Tip 1. What's the best order to put my pedals in?
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The order of effects in your pedal chain is a big factor in combined effects guitar sound. Does the overdrive go before the chorus? Does the delay go before the flanger? The actual answer is…you can do whatever you like. Experimentation is the key. BUT, we can offer you a good place to start from. If you use this as a general rule, you won't go far wrong. |
| | | 1st Envelope Filter and Tone Shaping Effects.
These include Auto Wahs and Wah pedals. These effects rely on the dynamics of your guitar tone and should be the first thing you signal sees.
2nd Compression Compression can work well with a variety of different pedals, so best to have it close to the front.
3rd Overdrives, Distortions and Fuzz's
And in that order. If you go from the least amount of drive to the greatest amount of drive you can get some pretty cool combinations. A low gain pedal can be a great solo boost into a higher gain pedal, but the other way around can often spell disaster. There is one major exception to this rule - Germanium Transistor boosters such as Fuzz Faces, Octavias and treble boosters. The nature of the design of these effects means that they don't like to see the buffer from another pedal at the input. They prefer to see the guitar pickup. So if you have one of these type of pedals, best to stick it at the front before any buffers.
4th Modulation Effects
These include chorus, flanger, phasers and tremolos. The specific order of the modulation effects is probably the least important as you rarely use more than one at a time and if you do is more a sound effect than a toneful combination.
5th Delay effects
A good rule of thumb here if you use multiple delay effects is to put your short delay before your long delay. Adding a nice drawn out delay on top of a slap back effect can sound quite cool.
6th and finally Reverb
Technically speaking, reverb is actually a delay effect. Very short delays combined to give the effect of being in an enclosed space. Think about what happens when you shout in a hall. That's the delayed sound of your voice bouncing of the walls. Leaving this effect till last works well with many different combinations including clean and dirty sounds.
Again find the sounds and combinations that work for you. |
| Tip 2. What causes popping in amplifiers?
Have you ever noticed a pop when you change pick-ups, or turning on any true bypass effect switch? Most of the time, this can be explained by what is called a D.C. input offset. What does that mean?
It's basically when your amplifier input which should be sitting at 0 volts has drifted to a different level. When your guitar is plugged in and playing normally, the input is given a ground reference and everything works great, but when you break the circuit, even for a fraction of a second like selecting pickups, or with true bypass switching, that voltage drifts back up to a different level. The pop sound is when the circuit is reconnected and the voltage comes back down to ground…with a THUD!
Often this can be as simple as a faulty input valve (or tube as you might call it) in your amp.
You can measure this offset easily with a multi meter. Just plug your guitar cable in and with your voltage selector on D.C. volts take a reading between the tip and the shield of your lead. Get a reading other than 0? There's your problem.
I have a 1962 VOX AC10, which I have a barely legal relationship with. The D.C. input offset on this amp is 3.2 volts! That's huge, but it sounds amazing. (A bad D.C. offset won't affect your tone, which is why most people miss this as a problem.) It has the original Mullard EF86 valve in it. With a new valve the popping goes away, but the old Mullard just sounds too good so I live with the popping, and in truth it's not that bad, but on my other Vox's Marshalls and Fender amps TheGigRigs true bypass switching is practically silent.
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