Guitar Pedals: What you need to know

Guitar pedals can add a lot of interesting sounds to your rig. Here is a description of some of the most common pedals you’ll come across, and how they function.

1. Chromatic Tuner: The first pedal in many effect chains is the chromatic tuner. When activated the pedal will mute the outgoing signal and will help you tune your guitar.

2. Noise Suppressor: As it’s name indicates, the noise suppressor silences or reduces any extra hum your guitar may be making. This is especially good for guitars with single-coil pickups.

3. Compressor: This pedal takes quieter, weaker signals, and boosts them to the desired level. This is great when you want to make your picking sound a little more even. It can also give you guitar some extra sustain, making long notes sing out.

4. Overdrive: An overdrive pedal boosts the signal from the guitar. By the time it gets to the amplifier, the signal is much louder and can have an edgy sound, thus it is overdriven.

5. Distortion: Not to be confused with overdrive, this pedal literally distorts the signal, making it sound “dirtier”. It can boost the guitar’s signal, but this is not it’s primary role.

6. Flanger/Phaser: These two pedals have similar functions. It is essentially a extremely short delay of the guitar signal. This minute delay causes a “whooshing” type sound, and can beef up your tone. With a twist of a knob, you can get very eclectic and bizarre tones.

7. Delay: This pedal take the guitar signal and repeats it over and over. There are usually settings to determine how fast the echo is and how fast the sound decays. This pedal is great for filling up sound and adding “shimmer” to your solos.

8. Reverb: Reverb simulates how sound bounces off walls in a certain room. Some pedals have only one type of reverb, while others can emulate different rooms. Certain knobs will let you choose how long the sound takes to decay.