Guitar Foot Pedals

When we as guitar players look to diversify our sounds there are several options to us. You can adjust the EQ of your amp and the tone settings on your guitar. Some may replace their pickups to get a varying sound and the list goes on. However there can be no doubting the fact that to get the most dramatic sound alteration would be to use guitar foot pedals. This is no big surprise to anyone guitar effects have been around for a very long time. We hear them daily in songs on the radio and on our ipods.

Ok so you want to get some foot pedals for you guitar arsenal and need to know what the best guitar pedals are. As always I will cop out a little and say this will depend heavily on you and the type of music you play. I will make some suggestions to guitar foot pedals I think we should all have. These are the basics of guitar effects in my mind. I will also give you brief descriptions of each.

Chorus

A chorus pedal creates almost a harmonic sound. This pedal will take the guitar signal and delay it and play a slightly detuned version of the original. Then play both the altered and original signal together. This is a great a effect to create a fuller sound and a shimmering quality.

Flanger

The flanger will take two signals and mix them. Both signals will have the same pitch with one of the two signals being delayed in adjustable increments. The sound has been compared to a plane engine or a sort of sweeping up type of sound.

Wah Wah

In my opinion no other guitar pedal has a better name. The name describes perfectly the sound that is created. The wah wah pedal sound is created by a low pass filter that is adjusted and cut off by the foot pedal being moved up and down. So you get the up and down sort of sound from the wah.

These are what I feel to be the basics of guitar foot pedals. I would add two other foot pedals before anything else if your amp lacks distortion and or reverb. If you do not have either of these effects on your amp then make these your first stop. One other thing I do want to mention is there is away to get all these effects without having to get them individually. The way to limit the amount of pedals is to look into getting a guitar effects pedal board. These boards have all the above effects and more. Most of them have amp sound replication and some have sound modeling based on certain musicians like Eric Clapton Jimmy Page and many others. These boards in my eyes have turned a sort of corner. When they first came out I felt the sound they offered was somewhat lifeless and stale or even thin in some cases. However in the past few years the manufactures have made huge steps in quality not to mention you can get some great effects board for under $100.00 digitech offers a nice set of pedals in a wide range of prices. Look into these you will be surprised how good they are.