Understanding Pedal Order

hi I'm Mitch Gallagher welcome to Sweetwater's guitars and gear you know one of the questions I'm asked the most often is what order to place pedals on in a pedal board should the wah go first should the compressor be before or after the distortion where should the volume pedal go these types of questions make a big difference in the results you get with your pedal board so I'm joined today in the studio by Don car and we're gonna be taking a look and what it sounds like when we place our pedals in different order and we're gonna end up with a working pedal board when we're finished let's get started Don I know you've built a lot of pedal boards in your career and of course I put together tons of them it seems like I'm changing just about every week oh I know man new stuff coming out all the time you always want to try something different you get an idea you know right just never know what's gonna happen alright exactly right but there is kind of a conventional wisdom to how you place your pedals in the order sure and you know typically I tend to follow something that's close to that conventional wisdom which is like you know just a rattle off top of my head let's say wah compressor gain pedals volume pedal modulation pedals and then time-based stuff right and that's kind of the typical order but you know you've got tons of flexibility and there are so many different options obviously even with a fairly simple pedal board like we have here we could I don't know how many possible routings there are with all these pedals yeah right right I want to do the math I don't know about you nobody said there was gonna be math yeah no math involved today now so what we have here is a pedal board that's very similar to one that I might take out to a gig I've got a wah pedal I've got a tuner and overdrive a delay compressor phase shifter which might be a chorus there might be a flanger depending on the gig I've also got a reverb and I've got a volume pedal now there are lots of ways we can wire this up before we start let's take a look at the default setup we have here as far as our wiring in our signal flow we're coming out of Don's guitar which is the Yamaha Rev star 620 into an electro harmonix wah from there we're feeding in to a Wampler mini ego compressor from the compressor we're going into the Catelyn bread dirty little secret overdrive coming out of the DLS into an mxr phase 95 which is a phase shifter and again that could be any modulation pedal it could be chorus flanger or rotary speaker or whatever you might have from there we're going into our volume pedal now the signal actually splits on the volume pedal we've got an output here that's feeding directly into our tuner so when we pull back on the volume peddle we're still feeding into the tuner and we have silent tuning onstage from the volume pedal we're going into our delay to our reverb and then back to our amplifier which is a Rovira modded Fender 68 deluxe down this pedal were to set up basically following that conventional wisdom that you were talking about although we had the volume pedal in a little different place than you I mentioned we've got it after the modulation instead of before and we'll look at what effect that has a little bit later but I think the most critical item to place in our signal flow is actually our overdrive or our gain pedals absolutely because the way gain affects the sound of other effects is just ridiculous I mean that's the most obvious thing right all that extra harmonic content really changes the way a wah pedal a phase shifter even a delay and certainly a compressor respond oh yeah I'm reverb too for sure now let's look at some examples of what it sounds like when we change the order of these pedals we'll begin with our wah and our overdrive in this case I've got the wah pedal in front of our overdrive so down give us our clean signal so we have a neutral clean tone there now let's listen to what happens when we run the wah pedal before and after the overdrive we'll begin with the wah pedal in front [Music] [Music] the next question is where to place your compressor in your signal path the bow and the compressor of course is designed to increase your sustain but also clamps down on those transients and really smooth the sound out it's used a lot for chicken pickin and those kind of things for clean tones but it makes a big difference with distortion as well yeah it absolutely does I mean you can feed your distortion pedal with your compressor bump to gain up a little bit smooth out the attack I mean it completely changes it and again putting it on the other side of the overdrive pedal is completely different thing on the other side of the overdrive pedal is gonna be squashing that distorted tone it's kind of recompressing because the distortion is natural compression in it as well the fact that it's actually a square waving the signal right and it's taking that harmonic content and actually kind of condensing it listen to what that sounds like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] down the thing to remember with a compressor pedal is not only is it squashing the peaks but it's also changing the shape of that tail of the note to increase the sustain exactly if you've got your compressor pedal after like you say your delay or anything that has a tail on it reverb it's gonna increase that peak and completely change the sound of it even with modulation bells it's gonna tend to squash those Peaks and make the sound more uniform more smooth mm-hmm which is also gonna have the effect of bringing up the tail right next up let's take a look at modulation pedals and overdrive I've got an mxr phase 95 a phase shifter here and of course we have our DLS will listen to the phase shifter by itself then the deal asked by itself the phase shifter in front of the DLS and the phase shifter after the DLLs [Music] [Applause] to me that's a lot like what we heard with the wah pedal sure it's the exact same thing where you've got more intensity with the effect after the distortion right all that extra content from the distortion all those harmonics are being processed by the phase shifter it gives you a much more intense effect now let's look at our overdrive or our gain pedal in relation to time-based effects which would include things like delay and reverb where you place your gain pedal in relation to those two types of effects it's critical in the sound that you get and this also carries over when you're plugging into an amplifier if you're plugging into a distorted channel obviously your time-based effects are gonna be in front of that distortion and we'll simulate that by moving our gain pedal after our delay effect so let's check out what this sounds like [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] it really makes a difference where the delay is in relation to the overdrive pedal sure does again that extra harmonic content really changes things well that and the fact that the overdrive is actually increasing the gain of signals that are coming in so instead of tailing away the way you'd expect the delay to the overdrive is actually pushing those up so we get a much messier sound because the delay repeats are coming out at close to the same level if the original signal did right you've also got the fact that the delay sounds are being filtered by that as well right the same type of thing is going to happen if you place your distortion after a reverb because that reverb tail a set of decaying naturally is going to be boosted by the gain and it's going to end up being much more of a steady-state so you have a long tail that just drops off instead of a slow steady decline now let's talk about placement of your volume pedal in the chain there's several different places where you can put the volume pedal aren't there done all right you can put it in the front of the chain and put it in the middle of the chain or at the very end and it makes a big difference on how the rest of your pedals react where you have that volume pedal placed so let's take a look at the first example of this which is placing the volume pedal before and after our gain pedals when the volume pedal is before the gain pedal it's going to function basically like the volume knob on your guitar it's gonna change the amount of signal that's feeding into your gain pedal when the volume pedal is after the game pedal it's gonna serve as a master volume for that gain pedal so you can still affect the amount of overdrive by turning your guitar volume knob up and down but you can change the overall volume that's coming from that game pedal using the volume pedal let's listen to those two examples [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so what we're hearing there is with the volume pedal in front of the overdrive it's basically controlling the amount of distortion or gain that's coming from the pedal that's right it's totally dynamic that way you can use it to you know increase your sustain or back off of it or you know just play dynamically and with the volume pedal after the overdrive it's really serving as a volume control for that overdrive yeah that's the way I like to use it after the distortion pedal I like to use it as a master volume because I can always use my volume knob on my guitar to control the dynamic range so you kind of have the best of both worlds at that point it's also important where you place your volume pedal in relation to your delay your eevr your other time-based effects and where do you like to put it I like to put it beforehand that way you can get the tails of the delay and the verb when you back off the volume pedal and you can swell in and out of stuff so we mentioned there were three places in the signal path where you could put your volume pedal at the front which we showed in front of the overdrive pedal where it controls the amount of distortion after the overdrive pedal gives us a master volume from that overdrive pedal but it also affects what's feeding into our time-based effects so we can turn the amount of signal up that's feeding into our delay and reverb or turn it down while still allowing the reverb and delay tails to ring out [Music] so this is our third position for the volume pedal at the very end of the signal path yeah as a master volume and overall master volume to control the sound that's going directly into your amp right in this case we're able to actually turn down the tails on our reverb and our delay because it's the last thing before we hit the amplifier sure and you can also shut it completely off like if you just need a hard stop okay yeah I see what you did there a hard stop but that's exactly right yeah I've got a master volume controller that it can also serve as a mute and again no matter where we have this place because we're using the tuner output from the volume pedal we can still access our tuner yeah I love having that feature as well because at any given time if you notice one string is out of tune you can just duck out really quick tune up and there you're getting back in action today we've looked at the basics of signal flow on a pedal board what happens when you change the order of particular pedals and in my mind the two critical ones are the overdrive and the volume pedal yeah absolutely agree with that those are the two that make the biggest single change right where you place those in relation to your modulation your filter effects your compressor your delay your reverb your time-based effects really has a big impact with those two pedals in particular but of course we haven't looked at all the possibilities there are endless permutations to how you would wire up even a fairly simple board like this just to give you one example let's say we took our phase shifter and put it after our reverb yeah in one case you've got filtering reverb and in the other case you've got filtered reverb right right it makes a big difference that does so you can experiment with those different types of Plaisance and get creative with the order that you put your pedals in on your board and how you wire them up you're not gonna hurt anything nothing's gonna blow up by changing the order of your different pedals exactly I mean there's no wrong answer here it's just whatever kind of result you want to get done thanks for helping me out showing the effects of changing our pedal order on the board really makes a big difference how you wire things up yeah really does a lot of fun Mitch thanks man you bet and thank you for joining me for Sweetwater's guitars in gear be sure to tune in next time we'll have more guitars more apps more effects we'll be making lots of music I'm Mitch Gallagher [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Sweetwater

Views: 402,810

Keywords: pedalboard order, pedal order on pedalboard, how to set up a pedalboard, pedal chain order, guitar pedal board, how to set up guitar pedals, setting up a pedalboard, pedals and effects, pedal board setup, how to build a pedalboard, pedal order, pedal board, compressor pedal, how to set up pedal board, bass pedalboard, bass pedalboard setup, guitar pedal setup, guitar pedals explained, guitar pedal board setup, guitar pedal order, pedalboard setup, pedalboard, guitar pedals

Id: _Xl19g3zK8g

Length: 12min 24sec (744 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2017