Effects schemes

[publicradio]

Hello,

What do you all recommend for effects schemes? If I want to start putting a song together I often set my master effects to room reverb, and then I turn up the reverb time to 2.0 or somewhere near there, and then I chain it to comp>amp or comp>OD/hi gain. This gives everything a fuzzy, lo-fi, sound where all my sounds are in a far away space and place in time, sort of. I work on headphones, and psychologically this gives me enough distance to start playing around without the raw sounds right in my ear.

I really want a lo-fi, natural sound that I can apply to a lot of different songs. I'm not so interested in running a lot of different effects off of everything right away, and obviously there are limitations with the effects to I want to use them sparingly, but to their potential.

For instance, a lot of older dub reggae stuff has just this one, low fidelity drippy reverb and then the delays are played with, to great effect. This type of 'environment' seems like it would be easy to play around in.

Any ideas?