Guitar pedal order, or the order in which you place your effects pedals in your signal chain, is a well-covered subject on the Internet. You can find plenty of recommended FX-pedal signal chains, but always with conflicting information and the inevitable disclaimer: “Your mileage may vary, use your ears and experiment.”
Despite sounding like a copout, it has its basis in truth. The reason for this is that with so many pedals on the market and new ones arriving every day, it’s hard to predict how they will behave when combined with other pedals (and therein can be found a somewhat original sound).
However, there is an inherent logic to pedal placement that once understood, not only explains the conventional wisdom of pedal placement, but also turns organizing your pedals into a creative endeavor rather than a hit-or-miss exercise.
Often you’ll read recommendations that say things such as “put your time-based effects after your modulation effects.” Fine. What does that mean? What are time-based effects as opposed to modulation effects, and if you have a few different types of modulation effects, where do you place them in relation to one another?
For example, chorus, phasers and flangers are all modulation-type effects, so which one goes where?
Once you understand what each pedal type does to the clean signal coming out of your guitar (or the pedal ahead of it), you’ll know how to place them—or at very least have a solid foundation for your experiments in order to produce a sound all your own.
- Secrets of Guitar Pedal Placement
- True Bypass vs. Buffered Bypass
- Sidechain Effects
- Following The Signal Chain of Your Amp
- Pedal Function and Behavior Determines Placement
- The First Part of the Signal Chain
- Dynamics Processors
- EQ Guitar Pedal Placement
- Modulation Pedal Implementation
- Say OK to Reverb and Delay
- Volume Pedal Placement
- Where to Place Specialty Pedals in the Signal Chain
- Noise Suppressors, Expanders, and Gates
- Guitar Effect Pedal Management
- Digital Multi-Effects Units vs. Analog Pedal Chains
- Putting it All Together
Secrets of Optimal Guitar Pedal Order
The first secret to understanding pedal placement is to understand how each main effects category works in terms of how they alter sound.
The next big secret of pedal placement is to think about how each type of effects pedal works in terms of its position in the chain.
Put simply, a pedal changes the sound of the unit ahead of it (or the sound that is the sum of the units ahead of it), which then feeds an altered waveform to the unit after it.
For example, if you feed your guitar to a compressor going into a distortion pedal followed by an EQ pedal, the EQ doesn’t change the sound of the guitar or compressor alone, but it does change the sound of the distortion being fed by a compressed guitar. You could think of it as equalizing a compressed, distorted guitar.
However, the EQ does not change the output gain or frequency range of the guitar as it goes into the compressor, or the input signal going into the distortion pedal—but it does change the sum of their sounds. It also changes the signal that feeds the next effects unit in the chain, which in turn alters the sound of everything ahead of it, and so on.
Put simply, when you’re deciding the position of two pedals, for example EQ and distortion, ask yourself if you want to EQ your guitar and then distort it, or EQ your distorted guitar.
In a previous article, we discussed the main categories of guitar effects pedals and how they work, which also provided some basic clues in terms of how to place them in an effects chain.
Now we’re going to go deeper in terms of how the pedals respond to input signals and how they interact.
Once you have a solid understanding of how effects pedals behave in terms of signal flow, instead of hit-or-miss experimentation, setting up your effects chain will become a logical and creative endeavor. Much like soloing, you can either learn other people’s licks, or you can come up with your own riffs. This is when you can create a custom guitar pedal order that works for your own sound.
Before we get into the depths of pedal placement, we’re going to discuss a few important concepts.
True Bypass vs. Buffered Bypass
Vintage tone aficionados believe in true bypass and nothing but the true bypass for effects pedals.
True bypass provides the shortest signal path with no extra components in the circuit to color your tone—at least that’s the theory. In short it’s just a hard wire from point A to point B, or a “short,” if you will (only it doesn’t blow anything up).
Buffered bypass, on the other hand, senses a drop in signal level when bypass is engaged and sends some of the output to the input signal to compensate for signal loss. The buffered bypass can change tone, since it’s an active circuit.
Now, the reality is that both methods of bypass can affect your signal. True bypass pedals have the unfortunate tendency to make loud pops when switched in and out of circuit, due to changes in impedance, capacitors discharging DC into ground, or noise from mechanical switc