Guitar Effects guides & articles

We like to tell people that legendary sounds are born in expensive studios, with hundreds of pedals and racks that can't be found anywhere. As if the character of a sound depended mainly on the prest…

The quest for the perfect wah-wah pedal is not an easy one. The sound varies a lot from model to model and we don't all want to attack the same frequencies. Any reviews and advice is always very much…

The '80s revival that has taken hold of pop culture seems to not have an end. And, obviously, music hasn't escaped this phenomenon, to the benefit of one instrument: the synthesizer. A fact that make…

Fuzzzzz! This onomatopoeia used to describe the first distorted sounds of an amp is hardly a stranger to any guitar player. The fuzz is obviously a distortion effect, but it's a also a culture in its…

Although many hits have been marked by the Talk Box sound — take, for instance, California Love by 2Pac, Livin’ on a Prayer by Bon Jovi or Pigs by Pink Floyd — it still remains a little known effect.…

The long-awaited poll regarding "small" guitar effect pedal brands is finally here! It's open season for anybody who likes controversy!

Despite the explosion of the pedal market and the appearance of countless small manufacturers, the big names in the effects world continue to implacably dominate the business. Here's a list of the ma…

The overdrive pedal is one of the most timeless and classic effects for electric guitar, and finding the overdrive of your dreams can be a lifelong endeavor. They have become a true cult object and m…

One of the great things about pedalboards is that they give you the freedom to choose the effects you want for your rig. There is one caveat: Your pedalboard is a finite size, and you can only add ef…

The Pitch Fork is a powerful and clean-sounding pitch shifter with some smartly designed features. It can produce shifts of plus or minus 3 octaves, which can make for some pretty cool and unusual so…

With over 100 overdrive pedals listed on just one gear-shopping website, how does one choose the top five? The first order of business is to define the terms: An overdrive pedal should have enough vo…

Indispensable on the pedalboard of any guitarist — right next to the overdrive/distortion — the reverb pedal allows you to add some ambient or to modify the position of a sound in a mix. Naturally, i…

Unless you're one of those guitarists or bassists who flat-out refuses to consider digital effects, it’s worth comparing the merits of multi-effects pedals with traditional pedalboard setups, before …

For those who have a tendency to hammer their electric or bass guitars with a heavy attack, or can't play consistent rhythm parts throughout an entire song, a compressor might be the solution. A comp…

So the bad news is, it’s virtually impossible to tell what the distortion pedal sounds like without auditioning it personally.

The two most important effects in a guitarist’s signal chain are distortion and delay. And if you derive your tone strictly from the amp—whether it’s squeaky clean or buzzsaw nasty—then the digital d…

A lot of guitar multieffects have a footpedal that can be assigned to various parameters. Volume and wa are no-brainer pedal assignments, but there are a whole lot of other parameters that are well-s…

If you're a guitarist and you're not into multiband distortion...well, you should be. Just as multiband compression delivers a smoother, more transparent form of dynamics control, multiband distortio…