Logical Order of Effects

[Music] hello guys going here building a pedal board can be a pretty daunting process if you don't know what order your pedals should be in some pedals sound better placed after others while placing the wrong pedal before distortion can cause all sorts of aural chaos fortunately there's a pretty simple logical system for ordering your pedals just imagine each effect as adding a new layer onto the sound think about your pedal and what it does to your signal and it makes sense to apply that a top or beneath your existing layers so let's go through the main types of effects and see where they should go utility utility pedals are things like your tuner wireless receivers or a buffer there are devices that don't necessarily affect the sound are so useful to have on the board largely these should come first especially a tuner you want your raw guitar signal hitting these for your fake tip in any other way cheaters commonly have a mute function when engaged so placing them first and your second chain means you can silence your entire rig which is remarkably useful in a live situation volume and wah if you're running volume and wah pedals you will probably want them here volume pedals work just like your guitars boiled control except controlled by your foot so placing the first and second chain before all the rest of your effects will give the most natural swells wise are a selectable frequency boost in d2 what better ahead of all your other effects while sound vastly different if you place them before or after distortion before distortion was so much more consistent and refined you're applying distortion on top of a moving EQ keeping everything fairly consistent well as after distortion are a lot more pronounced and wild you're boosting a narrow frequency band of that distorted sound and that can produce some unpredictable and sometimes painful results this one is largely considered to be a point of preference but based purely on the way the effects behave with each other while first makes more sense pitch shift pet shifting pedal should come as early as possible in your cycle chain and certainly before distortions a clean clear signal is vital for getting accuracy when it comes to pitch manipulation furthermore distortion pedals generally only target frequencies above a certain threshold low frequency sound really makes see when distorted saw any pet shifting that lowers the pitch should certainly come before the distortion to keep everything as tight as possible OverDrive's distortions if you are planning to use overdrive and distortion pedals you'll probably want to set them up right here now applies to boosts to most of the effects I'm going to come on and talk about behave much more appropriately if placed after distortion so say up all your gain know before you move on to anything else modulation modulation effects come next these includes phasers flangers chorus tremolo at all similar effects like was the what vastly different if placed before or after Distortion personally I prefer some phasers before the distortion and just get a little nicer sound that way but for pretty much everything else you get a much more controllable and predictable sound if you're placing the modulation atop the distorted signal time time effect should be last in your sight machine reverbs and delays and width and ambience taking the sound under them and making it seem like it's in a much bigger space they should certainly come after the starters I mean why would you want to distort your echoes you want to echo your distortion the same is true for modulation you want to add echoes to your lush swirls and not watch swirls to your echoes so which should come first a reverb or delay well this as a point of much debate and I seem to find myself on the list popular site placing my reverb before my delay my thought process on this is I usually use a room or Hall style of events which represent a fairly small space but I have long delays like it's echoing back across a chasm so I ordered my effects and increasing size of simulated space this works for my set up you can hear the rim reverb echoed back and the delay my repeats are also mixed pretty low so this is just add a bit of space and not to be ultra precise players use the delay in a more rhythmic fashion with shorter repeats or wanted to delay first and feed that into a bigger more ambient reverb to give a sense of away their space less results and a cleaner delay sound which is vital if you're wanting to use it rhythmic as part of your playing it's really the order of reverb and delay is down to personal preference and the style of music that you are playing really the one representing the smaller space should come first as long as a booth after all you're on offense you can't go wrong now there are a couple of important effects I haven't mentioned yet and that is because they can be placed in different locations depending on what you want to achieve these are EQ and noise gates EQ EQ panels are generally used as a corrective measure to cut out some troublesome frequencies or to boost up those lost by other effects and the chain as for that reason they can conceivably be placed anywhere to target specific problem areas placing first allows you to reshape the sound of guitars pickups ahead of any effects before distortion means you can select the frequencies you want the distortion to emphasize after distortion is really useful as a distortion creates harshness and certain frequencies you'd prefer it doesn't and you can even place an EQ array to the end of your signal chain should you want to reshape the whole thing but at that point you probably just done a better job of setting up your fix in the first place EQ is one of these effects we have to have a specific purpose to use it once you've pinpointed your area of trouble that's where you can place the EQ end to start to fix it noise gate noise gates are similar and that they appear active by nature and depending on what kind of noise you want effects will depend on where you want to place them in your signal chain having a noise gate first means that I'll cut low level noise from your guitar pickups before any of your effects for a chance to amplify it and that's great if you got high output pickups otherwise you might find that then that's placement it starts to eat into the sistine of your nose if you have a boost or overdrive pedal on your board then you may want to pick the noise gate after those boosting overdrive give extra juice and sustain to your notes and place in the noise gate afterwards means you can wring out those long notes without any fear of being prematurely cutoff gates after distortion or indeed end the effects lip aren't uncommon if all your wants to do is take out some of that preamp s whether it's a harsh clamp down this is generally only used in low distortion applications with guitars that have a little pickups there the thumb here is that the more gain you are using the earlier your noise gate should be and your signal chain oh oh so don't place any noise gates after reverb and delay not unless you want to cut off all your lovely reverb tails and echo repeats oh yeah and then there's fuzz fuzz is the massive pain in the arse when it comes to playing nice with other pedals when to steal fuzzies expect to see a high impedance signal like those coming directly from your guitar pickups and they start with a really strange and awkward things effect with a low impedance signal like the kind of cycle that comes out of any other effects pedal so fuzz throws out all of the rules and usually needs to be placed before literally everything else that said fuzzies can be pretty fussy and different types will have different preferences and just how nice they want to play with the other kids so experimentation is going to be key for finding out where the fuzz should sit and your arrangement but you're fading that it sounds rubbish or weird or unpredictable and try making it the very first thing your guitar connects to now that's about all the mean tapes are effects covered and Wildlife's represents the most logical way to set up your effects remember there are no rules to this and you can set them up however you like now you can't break anything by putting the panels in a different order - what I'm suggesting here but you will think that effects will respond differently strangely and sometimes even unpredictably if you start mixing them up no that could allow you to stumble upon this great new sound that really inspires you so please do consider experimenting with your pedal policeman and if you liked this video and you want to see more content from me you can hit the subscribe button Pete Jones also there for exclusive or secret stuff you want to support me and there's other videos you might know I've seen but anyway that's it for just now so keep a load and I'll see you later

Channel: Science of Loud

Views: 461,763

Keywords: csguitars, csg, cs, guitar, guitars, colin, pickups, amp, amplifier, valve, valves, pedal, blues, rock, metal, all, the, gain, logical, order, effects, setting up, pedalboard, how to, best pedal arrangement, which pedal comes first, first, last, before, after

Id: NXI0ewj1Oqw

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 30 2017