Big Red Button: Guitar Pedal Chains

April 8th, 2009 | Author: Sanjay

Pedal Madness

One of the coolest things about playing electric guitar is getting to mess around with all those pedals. Fuzz pedals, distortion pedals, wah pedals, delays, reverbs, terms and vibratos, octave multipliers, and on and on… So many little units of crazy noise making.

But getting them setup in the right order can be tricky. You have so many choices and options, but inevitable you have to whittle it down to a couple of chains that you learn and use, because you cant spend half of every practice repatching your pedal board to get a new sound… unless that’s how you roll. If you DO have that much time, then disregard what I’m about to write, because you’ll encounter all sorts of nuanced and extreme sounds messing with your pedals.

BUT, if you’re just trying to get the most out of your pedals, and want to get on with your life, then read on.

Categories of Pedals:

1) Gain-Based Pedals – These are your fuzz boxes, distortion pedals, and some other funky-named things, like a “line-amp” pedal, etc. These also include the various “amp-sim” pedals like Boss’s Fender Bassman emulator.

I tend to think of these as “tone” pedals – They tend to have huge pronounced effects on your sound, and once you slap on a fuzz pedals there’s no going back to clean later down the line.

I’d also include compressor/sustainer pedals in this category, but they tend to show up in different places in your pedal chain than the rest.

2) Modulators – These are Tremelo, Vibrato, Phaser, Flanger, Chorus, Octave Multipliers, and Wah-Wah pedals. Think of these as your “FX” pedals . They alter your sound, by performing operations on your audio. They let you create crazy, spacey, and out-of-this-world sounds when pushed to limits. However, used sparingly, they’l give you a different “sound” while maintaing the “tone” or crunch or fuzz of your guitar sound.

3) Time-Based Pedals – These are Reverbs, Delays and Echos, and to a lesser extent, various Modulators. In reality, your Modulators are operating based on “timing” so they’re technically time-based pedals, but guitarists tend to group them separately from reverbs and delays.

Reverbs and Delays allow you to create artificial “spaces” with your sound, while again, leaving the basic “tone” of your guitar the same. They do this by creating delayed duplicates or “reflections” and adding them to your sound.

4) Loop Stations – These are the pedals with “memory.” Some of the fancier delays have these built in, but most are stand-alone pedals. They record part of your performance and play it back, looped or one-shot. I mention these, because where you place them in the chain can be really important.

5) Multi-FX Pedals – These are those monsters that have a version of all the other categories included, often allowing you to swap them around, or turn them on/off individually. These are another special case when it comes to Pedal Chaing.

Ordering Your Pedals:

With so many categories, it can be a little nuts trying to sort them all out. Here’s a basic way of looking at it, that will be useful for most types of guitar playing. My suggestion would be to start with this, and as you grow dissatisfied with it, make changes to suit your particular style.

The Basic Chain is

Guitar > Gain-Based Pedals > Compressor/Sustainers > Modulators > Loop Stations > Time-Based Pedals

This Basic Setup lets you create a tone with gain-based pedals, use comps/sustainers to make wailing solo tones, tweak your sound with modulators, create clean loops, then put them in a sonic space with Reverbs and Delays. This works for most traditional styles of playing.

You might have notice that I avoided mentioned where to put multi-effects. That’s mostly because there isn’t any GREAT place to put them with other pedals. Obviously if you use them with loopers, you need them before the loop station for the FX to be recorded. But other than that, it really depends on what you use it for, and trial an error to see what works for you. My basic suggestion is either get a bunch of individual pedals OR a Multi-FX processor, but don’t go overboard mixing the to together. That can turn into a pedal mess pretty quickly.

Also, within your Gain-based Pedals, I’d further divide things up between Fuzz boxes, which are on/off distortion and Overdrives, which are gradual, volume-based distortions. Put your overdrives in front of fuzz boxes in order to give yourself more options. Setting distortion/gain levels on these will create varying levels of grit and distortion, while fuzz boxes tend to be “on and distorted” or “off and clean.” If you have an overdrive feeding a fuzz box with both on, you’ll hear a difference as you gain up the overdrive. With a fuzz box feeding an overdrive, you tend to hear less difference as you gain things up because your fuzz box automatically slams your sound into white-noise territory.

Lastly, I want to leave you with some suggested Deviations. Here’s some samples played with a Fuzz/Distortion (Big Muff), Crybaby Wah, and Reverb (Holy Grail Reverb) in various orders.

I created the samples by recording a DI-ed guitar and then reamped the same sample through different chains into a Vox Pathfinder 15R without changing settings.

Clean DI (There’s a little clipping in it, but I think it still works)