Guitar pedals, also known as pedal effects, provide a simple and effective way to modulate the sound of your guitar. Thanks to the wide range of effects available, there is the risk of getting excited very easily, accumulating a wide range of pedals to use them all together. While it is feasible, it's best to avoid linking them all together without any forethought and start playing. To arrange the pedals correctly, you will need to arrange them in a certain order. This way you will get the best possible sound for your guitar.
Steps
Step 1. Start the effects chain with the pedal tuner
If you use a chromatic pedal tuner, the guitar must be connected directly to it. The tuner must be placed in the first place of the chain because during the tuning the guitar signal must be clean and free of any kind of modulation, rather than heavily distorted due to the presence of other effects that precede it.
Step 2. Connect the filters to the top of the chain
Filters, such as auto-wah, envelope and wah-wah, should be placed right after the tuner. Since effects of this type depend on the attack of the clean signal to be able to apply their filter and modulate the sound, placing them after other effects would reduce their ability to affect the signal. If you don't use a pedal tuner, one of the filters will be in first place.
Step 3. Connect the foot compressors right after the filters
The compressors are designed to “level” the volume of the guitar, which means increasing the volume of the lower sounds. If these volume adjustments are made after the guitar sound has already been heavily modified, a lot of noisy and unwanted sounds can arise.
Step 4. Next, add the distortion and overdrive pedals
Now you are finally ready to connect what are probably the most common effects pedals - overdrives and distortions. These pedals generate and amplify the nuances of each note that is played, which is why connecting them before the filters and compressor is a bad idea. If the nuances of the signal pass through these pedals, the resulting sound will be strange and unpleasant.
Step 5. Connect all other modulation effects
After connecting the aforementioned pedal effects, you can now add any other pedal capable of modulating the sound. These include chorus, flanger, tremolo and phaser. If you have multiple pedals of this type, experiment with different sequences so you can hear how they affect the sound of the guitar.
Step 6. Add the volume pedal
Volume pedals need to be added after all the modulations mentioned so far, as they offer better results in tuning a practically complete signal, rather than one that will then have to go through a bunch of other effects.
Step 7. Place the echo effects last
The only type of pedal that works well after volume is delay. Placing the delay before the volume will make it more difficult to control the volume of each subsequent delay or echo.
Advice
- To keep the pedals in good order, you can buy pedals of various sizes. These cases allow you to power each pedal to a single multiple socket, thus reducing the clutter of cables and avoiding the need to use batteries.
- Guitar pedals must be connected together using very short cables, known as “patch cables”. The longer the cables are, the weaker the signal will be, resulting in a loss of guitar sound quality.
