Hello! I’m Emily, and I’m so excited to talk pedals with you all.
You’ll find that there are a lot of opinions about effects pedals (I’ll just call them pedals from here on out). Some people along the lines will gladly tell you their hot takes, but I want you to know first and foremost that pedals are entirely subjective. If you like the way something sounds, that’s the only thing that matters.
There are a few general rules of pedals, but all but a few are meant to be broken. I’ll be sure to cover those, but first let’s define pedals.
A guitar pedal is a device that you place between your guitar and your amplifier to produce a wide range of sounds that would be difficult or impossible to achieve with just a guitar plugged into an amp.
There are a lot of types of effects out there, but they generally fall into a few buckets:
Dirt/Gain Pedals
There are three primary types of dirt pedal: Overdrive (OD), Distortion, and Fuzz. They’re often confused with one another and can honestly sound pretty similar. But you can think of them in terms of light to heavy with Overdrive being the lightest, Distortion being medium, and Fuzz being the most crunchy.
However, they were all created for different purposes.
Overdrive / Pre-Amp
Before we talk about overdrive we have to talk about amps. Amps are what powers your sound and makes it audible to crowds when you’re playing an electric instrument. Nowadays there are two types of amps: tube amps and solid state. But folks used to just rely on tube amps.
With tube amps, players often seek the sound of their tubes being pushed to the limit by volume. We call that driving the tubes. This gives this nice, light, warm crunch.
But the thing is, you have to really crank the volume on some amps to do that. The more wattage an amp has, the louder it can get. For example, a 10 watt amp is great for bedroom playing, but won’t fill a large venue with sound on its own. A 100 watt amp is great for those big venues, but you can’t really play it at home without annoying the neighbors.
That’s where OD pedals come in. They mimic the sound of you turning up your tube amp as loud as it can go without actually having to crank the volume.
You’ll find terms like light, medium, or heavy gain in terms of OD. This tells you how much crunch you can get from that pedal.
I’m going to go ahead and throw the term pre-amp at you as well. These are typically similar enough to Overdrive pedals to include here and are honestly pretty interchangeable in my experience.
Distortion
History lesson! Distortion came about originally as a bit of a studio mistake. When Ike Turner went to Sun Studios to record his song “Rocket 88” he realized that one of the speakers in his amp was broken. So they tried to fix it with newspaper. The result was an especially crunchy sound that people still use today.
We call this sound distortion because it literally distorts the signal. It’s easy to confuse overdrive with distortion, and some heavy overdrive pedals behave like distortion. A good rule is to describe something as distorted when it has a consistently and heavily overdriven sound.
There are a lot of pedals that do both. You call that having a lot of range. A dirt pedal with a lot of range can go from a light crunch to heavy as you turn the “gain” knob.
Fuzz
Fuzz is unique from overdrive and distortion. It uses a technique called square wave clipping, which compresses and changes your signal to create this sound that’s…well…fuzzy. It’s unnatural. It’s warm. It’s wooly. It has texture.
Think of Smashing Pumpkins when you think about fuzz. Or Jimi Hendrix.
Fuzz is a really popular effect and you can find a lot of different types of it. Personally, there are some types of fuzz I love and types I don’t. Smashing Pumpkins use a Big Muff style fuzz. St. Vincent uses a gated sounding fuzz on “Birth in Reverse.” Listen to them side-by-side and see how different they sound.
Modulation
Modulation is a big umbrella term for effects that take the waves of your sound and change them. It isn’t even possible for me to cover all of them, but I like to break them into effects that chop up your sound, swirl your sound, or bow-chicka-bow your sounds.
Tremolo
Simply put, tremolo chops your volume as you play. Sounds like it should be a bad thing, but it’s not! It adds movement to your sound that can be soft and undulating or harsh and choppy.
There are tons of tremolo pedals out there, and the big difference between most of them is the wave shape that dictates how your sound is cut up. You can have smooth sine waves (slow woosh), cyclical triangle/sawtooth waves (a faster up and down) or a hard square (no smooth up or down there).
All tremolo pedals should have controls for depth (how much volume is being cut, from a little to all of it) and rate (how quickly that wave moves).
Chorus/Flanger/Phaser
Okay, now we’re getting weird. I’ve roughly put all these effects together because they often get confused for each other anyway! Briefly put, they create the wooshing sounds you might identify with the 80s. For example, the rhythm guitar in “Purple Rain” has a chorus effect on it.
Choruses and flangers work by making copies of your signal (the notes you’re playing), making a copy of those songs, and playing the copies back, but delayed a little (or a lot). They typically have controls for depth and rate like a tremolo. Flangers have shorter delay times, and choruses have longer delay times.
Phasers also make a copy of the signal, but have filter modulation.
I’m going to be honest — these effects and how they work are complicated. But using them doesn’t have to be! Just try some pedals and play with them until you get the sounds you like.
Filter Effects
The technical effect of a filter is to cut or boost high or low frequencies in a sound wave. You might also call these EQ or equalization effects. In short, they shape your sound waves.
The most famous filter effect is the wah wah pedal. This is probably what you think of when you hear Jimi Hendrix or the guitar in the Prince song “Kiss”. The wah wah works by moving the pedal up and down with your foot, which changes the way the filter is applied, giving you that bow-chicka sound.
You’ll also see filter pedals where the filter is controlled by how soft or hard you play notes, or autowah pedals that automatically change the filter without you having to use a wah wah.
Vibrato
Vibrato is, at its core, super simple. It takes the note you’re playing and bends it up and down. Can it get more complicated than that? Absolutely! Like tremolo, it should have controls for rate and depth of the bend. I’ll just say, this is one of those effects that people either love or hate. It’s woozy, which makes some people feel a little seasick.
Spacial Effects
One thing you don’t want to overlook in your sound is a sense of space. If you clap your hands in any room you’ll hear that each room or space sounds different. But to have no sense of space, to have no sound bounce off the wall and come back to you, feels stark and cold, no matter what other effects you use. The effects that give the most sense of space are delay and reverb.
Delay/Echo
You can think of delay as repeats or echos. With a delay pedal, your notes will be repeated to the speed you select with the Time knob. The number of repeats is usually controlled by the Feedback or Repeats knob.
Like with any pedal, there are different types of delay! There’s a quick slapback delay (like you might hear in country music) to washy modulated reverb that echoes into eternity.
Reverb
Reverb is THE effect that gives you a sense of space. You can use a touch for a little room sound or you can crank it for that washy sound.
Originally, reverb was added to songs by using physical devices. That often either meant a spring reverb tank where sound waves would physically travel through a metal spring or plate reverb which was similarly sound traveling through a metal sheet.
Spring reverb is still found in a lot of amplifiers, even analog devices. But most of the reverb you’ll hear is digital. More than other effects, I personally think that the different types of reverb are SO different that they’re worth mentioning. Here are some examples from a multi-effect reverb called The Atmosphere by Dr. Scientist in Canada:
Glossary
Below are some common terms you’ll see on or in relation to pedals.
Decay: This is associated with Reverb pedals. It controls how long the reverb dwells after you play a note.
Depth: This is sometimes called intensity. It is used on tremolo, chorus, flanger, vibrato, and some filter pedals.
Dry: This is the part of your signal that is not affected by the pedal.
EQ: Equalization. This is sometimes called Tone or Treble and turning it can act as a light filter on your tone. It behaves differently on different pedals, but generally turning clockwise gives you a brighter sound.
Feedback: This is associated with Delay pedals. It’s also called Repeats and controls how many repeats your delay pedal has.
Footswitch: The part of the pedal you stomp or press with your foot to turn the effect on or off. Some pedals have secondary footswitches that can perform a variety of funcitons.
Gain: This controls the amount of “dirt” in your dirt pedal signal. It also increase volume typically, so if you turn up the gain you might need to turn down the volume.
HPF: High-pass filter. This will cut out low frequencies and only let high frequencies through.
Input: On the right side of the pedal. This should lead to your guitar or the pedal in front of it in the signal chain.
Kill-dry: This is a feature on some pedals where you ONLY hear the “wet” or affected signal. For example, if you had a kill-dry on a delay pedal, you’d only hear the repeats, but not the original note. Same with reverb.
Knob: The dials you turn on the face of a pedal to shape the effect.
Level: This is also called Volume.
LPF: Low-pass filter. This will cut out high frequencies and only let lower frequencies through.
Mix: When you see this on a pedal, you’re mixing in wet signal with dry signal. More wet signal is added when you turn clockwise.
Output: On the left side of the pedal, this should lead to the next pedal in your signal chain or your amplifier.
Rate: If you’re using a modulation effect, this controls the speed or rate of the effect. A higher rate is faster, and a lower rate is slower.
Signal Chain: This is the order your pedals go in. Some people will tell you there are rules to your signal chain, but they are liars. Still, most people put their dirt pedals at the front of the signal chain (closer to the guitar), modulation in the middle, then delay and reverb last (usually with reverb being the very last effect).
Time: This is most often associated with delay pedals and controls whether your repeats are faster or slower.
Toggles: Some pedals have toggles to go between different settings.
Wet: This is the part of your signal that is affected by your pedal. You blend this with your dry signal to your personal taste.