Pedal Boards Part 2

After you have your pedal board, you are now ready to place your pedals onto it. But wait! You realize that you don’t really know what should go where and what order to chain them in! Luckily you found this blog where I am about to tell you how to “properly” set up and order your pedals. I use the “” marks because it isn’t just black or white, yes or no. Many guitarists in past have developed their tone by putting their pedals in an order that is different, but for the purpose of quickly ordering your board to get you back to making sweet sweet music these are just loose guidelines to follow.

To give credit where credit is due, most of the following information I learned a little while ago from a wondrous pedal maker and modifier named Robert Keeley. Here’s a link to his website for a more technical and in depth explanation: www.robertkeeley.com/faq.php#Effect Order.

The great phrase that I learned from him to help me remember what order to put effects pedals in is this: Which Chain Of Effects Pedals Makes Life Easy. It’s a phrase just like the one you learned in grade school for remembering what order to do math in (I think that was Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally). Anyways, the phrase stands for Wah, Compression, Overdrive, EQ, Pitch, Modulation, Level, and Echo.

I’ll go over just briefly what these include. Wah pedals are any pedal that you either sweep with your foot and it exemplifies a particular frequency or a pedal that does this electronically. For example: a Dunlop Crybaby or a MXR Phase 90 (like Van Halen uses). Compression pedals essentially “compress” your signal so that if your level exceeds a certain limit, it only lets that set amount through. A couple examples of compressors are the Boss CS-3 Compression Sustainer and the MXR Dyna Comp. If you couldn’t tell, compressors typically have some form of the word compressor in the name so they aren’t too hard to pick out. Overdrive pedals, also known as distortion pedals, essentially distort your signal or boost the overdrive to what it would be like if you were running your amp on 11 without having to kill your ears. From there you have EQ which shapes your tone or the tone of your Overdrive. Pitch pedals change the pitch of your guitar, for instance octave pedals or vibrato and tremolo pedals. Modulation pedals come next and give you unique and odd sounds like flangers or synth type sounds. Level pedals or volume pedals are quite simple: they just control the level of your output or your volume. And last but certainly not least is another pretty self explanatory category: Echo. Echo pedals basically just echo or repeat what you play just like yelling at the top of a mountain and hearing yourself over and over a couple times.

Remember, this is just a guideline to ordering your pedals. Putting them in a different order will still work, but you may run into some problems or get a unique or different outcome from doing so. Until next time, happy playing and keep rocking out \m/(>.<)\m/