can still reproduce the same sounds live.

pedals 3


Lyle: Here's a few more photos:

pedals 6


Lyle: Above is a picture of his switching system near his mic stand. All of his rack fx and all these stomp boxes are used to create the sounds you hear on all of U2's music and live shows.

pedalboard 1


Lyle: In this picture you might see a couple pedals you know. The white pedal is a Boss tuner. He's got a wha, volume, Digitech whammy and a couple of switches for turning the keyboards on and off during live shows.

Lyle: The Edge uses Vox amps to drive the signals from all these fx. His favorite is a '64 Vox AC30.

amp 1


Lyle: He plays mostly Gibson and Fender guitars. Gibsons for the fat crunch, and Fenders for the cleaner sounds.

Lyle: Let's check out a few riffs using a delay setting of 360 milliseconds. First, here's a basic jam track to give you a beat to work with:

Looping Sound Clip 1

Lyle: Use a clean tone on your amp setting for this. Watch this video clip of the delay sound, it's set for about 4 repeats:

echo example 1

Lyle: Turn the output of the delay fx up loud to match the guitar signal. What is happening here with the jam track at 125 beats per minute (bpm) and the delay set for 360 ml, is a dotted eighth note repeat. A very cool sound.

Lyle: We are using the key of D here and this next riff is based on the open D string:



Lyle: You can hear the effect that the echo has at this tempo.

echo example 2

Lyle: Now you'll add another note to the riff. You can use all down strokes. Ok, now add another note like this:



echo example 3

Lyle: This next example is the D major scale using this echo effect.



Lyle: Van Halen used this type of effect in a solo called "Cathedral". Also David Gilmour used this effect on the song "Run".

echo example 4 - maj scale

Lyle: Here's an arpeggio of the D major scale. An arpeggio is made up from the chord tones of the scale - 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the major scale.

echo example 5 - maj arpeggio

Lyle: These have been just examples of the delay effect used by The Edge on a song that sounds like this. Play around with your settings on your signal processors and in the next lesson we'll get into chord progressions and rhythm techniques. Remember to set your delay to 360 mil and about 4 repeats that are loud, and jam to the looping sound clip in the key of D.

Lyle: That’s all for this lesson. If you would like further study on this topic or any other topic, email me at Lyle@theguitar.net for info on how you can get your own customized guitar lessons like this using Riff Interactive technology. Your private lessons can be downloaded to your pc for anytime, anywhere study. Thanks and see you at the next lesson. - Lyle