Which effects pedal should i buy

Taking inspiration from products like the Tech 21 Fly Rig, the Red Truck is a compact, condensed multi-effects unit with five of the most commonly used effects included. For what seems like forever, guitarists have been arguing over whether multi-effects pedals are better or worse than their individual brethren. There are convincing arguments for each camp, but there are some factors you should definitely consider before buying one of the best multi-effects pedals.

For one, with a multi-effects all of your pedals and other effects are in one place and one unit, making gigging a lot easier. The tone you can create with one Helix or Kemper will likely sound much cleaner and more precise too, with less potential for background noise and hum.

One big plus-side for multi-effects and amp modeling is that you can just go straight out to the PA system when gigging, removing the need for a speaker cab on-stage, and saving you a considerable amount of backache. As long as your sound guy doesn't hate you, you should have no problems getting the exact tone you want out into the room, for all to enjoy. Have a think about whether your multi-effects unit is going to make up part of your pedalboard, or replace it completely.

GP logo Created with Sketch. Included in this guide: 1. Line 6 HX Stomp. Amp models: 41 guitar, 7 bass. Type: Multi-effects. Effects: types. Reasons to avoid - Perhaps a little too simplistic.

Mooer GE Effects: Amp models: Reasons to avoid - Mooer aren't a big brand, so this one might depreciate in value quickly. Line 6 Helix. Reasons to avoid - Not as straightforward as some. Here you see multiple references to a horse, a centaur, something arcane lost to annals of time. You get a sense that this is the tip of the iceberg. You look on Reverb. It sounds the same.

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Essential Guides. Jargonbuster: Overdrive — how to understand your overdrive pedal. Buyer's Guides. The best guitar pedals to buy in 10 best pedals for praise and worship music. All Advanced Beginner Intermediate. Learn to play guitar like David Gilmour in five minutes. Chord Clinic: Learn to play 10 interesting E major chord variations. Learn to play guitar like Chuck Berry in five minutes.

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Sorry to do this, but our first recommendation has to be a boring one — get a guitar tuner. We didn't get a tuner until our bandmates started complaining. So, assuming you, like us, want to go for cool sounds first, then our two recommendations are simple. The first step is to get a drive or distortion. If we could have our time again, we'd probably go for a Big Muff or a ProCo RAT as we've always played in heavier bands, aiming for the guitar sounds of grunge bands like Smashing Pumpkins or progressive metal groups like Tool or Porcupine Tree.

If we were in a more low-gain, indie or blues group, we'd go for the Tube Screamer, though it's worth saying that the RAT works really well at lower gain settings too, especially if you have a good amp. Second, you'll want a delay. We tend to think that the versatility of a digital delay is better for a beginner as it gives you more options while you're finding your feet and your sound.

Then again, perhaps you're somebody who thrives when dealing with creative constraints, in which case maybe the straightforwardness of an analogue delay would be right up your street. Broadly speaking, there are four main types of effects to focus on, although there's a lot of subtypes that you can delve into as your tastes and needs develop. FUZZ Generated by pushing transistors into clipping, this abrasive type of signal mangling defined the tones of early rock and psychedelia, becoming synonymous with players like Jimi Hendrix.

Over time, more refined pedals came out, like the Big Muff, a pedal that promised smooth, 'violin-like' sustain that was a far cry from the less-controlled sound of pedals like the Superfuzz, Fuzz Face and Tonebender. Ironically for a fuzz, the Big Muff has more in common with most overdrives than fuzzes in terms of its circuit. To some degree, this was achieved, but something else incredibly useful happened — by boosting the guitar signal so that it drove a tube amp into distortion earlier, as well as making the signal more mid-forward, the Tube Screamer also made tube amps sound better too.

Where overdrives like the Tube Screamer or Boss Blues Driver employed 'soft clipping' diodes to clip the guitar signal, distortion pedals tend to employ 'hard clipping' after their amplification circuits, which chops up guitar signals into something that much more closely resembles a square wave.

At its core, delay is echo, and the first units in this area did just that, using tape loops. Pedals using bucket-brigade compact chips followed, and then eventually a jump to digital chips occurred. The thing is, many other types of effects were created by time-based manipulation of signals; flanging was achieved in the early days by running two tape machines and slowing one down; chorus was the same concept but with alternating speed.

The more that engineers experimented, the more effect types they created. Digital delays were the real game changer, as they simply recorded and looped a buffer of audio — this in turn led to not only the guitar looper pedal , but also the pitch shifter. Today even the wildest, most out-there delay, glitch and looping pedals, from the Red Panda Particle to the Montreal Assembly Count to Five can trace their origins back to being able to digitally record and replay a buffer of audio.

From these categories you get distortion, delay, modulation and pitch shifting; what remains are mainly utility pedals - EQs, line switchers, noise gates and tuners. For shaping your tone, you're likely to always be relying on some combination of distortion, modulation or delay and amp tone to zero in on the sound that's in your head.

Memorably described to us by one guitarist as a 'hoover', the Big Muff has been modded, cloned, reissued, rebuilt, and redesigned more than almost any other pedal in existence. With a distinctive 'scoop' in the guitar mids, the Muff can mean that you get lost in a band mix — it's like the anti-Tube Screamer in terms of EQ profile — but when it works, there's little else that has the same visceral impact.

Very broadly speaking, there's about five main versions — although, in total there are over thirty versions by our count, with passionate fans of each - and it's on these that the current crop of EHX Big Muffs are based. The original overdrive pedal, the Tube Screamer and its descendants still represent a significant percentage of the worldwide pedal market just on their own.