What kind of effects pedals should i get

In basic terms, if you set up a delay so it repeats twice every beat, having tap tempo means that even if you speed up the song in real life, you can tap in the new speed with your foot, and still have your repeats going twice every beat! Reverberation, or reverb, is what you hear in an enclosed physical when sound bounces back to your ears off surfaces like walls and the ceiling.

The amount of reverb that you hear relays to your brain the physical size of the space that the sound is occurring in — think about the difference between clapping your hands in a small room, compared to a cave, or a cathedral. A pedal like the RV-6 can take you from small room reflections to huge hall reverbs and much more, letting you conjure up huge ambient soundscapes!

Like singing with a chorus group! Phaser and flanger effects operate on very similar underlying principles — take the original signal, delay it by very small amounts and mix it back with the dry signal. The easiest way to differentiate between the two is to hear it for yourself.

You can hear the slightly metallic, jet-plane swoosh of the effect very clearly. In the song Pardon Me, he utilized a BOSS Super Phaser to create that swishing, watery sound, along with volume swells and delay to create an otherworldly atmospheric sound. With the TR-2 , you can choose either end of this spectrum, or a blend somewhere in between, using the waveform control. Compressors usually have an attack knob that allows you to control how fast it takes the compressor to start affecting the tone and a threshold knob that sets the volume level that the compressor starts clamping down on peaks.

Essentially, it takes your vocal input speech patterns from a microphone , and changes the pitch based on your instrument input your guitar. Just plug your guitar and mic into the VO-1 and Daft Punk the night away. Not to mention, the VO-1 can also do a mean talkbox translation: you can play the intro to Living On A Prayer without buying an actual talkbox pedal or having to put a rubber tube in your mouth.

The name is self-explanatory! Basically does the same thing as the volume knob on your guitar does, but on the floor. So why do you need one? A volume pedal can also function like a solo boost if you put it at the end of your pedal chain. The audio frequencies that we hear around us sit across a wide spectrum, of which the human ear can hear between 20Hz to 20kHz. In the most basic terms, an EQ pedal allows you to cut decrease or boost increase the frequencies.

Many guitar players who play at high volume with high gain find themselves in an ongoing battle with noise, hum or unwelcome feedback. This is where a noise gate comes in. A noise gate or noise suppressor can be used on two levels.

First, used early in the signal chain to stifle playing noise e. Second, used in the effects loop of your amp to reduce high gain hiss. The NS-2 can do both! Electric Guitars. Acoustic Guitars.

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It functions sonically like a wah-wah pedal but uses the strength of the signal to control the sweep of the frequency. Typically, control knobs allows the player to set the amount of wah to interact with picking, so that the guitarist can dynamically control the effect without using a rocker to engage the filtering. Possibly the most famous of all guitar effects, the talk box has its indelible place in history.

The guitar signal is pushed thru a speaker into a tube that the player holds in their mouth. This tube is usually run up a mic stand, so that the player can use the embouchure of the mouth cavity to control vowel sounds that are then picked up by the microphone and pushed back through the PA system.

For being such a simple set up, the talk box creates one of the most dynamic and distinctive effects that has become a household name through artists such as Peter Frampton and Roger Troutman.

Compressors basically do what the name implies. Your signal will be squashed. You can think of it as a floor and a ceiling. Some make your lowest volume notes rise up to an audible level with an expander, which will increase the amount of sustain your notes have. It almost sounds like a sound flower blooming. Others act like traditional compressors with a threshold and compression ratio.

The louder sounds are reduced in volume, which helps in producing a more level volume overall from your guitar and amp. The sound guy will consider you his best friend after you send him this more consistent signal.

The effect a compressor has on tone has been exploited differently depending on genre. You know the sound. Players who use a lot more gain will often set a compressor to offer almost infinite sustain or even controllable feedback at lower volumes. A player can get all the benefits of a dimed out Marshall stack without having to be as loud as a jet breaking the sound barrier.

Next up in your signal path comes the trusty gain pedal, or two or three even. These effects will pass your signal through a transistor or diode to produce the clipping sound of a tube amplifier cranked up loud. These are historically the most popular types of guitar pedals ever used. They can go from subtle drive of a loud Fender to the high gain insanity of a Mesa Boogie Triple Rectifier.

Most players call these effects distortion pedals, but there are different varieties of distortion that produce distinctly unique tones, all driven by the amount of gain you push. Its the type of clipping you would expect to hear from a tube amp that been naturally gained up by cranking the volume levels really high. Some players refer to this sound as Crunch. They sound as good as they might taste, if they were flavors of cereal or ice cream.

This classic tone is most often associated with Jimi Hendrix, who used the Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face to push his Marshall heads into the stratosphere along side his trusty Stratocasters.

Its been said that Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath fame once dropped his amp down a flight of stairs and busted the cone on his speaker. Needing to use the amp, Iommi hopes for the best and plugs in and gets surprised by the ensuing fuzz created by the broken speaker cone flapping around. History was made during this fortuitous accident.

They can go from that classic fuzz of the golden days to the bit crushed searing madness of boutique modern pedals. The distortion pedal is probably the most well known of the gain bunch. Not only have guitarists used this effect to produce high gain distortion at any volume level, the pedal can also be used on top of an already gained up amp as a lead boost. Think of Heavy Metal, and you know the sound of a distortion pedal.

While they can be used to subtly color your tone, most people associate the distortion with the buzz saw hard clipping of heavier modern guitar tones. Put that crushing tone into a small metal box and you have the distortion pedal.

Pitch altering effects will add or alter notes in the signal path depending on which pedal type is being used. Many players have built signature sounds and riffs around the pitch altering effects. The octaver is a style of pitch effect that takes whatever note you are playing and doubles or halves the frequency to add an octave back into the signal. These type of effects can simulate the sound of a bass player playing simultaneously with the guitarist, giving beefy low end to bands without a bassist.

These are called octave down pedals. On the flipside, octave up pedals add a higher octave to whatever note is being played. Some octave up effects are called 'octave fuzz', because the introduction of the high octave is dependent on the level of fuzz the pedal is producing.

The pitch shifter is one of the most versatile effects in the pitch category. Often used with a rocker pedal like a wah-wah or volume pedal, the pitch can be swept up or down by a specified amount in a smooth glissando-like bend. These detuning type pedals have become prominent in the age of dropped tunings and seven string guitars.

Sometimes a pitch shifter will retain the original signal while adding in the new shifted pitch. The new shifted note can be set at a given intervallic distance from the original and will automatically harmonize any given series of notes or melody.

In short, it will harmonize the guitar by duplicating the melody at a 3rd, 5th, or whatever interval you define.

We all know what a tuner is. They don't apply any effects to your tone. They simply give you a visual guide so you can retune on the fly as quickly as possible. Which is great because so few of us have anything near 'perfect pitch. TC Electronic has literally changed the game with their new polyphonic tuner technology that lets you tune all of your strings at once, no matter what tuning you're using.

This is the only logical choice when it comes to pedals, although if you're interested in other formats such as headstock tuners and rackmount options, check out our reviews of the best guitar tuners on the market. Many of the modulation type effects pedals are made to approximate some aspect of the original rotating speaker. The Leslie Cabinet was made as a companion to the Hammond B3 Organ and literally had a rotary speaker that could produce all of the common modulation effects depending on the speed setting.

Doubling the signal and modulating some aspect of the new signal before adding it back to the original is how these effects are created. The Univibe effect was produced to also mimic the sound of the Leslie rotary speaker, but in a slightly different way from the new digital pedals previously mentioned.

They often combine slight amounts of all modulation type effects at the same time to approximate the rotary sound, but became a unique sound of its own.

Some pedals allow some individual tweaking of each modulator, but most typically allow the user to adjust the speed of the Univibe effect. The chorus effect sounds like a lush underwater soundscape that is created by doubling your guitar signal and slightly shifting the second one out of time and pitch with the original. The sound can be described as a warbling in phase and pitch. Similar to how the chorus effect works, the signal is doubled and the second signal is slowed down and sped back up, so it lags behind and catches up with the original signal.