A Guide to Effects Pedals

If you've ever heard a 12 string guitar a chorus can produce a similar effect. It does this by doubling your signal and ever so slightly shifting the pitch. The more extreme you make the effect, the more ethereal and chimey it will sound. Often in recording, guitar tracks are doubled up to add emphasis and depth to the sound, a chorus can also produce a similar effect to this. 

 

Fender - Bubbler Chorus

MXR - Analog Chorus

 

 

One of most important effects in guitar is arguably reverb. It will make your playing sound much more fluid and create a pleasant listening experience. Used a huge amount in recording to add life-like quality to otherwise dry recordings, it can also be used in a more extreme way to create atmospheric, pad-like sounds. Spring reverb tends to be the most popular in guitar and is often built into amps with a reverb tank that sends your audio down two springs and adds the output from this tank to your sound.

 

EHX - Oceans 11

Fender - Marine Layer Reverb

 

A phaser duplicates your signal with an out of phase version. What this is essentially is a flipped waveform that moves back and forth at different rates to create a faster or slower sounding phase effect. A similar sound can be created by using two microphones to capture the same sound and moving one of these closer and further away from the sound source. You'll hear this a lot in 70's music. Classic examples are Brian May's solo on 'Don't Stop Me Now' and EVH's - Eruption. They can add a new dynamic and thicken up a guitar sound.

 

MXR - Phase 90

Fender - Lost Highway Phaser

 

 

A Wah pedal is whats known a bandpass filter, which is both a low pass and a high pass filter. It basically gives you a very scooped sound by cutting out the highs and the lows around a particular band of frequencies. It then moves this chosen band up and down with the foot pedal to give it that iconic sound. A lot of guitarists use this effect but the most iconic has to be Hendrix.

 

Dunlop - Crybaby

Vox - V847 

 

 

Expression pedals can be used in conjunction with other pedals that have an expression input. This allows for certain parameters to be controlled by a foot pedal, giving the player more control over their sound. Often what this will do is control the mix or amount of effect in the dry signal. Volume pedals are simply volume pots attached to a foot pedal to give you more control and keep your hands free. They're also handy for cutting you signal between songs or in quiet sections.

 

Vox - XVP-20

Fender - EXP1

Probably the funkiest effect of them all, it works similarly to the above-described wah but is triggered through dynamics in your playing. Parameters can be altered to give you quite a "quacky" sound, through to a more muffled, subtle tone. You can hear examples of it in John Mayer's - I Don't Trust Myself and Tom Misch - Cosmic Sans, who uses it a lot in his live performances.

 

EHX - Q-Tron

Fender - Pour Over

A flanger often gets confused with a phaser but the easiest way to tell them apart is a flanger has more of a woosh effect (think of a passing jet-plane). They often get confused as they do operate in quite a similar fashion, it duplicates the signal and shifts this signal slightly out of time by adding a quick and modulating delay. Parameters can control how delayed the second signal is and how much it feeds back. You'll find you can replicate a few different effect types with this one pedal.

 

MXR - Micro Flanger

EHX - Electric Mistress

 

 

Not only an incredible practice tool but as proved by Ed Sheeran, it can be a brilliant way to take your solo performances to a whole new level! The simplest loopers have just one button, with the first push you start recording your loop. The trick is to do the second hit on beat one of the next bar once you have completed your phrase, this will then set the duration of your loop. You can then dub over any additional parts over this phrase. Double-tap to stop, double-tap and hold to erase the loop. Some looper controls may differ. More advanced loopers will have storage, ability to swap between other loops or sections of a song and even add effects such as pitch shifting and reversing of the loops.

 

Pigtronix - Infinity 2

EHX - 360L