Effects Pedal Order Explained

hi i'm mason maringella from vertex effects aka the rig doctor and today we're talking about signal path the do's and don'ts where to put things how to optimize the placement of your pedals for the best possible tone let's get into it [Music] today when we're discussing signal path we're going to be speaking about the major food groups that's distortion overdrive modulation delay and time-based effects like delay and reverb eq volume pedals wah pedals fuzz pedals and other impedance sensitive devices buffers and all those good things in talking about where they might live in the signal path now some of these are going to be somewhat hard and fast rules about where they belong in the signal path and there's going to be others that might be modular can live sometimes before overdrive sometimes after overdrive and in different positions depending on the sound that you're going for the recommendations i'm going to make today are more of the classical recommendations of course there are no rules in terms of creating your own sound so if there is things that you want to do that are not within the framework that i outlined today for signal path this is not something that you need to stick to ultimately you can abstract this however you want to make the most sense for the tone that you're going for but for all intents and purposes of the video today i'm really going to outline the classical locations that you would put some of these major food groups and how you would sequence them appropriately for the best possible result to get a lot of the sounds that we know and love that we've heard on hundreds of classic guitar recordings over the years so let's get into these food groups these type of pedals and let's get into the signal path so the first food group i really want to talk about is signal conditioning in buffering as i always say you need to have a high quality buffer first in your chain and last in your chain the intent here is that the input buffer is controlling the pickup loading of your guitar pickups making them think as though they're plugged into the amplifier directly providing that one meg input impedance and then converting it to a low output impedance on the output of that buffer preferably somewhere around 100 ohms equally at the very end of the pedal board on the output of it you want to have an output buffer this again would have a 1 meg input and 100 ohm output and this is to ensure that no matter what pedals are on on the pedal board that they're always going to have a high quality buffer to drive that line back to the amplifier without any sonic consequence so again buffer is incredibly important to have first and also last when we're talking about signal conditioning now this is where i wanted to get into the first real primary food group of petals which are what i'm going to call the impedance sensitive devices these are things that don't like buffers and actually need to go before buffers in the signal chain these are things like vintage fuzzes vintage wah pedals treble boosters anything that incorporates a germanium transistor or a silicon transistor is typically going to be very sensitive to any sort of buffering and these devices are going to need to be before any sort of buffering in the signal path so if we're imagining our fictitious signal path here i'd have my guitar first my guitar would then go into any of the impedance sensitive devices wah pedals fuzz pedals treble boosters and then it would hit the input buffer the thing that's going to condition my line is going to be the first thing in the signal path now generally these sort of impedance sensitive devices are all true bypass so they're not really going to do too much in terms of taking away from the tone maybe it's just the equivalent of adding a little bit more guitar cable between the guitar and the input buffer and usually these don't have much sonic consequence on the overall tone but that is the group of impedance sensitive devices that we should all be aware of as a food group that we need to have existing before buffers in our signal path so what comes next generally i like to put then dynamic type pedals next in the signal path so if we're looking again at our fictitious signal path we have our impedance sensitive devices first then we go into our input buffer and then we're going to go into our dynamic type pedals now what do i mean by dynamic type pedals well i mean things that rely or adjust the dynamics of the guitar tone these could be things like compressors these could be things like filters envelope filters these could be octave based pedals these are typically things i like to put early in the guitar chain but aren't necessarily going to be sensitive to buffers so a lot of times we like to have these types of devices close to the guitar because they depend on the dynamic of the guitar in order to trigger whatever it is that they're doing in an envelope filter it's triggering the envelope in an octave style pedal it might be triggering the octave and we want to be able to have these effects early on in the chain so that they're the most reactive with what's happening with the guitar in our right hand so ordinarily things like compressors i would put there things like a pog from electro harmonix i might put there something like an octave from boss like an oc2 or an oc-3 or one of their newer versions that i would put there these are all great examples of petals that you really want to have early on in the chain synth style petals equally you want to put those early in the chain and the oc dividers earlier in the chain those are all things that i kind of categorize into this group and i would say need to come as close to the guitar as possible but after the input buffer going back to our fictitious signal path we have our impedance sensitive devices we have our buffers we have our dynamic type pedals then after that we're going to go into our distortion devices and in distortion it's sort of a broad category this can be overdrive devices this can be distortion devices and really they mean the same thing and we've just sort of created these two different categories for them in our industry and it's usually just differentiating between a soft clipping type device and a hard clipping type device but for the purposes of this i'm going to sort of lump them into one now ordinarily the way i like to think about ordering overdrives which is where a lot of us tend to ask questions about order order in this case doesn't really matter if you're not going to be stacking your devices if you're not using multiple overdrives on at one time i generally don't get too concerned about where they're going to go because they're not going to affect each other if they're not bouffant at the same time but if you are going to stack i think the best consideration is to put the highest gain pedals closer to the guitar the reason why i say that is if you're going to stack a high gain pedal with a low gain pedal and you're using a higher gain pedal after it the lower gain pedal is just going to be saturating the high gain pedal more and if it's already high gain you probably don't need a lot more clipping in order to get the most out of that pedal and generally i find when you put more gain into the front of a high gain pedal it just saturates it in a way that's not really that pleasant anyway takes away a lot of its dynamics and really just muddies things up whereas if you take a lower gain pedal and put it after a high gain pedal and you're using them together it can help add more volume add more dynamics and enhance the eq a little bit more because you're not clipping the high gain pedal so hard that it just became becomes kind of obliterated and the circuit doesn't really work that well so generally my thinking is higher gain overdrives and distortion pedals go closer to the guitar in my overdrive chain and then i move slowly toward less overdriven pedals as i go through my sequence of my dirt pedals in my signal path after the overdrive i usually like to put boost in eq in this particular place i use boost to increase the volume level so that means that whatever is going to go on on the signal path is just going to be raised so after overdrives i put the boost to increase the volume of whatever it is that i have going on the pedal board so that i have a sound set up i like how that sounds and i'm just going to increase the output of that either for a solo or to add a little bit more of a dynamic shift in what it is that i have going on equally an eq can be a really important tool to put in this place as well if i were going to use a boost and an eq together i would put the eq before the boost because i would just want the boost to add volume i wouldn't want to be clipping or adding more output into the input of the graphic equalizer i would just want to take whatever i've set up the eq that i have and then add volume after that now an eq can be really handy because if you have a combination of overdrives and you really want to get surgical about where that fits in the mix you can use that graphic eq to really help meld those perfectly in with the other instruments that you're accompanied with or if you're trying to get something to fit really well in a recording and you just want to bump up a little bit more of the mid-range or you want to scoop it out a little bit you have that ability to do that and you're doing it after all the distortion devices sort of the same way that you might eq and amp in post after it's produced the distortion it's kind of creating a similar sequence and the signal path is that where the overdrive devices are in a way representing the amplifiers and then you're putting in an eq after that so that was where i would put boost in eq now i want to move in to volume pedals there is two different places you can use volume pedals ordinarily people like to use volume pedals either first to kind of take over what the guitar volume would do or they might use it after any of their overdrive and distortion and boost type effects now the first way using it in front of everything is basically again just mimicking what the guitar does itself the volume pot that you would find on any ordinary instrument that's not only going to decrease the volume but it's also going to clean up the sound the same way when you roll down your volume when you have a higher gain distortion pedal on and it's just going to clean up that sound now if you use it after the distortion devices or any of your overdrives it's going to act as a master volume so it's just going to attenuate the output it's not going to change any of the essence of the distortion or the amount of saturation i tend to like it after any overdrives because i can do the first style volume where i use not only the volume attenuation but the cleanup i can do that with my guitar and so to me it seems redundant to put it up front before any of my devices i like to put it after the overdrive and the boost in eq so that i'm able to just use it as a master volume i can get my burn tones and just lower or raise the volume and not affect anything that's going on before it but again you could use those in either location after that i like to go into modulation so these are things like chorus tremolo univibe vibrato this could even be things like phaser or flanger although those can also be devices that could go before distortion we'll talk about that in a moment so let's just do a quick refresher in our signal path so far so what we have we have our impedance sensitive devices first these are the fuzzes the treble boosters the vintage walls we go into our input buffer then we go into our dynamic devices the octaves the the compressors things of that nature envelope filters that then goes into our overdrive and distortion devices then our overdrive and distortion devices feed our boost our eq and then that feeds our volume pedals and then that feeds our modulation devices now with modulation some of them you might prefer after distortion and others you might prefer before distortion typically i like to put things like univibe phasers and flangers before any sort of distortion i just prefer that sound but some people like to use those things after distortion and they're okay with the clipping associated with having your overdrive pedals hitting those devices i tend to think that uni vibes sound a little bit better before you get into any of your overdriven type sounds i also tend to think that phasers do better there and flangers do better there they just sound a little more natural a little bit more the way that i recognize them from a lot of classic recordings whether that's andy summers with the police using a flanger or eddie van halen using a phaser in front of a dirty marshall amp i just tend to think that those sound more like the way that i'm used to hearing them when i use them in that context but you could use those in either place and there's really no right or wrong way to put those in terms of your signal path i also again the modulation will put things like tremolo i'll also put things like again chorus all those things do really really great after the overdrive section but there is a little bit of modularity that you could put with these where you might want to put them before or after overdrive that's a little bit more of a pedal device style that's a little bit more variable depending on your taste after modulation we then go into our time-based effects this is delay and reverb now typically most people like to have delay first and then reverb but i tend to actually like having reverb before delay because i want the delay trails to have whatever artifacts there are of the actual reverb in them instead of the other way around but a lot of people do like to put reverb after delay and that is a pretty traditional way to do it either way i think can be great but again there are no real hard and fast rules about the way that you would you know put your delay and reverb together i think more more often than not i'm probably in the minority in terms of the way that i would set them up i think both can really sound good but again this could come down to experimenting seeing which way you think works best and then going from there and then again at the very end of the chain we're going to have output buffer again as i mentioned the beginning when we're talking about signal conditioning you put that at the end to make sure that's driving that long line back to your amplifier and that you're not having any issues in terms of capacitance from the cable that's getting built up through the course of running through all these interconnections and the pedals and them getting turned on and off and all the different impedances that they might have the buffer makes it so that that sort of nullifies any of those real differences creates that impedance firewall isolating the guitar from the pedal board and the pedalboard from the amplifier so let's refresh basic signal path guitar comes in it's going to go to any of your impedance sensitive devices first if you have them some of us don't use fuzzes or vintage was or any sort of vintage octave or silicon or germanium based device if you have them you're going to put them first if you don't then you're going to go in to your input buffer from the input buffer we're going to go to our dynamic style pedals compressors envelope filters any type of filter really any sort of octave device like a oc 2 oc 3 the classic boss units any sort of envelope filters all that stuff is going to be there from there we're then going to go into our distortion devices i like to go from higher gain to lower gain in terms of the sequence but you can play around with that to see what you like best from there i then go into the eq section if i'm going to use one if i want to use a graphic eq and put a boost at the tail end to kind of cut off all of that stuff that's happening with the overdrive section the distortion section the eq section and giving that all a boost if i want to have that following the boost i would then use a volume pedal the volume pedal is going to adjust the overall master volume of the entire system and if you wanted to you could also put that first but by putting the volume pedal first as i mentioned it's going to be a redundancy with what's already on your guitar that's not something that i think is going to be advisable but some people do prefer in that location so it could be modular either or next we're going to go into our modulation devices this is chorus flanger phaser univibe vibrato these are all petals that typically would fall in this particular location as i mentioned some people do like to put their univibe before their distortion they like to put phaser before distortion they like to put flanger before distortion those are some devices that have some flexibility depending on where you want to put them and even in some of the multi-effects like the strymon mobius it has a pre-post option where you can wire in the mobius to be before or after your distortion devices for this exact reason because there are some preferences that people have depending on what the actual modulation device is and where it sits in relationship to your overdrives then after modulation we have our time-based effects delay and reverb i personally like putting reverb before delay but most people like to put delay and then reverb their time-based stuff is going to come last you're going to have all those beautiful trails and ambience that's created there and those are going to be running in front of your amplifier and at the very end of the signal path is going to hit another buffer and output buffer which is going to drive that line back to the amp and make sure that everything is making it from start to finish with absolute signal integrity and a high quality robust strong signal that's going to sound exactly the same hopefully as it would if the guitar was plugged directly into the amplifier with a normal 10 foot cable so that was my take on signal path again this is the very classical sort of understanding of where you might see an ordinary signal path this is sort of a beginner's outline of where you would want to put your particular devices this is also all assuming that everything's going in front of an amp if you were using a effects loop amp or you were using a wet dry wet system this would look a little bit different in terms of the sequencing and those are going to be something for another video that we can talk about but for all intents and purposes the video today is to really give you a clear understanding of where you would want to put things in the sequence that you'd want to put them in and if you have any questions you're welcome to ask us in the comments below and we would be happy to talk to you about your specific devices where they might need to sit in the signal path and in the description we're also going to have links for high quality buffers from other manufacturers in addition to the diy buffers that we've shown how to make that you can arrange to be a single unit that would create the input and the output buffer in one unit one enclosure it would allow that to signal condition the whole entire rig there's also again other ones from other manufacturers that are pre-made that you can just order from amazon or any of the common retailers that are out there so do check out those links in the description if you're curious about buffering or about any of the ways to interconnect the pedals in terms of cables zip ties tie down mounts we offer all these things on therigdr.com in terms of pedal board building resources and materials and if you're interested in checking out any of our pedals that represent several different of the pedals that we talked about in the signal path you're welcome to check those out at vertexfx.com and head over to our store or check them out with any of our retailers and you can check that out on our website again with all of our dealers listed there until next time i'm mason maringella from vertex fx aka the rig doctor and that was a little overview of signal path and where you might want to put your effects to be most effective in getting the tone that you hear in your head coming out through your amplifier see you later [Music] you

Channel: Vertex Effects

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Keywords: Mason Marangella, Vertex Effects, Rig Doctor, Pedalboard, Pedalboards, pedalboard signal path, pedal order, understanding pedal order, understanding signal path, guitar signal path, what order do I put my pedals in, DIY Pedalboard, building a pedalboard, pedalboard build, pedalboard tips, stacking guitar pedals, stacking overdrive pedals, how to set up a pedalboard, rig dr, the rig dr, routing pedals on your pedalboard, guitar signal path explained, Best pedal order

Id: 3lEZb9MZC1c

Length: 19min 16sec (1156 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021