Guitar Effects Pedals

If you are serious about the guitar then you may want to consider investing in guitar effects. Guitar effects pedals come in lots of different shapes and sizes. Their main use is to change the way your guitar sounds.

There are thousands of different guitar effects pedals to choose from some new some rare and old – some create sounds that alters your guitar sound so much it is almost unrecognisable as a guitar sound.

Guitar effects pedals come in many different formats. You can get he single effects units – often called stomp boxes and chain them together or you can opt for a multi effects unit that combines lots of effects in one box. There are also other formats such as rack mounted effects units and processors.

For the purpose of this article I am going to illustrate a couple of the most commonly used guitar effects pedals that I consider an essential. I personally use these pedals. These can be easily chained together in whatever way you choose and changed to get the sound that you want from your guitar.

Distortion / overdrive pedals

Whilst the above is in fact two separate pedals the effect they produce are similar. I personally own a distortion pedal but tend to use the amplifiers overdrive effect to get the sound I want.. Basically they take your clean sound and convert it to an overdriven or distorted sound. This gives you a rock type sound found on hundreds of songs.

Wah Pedals

Wah pedals are a great guitar effects pedal. Rather than just an on/off situation this is an expression pedal. It is called a wah pedal because litreally, it makes your guitar sound as though it is saying "wah". This is great for slow and fast lead playing and produces some really great results.

Delay Pedals

This adds an echo effect to your sound. Can be used to layer multiple sounds or, more commonly, and in my case, used to beef up your lead sound. It is a subtle difference that can make such a difference to your playing.

Chorus Pedals

Another popular guitar pedal that adds depth to both your clean and distorted tone is the chorus pedal. This thickens the sound by doubling up notes in layers and altering delays in a very subtle way.

With guitar effects pedals there are massive differences in sound quality. Often the more expensive a pedal is, the better it will be. It is also very true, especially with the examples above, the older the pedal is the better quality sound it will produce. As with most things guitar related, they don’t make things like they used to.

Olly is the founder of Olly’s Guitar world- supplying a whole range of guitar effects pedals and cheap guitars.