How to Stack Guitar Pedals

on today's episode I'm going to show you seven of my favorite petal stacking combinations [Music] I got a new pedal in from a friend and it is the Golden Fleece by Mythos pedals I first heard of these from my friend Sean Brock who I did an episode with some of you guys have probably seen that he's a chef in Nashville we go to his house and look at all of his gear and talk about food and guitar it's great if you haven't seen it go check it out but he had one of these on the board and I played it and I fell in love with it so I met Zach of Mythos at Winter NAMM and he sent me this and I'm really excited to try it out and try it in live settings and actually get to know it him and his wife Morgan build everything in Nashville just a great company I want you to go their website and check it out I think you won't regret grabbing anything that he makes there are endless ways to stack guitar pedals literally you could spend the rest of your life trying combinations that's part of the fun of it what I'm gonna show you today is what I personally have done for a long time so these aren't hard fast rules these are just things that I stumbled into things that I was inspired to do my artists that I love and that's what I'm sharing so a lot of you guys will have some other techniques and other methods drop those in the comments below but right now let's get started the first and most important stacking method that I use and have always used is taking a light gain overdrive like The Morning Glory the reason I use this is because I like not having my first stage overdrive have any mid peak in it so this is considered transparent meaning bass mid and treble are even across the board and I set this pedal to a light breakup and I really never turn it off pretty much so it's always on light breakup and it's just stage 1 overdrive so that's number one some good alternatives to a Morning Glory which is a Bluesbreakers style circuit would be something like Paul Cochran's Timmy and the RC booster by exotic these are great transparent pedals that don't color your sound now here's the trick you take that first stage that's clean transparent no mids and add something with a ton of mids some people use a tube screamer now this is obvious because companies like me made a double barrel that has the Morning Glory and a tube screamer you have all kinds of people doing that kind of thing nowadays so you can use a tube screamer but I personally use a claude centaur now I don't use this one because I don't want it to get stolen so what's on my board right now is a KTR there are some other options that are affordable and awesome the Tumnus by wampler we also have the archer buy rocket pedals and mojo han makes a pedal called the sacred cow all of these are great versions of this and for what I'm using it for you can't tell a difference the reason this is cool and the reason you should try it is turn the drive knob up everyone gets a clone because it's mystical and hard to get and they use it as a boost induced I don't understand that I hate it as a clean boost so I cranked the drive knob up to 75% I put the treble the tone control at noon and then I adjust the volume accordingly and I have a beautiful first stage breakup that's transparent and then I can stack this on it and get a heavy mid-range boosted overdrive that's rich it's thick it works great on any pickup neck bridge or middle and I can't say enough about it if you have this set up try it and also get a klahn and try it as a heavy overdrive not enough people do it and I think you'll be really surprised [Music] [Music] you [Music] next up is to take to boost pedals doesn't matter what they are and combine them it's a type of DIY overdrive what a lot of you guys might not realize is that some overdrive circuits are simply gain stages cascading into each other and in a sense this will do the same thing but you get infinite tweak ability because you could try this boost here this one there there's so many in this room I could have taken one of any 40 boosts and put it somewhere in this 2 pedal set up and change the entire overdrive sound for this setup we're gonna use the zvex super hard on and the Earthquaker arrows now this is gonna be first and this knob when they're both on will act like an overdrive knob or a distortion knob because if this one's on that knob is gonna become a master volume you'll see what I mean when I hook it up and if you try this you'll be really really surprised it's fantastic and infinitely tweakable and great for people who like different style of overdrive sounds and you really want to try something outside the box of tube screamers so this is cool some people make too in ones like this zvex actually has two of this in one case for this reason and I even made a pedal it's called the Kirkland Signature boost John Mayer's had it on his board I get asked about it a bunch and it's essentially this setup in one case really fun really cool and I think a lot of you guys would love this [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] next up is a fun one it's where you take to delay pedals you sync them together and you let one run quarter notes and the one after it run dotted eighth notes now this is big you know guys like the edge of you to have done stuff like this for years I prefer an analog delay as the quarter note up front and then I like a nice digital delay after that I'm gonna use the walrus r87 Panther cub obviously so they're gonna combine and you're gonna hear the quarter note hit the dotted eighth and it's gonna do this dadada dadada like a rhythmic punch into each other it's really really fantastic and these boats have tap tempo I feel like that's necessary because I can chain these together this has an external tap jack this does as well so you're gonna see me play this and I'm they're gonna be syncopated so when I tap the tempo on one both of them sync up so quarter notes into dotted eights really really awesome [Music] [Music] this next one has been around for a while much longer than people were ever stacking pedals it kind of started through guitar amplifiers so with an example of a blackface 65 Princeton you see a reverb and tremolo now what's particularly interesting is that in an amplifier like this the tremolo is after the reverb but you have people even me telling you to put your tremolo after your drives and before your delays and reverbs that is a rule but I like to break that rule and I typically break that rule every time I can buy and trim and reverb so just like this and the reverb is before the trim that's what you need to try now what I like to do is take a big huge ambient reverb and for this example I'm going to use the old blood noise darkstar it does some crazy stuff but I'm gonna just set it as a big ambient wash and then I'm gonna take a kodiak tremolo and I'm just gonna let it pulse and trim the decay of the reverb and the clean signal it's really beautiful it's awesome for clean tones and it's something that you absolutely have to try trim and reverb they're like peanut butter and jelly [Music] [Music] fuzz stacked into an overdrive pedal now this one is really cool and in some cases it's almost necessary specifically what I want to go over is the sound of a big muff and putting that into a tube screamer so now this is a white out by written cuff it's a really cool version of a weird big muff that existed back in the day so the thing with the big muff is that it doesn't have any mid frequency peak at all it kind of has a scoop and a lot of people complain that you know I turned my big muff on we're in a band setting and I disappear out of the mix because mids are super important to be in that mix and make you stand out so to fix that problem you need to add a tube screamer so big muff into a tube screamer this is the jam tube dreamer really great version of a screamer any of them will work so fix this up so you get a lot of the mids turn the drive down low you don't need any more distortion this has plenty turn the volume up turn the treble up so the mids come up a little bit with the treble and when you stack them this suddenly Peaks its head out it's rich it's thick it's all the things you love about the big muff but it's just stronger and better it's a really good combo [Music] [Music] as a lot of you guys have figured out I'm a big fan of ambient clean guitar tones so this is one of those tricks that I used to achieve that all the time I take a delay I need to lay a work this is a diamond memory lane jr. and I set it to a faint but almost strong hard to explain you'll hear it in the example quarter note echo so I hit a note and it bounces back slowly a little bit of a longer delay time required in this so you want to kind of tap in the tempo 1 2 3 like that so you have this repeat falling with the rhythm of how you're playing and then add a modulated reverb now the rv5 is really really great it's on so many albums and so many great players still use this now when you combine those the quarter note delay into the modulated reverb I think it's one of the best sounds out there you got to keep the modulation and the effect level of this kind of low you don't want to get all crazy and wash it out but if you do it in a faint way it's really really special and I think a lot of you guys would like it there's a few pedals that I'll do that right off the bat for you the caverns by Robert Keeley has a modulated verb setting in a delay also the quiet Theory Prelude is a great pedal has both in there you can get the modulated verb going and the dispatch master doesn't say it has modulated verb but I swear it's there and it's a really simple pedal to use you could kind of have it on your board and just have a setting that you use I've often used this for big ambient slide parts with overdrive and just I have a knob setting that works great so you might want to check those out as well [Music] [Music] [Music] the last combination maybe the best because it's the loudest it's the most rambunctious it's the one that'll really frustrate your neighbors and make everyone in your house kind of hate you but that's why we play guitar you know to be heard and I think this is gonna help you be heard you ready I'm ready here it is take an octave pedal like the micro pog there's some other good options the OT 10 octave AB and as you've seen me use this in a video I like The OC to buy boss I actually like octaves that are a little more glitchy they don't track as well just one tracks pretty well but feel free to use one that's technically bad it might sound really good so you take it and you put it before a fuzz a big fuzz pedal this one's physically big this is the death by audio fuzz war and it sounds as big as the cases I mean the case is bigger than my head look at that I'm eclipsed by fuzz look at that anyway octave into the fuzz I set the octave up with about 50% dry signal if you have that option a lot of subs so like 75% sub octave and a little bit of high octave which kind of replicates the OT tin setting a whammy works well for this as well if you want to it's super glitchy and really fun and mxr makes this sub machine which you can kind of do the same thing with really fun and there's also the mxr blue box so anyway you ready here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] before I completely wrap up I want to show you a few more options for pedals that have some of these multiple effects already in them kind of a two-in-one thing so for the verb and trim the Flint is really great it's honestly like a modern staple this is on like so many boards for a reason has a lot of good verbs big and ambient or spring and you can add in the trim so check that out now on the delay thing you saw me sink two delays but there are a lot of pedals out there that have that built in things like the DD 500 from boss you're gonna see settings in there where you can have dual delays the Eventide h9 this is actually a pedal that's on my personal board I use it as a catch-all for a lot of different effects but it has settings and algorithms in it that let you kind of stack multiple delays really useful and then of course any of the new fancy line6 stuff like HX effects this has gobs of delay options and definitely you're gonna find that in there so you may already own something that does all this don't feel the need to run out and buy something just be sure that if you're using a multi effect delay or reverb that it doesn't already have that overdrive pedals just some really good options I brought this up this is great you know the morning glory in the screamer this is a double barrel the brown amplification protein has a Bluesbreakers style circuit similar to the morning glory into a noble's style circuit which is a type of screamer claun it's in that land so it's a really good option the Pearl by this one's mine this pedal is really cool you can find them if you look you know they're on reverb and stuff or you can get a hold of him this has the ability to do that the old classic Jekyll and Hyde it has some of those stacking possibilities you can make the screamer side of this you know a cleaner and get kind of a transparent sound and then this side definitely has heavy mids and another really affordable pedal that people just look over is the full tone gt500 you can buy these maybe for like fifty to seventy-five dollars I believe it's a great two-in-one and like my double barrel or some of these others you have an order toggle so you can choose which side comes first so check those out and most of all just get your pedal board and start stacking stuff have fun change the order try some things out and I'm positive you'll find something creative that you never found before today's record time is brought to you by Pete Yorn's back and forth this is produced by Rick Rubin that came out in 2009 and it's absolutely in my top 50 albums ever I love Pete yarn as a writer I love his lyrics I love how he blends acoustic and electric guitar parts so well it's just a great record and I can't recommend it enough and I want to challenge you to go listen to social development dance and tell me you don't like it I dare you it's just a good song you have to like it so what I want you to do in those comments is tell me about a record that's around ten years old a decade old that you loved and you still love and go listen to this if you haven't and let me know what you think about it thanks for watching this episode I would love for you in the comments below to tell me what your favorite stacking combinations are I want to hear them all I want to hear how you first use them who told you about them and why you do them if you liked this episode hit like subscribe to the channel and also there's a bell icon click that and you'll get notifications of all future episodes until next time have a great day

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 1,016,342

Rating: 4.9389524 out of 5

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, Guitar, Guitar Pedals, Electric Guitar, Guitar Effects, Guitar Player, Guitar Playing, Pedal Demo, Guitar Demo, New Pedals, New Guitar Pedals, Josh Scott, Guitar Gear, Music Gear, Guitar Tones, Pedal Tones, Good Guitar Tone, Best Guitar Tone, Best Electric Guitar Tone, Analog Guitar Tone, Guitar Sounds, JHS Guitar Pedals, JHS VLOG, JHS Videos, Stacking Pedals, How to stack pedals, Setting up pedal board, Stacking Effects, Pedal order, effects order

Id: prcFwllEzl4

Length: 21min 3sec (1263 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 14 2019