Understanding Pedal Order
This week, Addison and Nick joined forces to properly explain pedal order. It honestly ended up feeling more like an interview than a lecture, so it made sense to transcribe it that way. As always, you’re going to get more out of this article if you go back and watch the JHS Show episode it’s based on first-- especially in this case, as Addison and Nick are going to make a lot of references to the successful (and unsuccessful) jams they throw down during the video.
NICK
Addison, can you explain to me the purpose of pedal order?
ADDISON
The “proper pedal order” is created to give pedals their best chance at behaving like they were supposed to behave.
NICK
It's kind of like sending your kids to like community college. Putting pedals in the proper order sets them up to get their dream job or something like that. So explain the traditional, well-accepted pedal order that we all know about.
ADDISON
There's kind of one major standard...we have fuzz first, univibe, wah, compression, pitch-shifting, overdrive, distortion, modulation (like tremolo, chorus, vibrato, etc.), delay, reverb and then it ends with the amp. That's kind of the traditional [order].
NICK
Are there places where those rules are typically broken by people?
ADDISON
Well, a big one [people mess with]-- myself included --is modulation. A lot of people like modulation after their overdrives and distortions. I tend to prefer mine before those things. Although today, maybe we'll hear some stuff that'll change my mind.
NICK
So let's start at the beginning of a typical pedal chain. Why is fuzz at the beginning?
ADDISON
Fuzz is the needy circuit of pedals. It's old technology. It's primitive. So fuzz [wasn’t built to work with] 400 other glorious friends--
NICK
400 other brothers and sisters to share Mommy the guitar [with]. It just wants all the attention.
ADDISON
Exactly. So today we're going to use the Fuzz Face...We're gonna throw it at the beginning of the chain. We're going to demonstrate some stuff.
NICK
What if we did it though at the end [of the chain]?
ADDISON
I don't want to do that. I think it needs to go at the beginning where it's supposed to go.
NICK
What if we weren't total babies about it and we just tried stuff?
ADDISON
It’s your fricking funeral.
NICK
Let's do it. [Hard cut to NICK playing with the Fuzz Face at the beginning of the chain. The subsequent jam sounds like a witch being boiled in oil. Cut back to NICK at the studio.] So I admit you were right. That sounded really bad. It was really squeally...sputtering. There was a lot of noise. It didn't want to be there. It was like it was throwing a tantrum.
ADDISON
If you want to use spluttery fuzz, there are fuzzes for that. You don't need to put it into your chain. So let's put it back at the beginning of the chain and jam on it like the good Lord intended, like a normal person would do.
[They perform the same jam with the Fuzz Face at the beginning of the chain, and it sounds appreciably better.]
NICK
Next we have univibe. Univibe is very similar to fuzz in that it is an older technology. It's kind of like the second born child [saying,] “I want to be close to the mommy guitar.”
ADDISON
Right.
NICK
But I don't think we're going to mess around with that. Next is compression.
ADDISON
We're not going to play it today, [but] I do want to say that there's two schools of thought here. Before overdrive and distortion is where most people put [compression]...If you put [the compression] after [a really touch sensitive overdrive], you're going to retain that touch sensitivity of the overdrive. “Before” is going to sort of squash your dynamic a little bit, and “after” will allow you to retain that touch sensitivity of your drive pedal.
NICK
Let's go to overdrive next. There's a lot of space for switching and swapping. How do you like to stack your overdrive and distortion?
ADDISON
Another way to look at it is putting high gain to low gain. So I'm in the camp of high gain to low gain. So for me that would mean typically distortion before overdrive. Now our boy, Josh. Yeah. He's different. He likes it the other way around - overdrive before distortion. So we have an example of both.
NICK
We're going to use the trusty old ProCo Rat for our distortion and the mini Tube Screamer from Ibanez. Let's listen to distortion before overdrive, and then let's listen to distortion after overdrive.
ADDISON
Love it.
[They try the RAT before the Tube Screamer, then the RAT after the Tube Screamer. Both sound pretty good.]
NICK
I think I liked overdrive after distortion. I liked how it cut and it felt really good. So now we have something in common--
ADDISON
Not today.
NICK
Really?
ADDISON
Yeah. I actually liked it the other way around, which brings up a really good point: whatever you have at the very end of your chain, that's the shape, color, form that the rest of your flavors are gonna take off. So that's a good note to keep in mind. Today I liked the RAT flavor after the overdrive flavor.
NICK
Just for the record, Addison did say he liked the RAT flavor..And what lesson did we learn from this?
ADDISON
Honestly, bro, sometimes you gotta just try stuff.
NICK
So which one should we jam on?
ADDISON
I think we should do the one that I liked today-- not the one I usually do --and that's overdrive into distortion. That'd be Tube Screamer into RAT.
[They jam with the Tube Screamer going into the RAT, and it sounds like the soundtrack to a badly made Mad Max sequel.]
NICK
So the next section we're going to look at is modulation. The cool thing about modulation is it's kind of like a family within the family. You know, you've got tremolo, you've got chorus, you've got phaser, flanger, all kinds of stuff. Today, we're just going to focus on tremolo... [Usually] people use their amp tremolo [at the] end of the signal chain. Let's try trem before and trem after delay and reverb. Throw it all the way at the end.
[They try the tremolo before and after the delay/reverb. Though both sound pretty much the same, NICK wants you to know that they feel different.]
NICK
I really liked it at the end. It's weird and goopy and compress-y. The way it felt playing was super strange, but I really liked it. So I think we're going to put it at the end [of the signal chain].
[They jam with the tremolo after the delay/reverb, which sounds like the soundtrack to a Western set in space-- but not directed by Joss Whedon.]
ADDISON
Next we have delay. Now, you’ll typically place the delay before reverb and after modulation [and] overdrive, towards the end of your chain.
NICK
Delay is more of a mature effect in the sense that it really can stand on its own and it doesn't need his mommy so much.
ADDISON
Exactly. Yeah. So today we're going to use the Strymon El Capistan.
NICK
So let's try it before reverb and after distortion. Yep. But then let's also try it before the Browne Amplifications T4, because [why not]?
[They tried it both ways, with ADDISON and NICK proclaiming that the delay before the T4 sounded lame, but the delay into overdrive was pretty sick, so they just launched into an extended jam on that. It sounded kind of like U2 caught in a black hole.]
NICK
Last but not least is reverb. A lot of times people throw reverbs at the end of their board because they want a pure wave of reverb washing into the ethersphere, as if a wave is washing upon the shore clean and free of debris. If you put [reverb] at the beginning, it's like a tsunami carrying debris of a small beach town. That's not good.
ADDISON
We don't want that.
NICK
Today I'm going to use the Hall of Fame 2 TC Electronic. I was thinking that maybe we could just throw it at the beginning.
ADDISON
Please don’t do that.
[Nick tries the reverb at the beginning of the chain, and it sounds like Aquaman being drowned in a pool full of Jello.]
NICK
So what have we learned from today? We learned that there are some rules, right? There are definitely some things that help set up our pedals to do their jobs well. However, it's [also] really important to just try stuff. If you're sitting at home with a pile of pedals and some patch cables, you're thinking to yourself, “Man, I don't know what to do. Am I going to do it right? Am I going to do it wrong?” Just remember, there are a billion combinations that we didn't even touch on. We skipped the whole portion of the board today, ’cause we were lazy.
ADDISON
You know what? We skipped wah. Anyone out there using a wah pedal? No.
NICK
Don't be afraid. Look at me. Don't be a baby. Just live for once.