Guitar pedalboards are set up to achieve a wide range of effects and sounds in the studio or onstage. Each proper basic large or small pedalboard setup is suited to the individual guitarists taste, and depending on their sound, some use more pedals than others. Because of this, let’s learn how to arrange guitar pedals on your pedalboard and guitar effects chain.
Take a look at the image above to see my simple pedalboard order diagram.
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If you’ve been playing for a while, chances are you have a couple stompboxes already, and know of a couple more you would love to get.
That said, there are some things you want to avoid doing, or be sure to pay attention to when determining the best or correct order pedal chain for guitar effects pedals on effects pedalboard arrangements and perfect order to get the best possible electric guitar sound.
The best order of effects is really going to depend on your complete set up of pedals but here are some guidelines.
LOOK: What Are Good Guitar Pedals For Beginners To Start With?
The Effects Pedals Do’s and Don’ts
There’s no right way to set things up, but it’s a good idea to work from big, more often used effects in the signal chain to smaller ones. This starts with the effects that are dependent on your style of playing.
These are effects like a wah-wah pedal, envelope follower or a pitch shifter. These effects would have reduced performance by putting other effects pedals in front of them. If you are using a pitch shifter with an envelope filter, consider placing the pitch shifter in front of it to allow clean entire signal processing.
Distortion Pedals
Wah before or after distortion? A quality distortion pedal can also go in the front of the signal chain, and is frequently put in front of a wah pedal for added distortion. The same applies for overdrive distortion combo pedals.
Next in the pedal hierarchy would be pedals for altering output levels. Best fuzz pedals, vintage and treble boosting pedals all fall into this category.
Overall, your goal is to develop the tone you want to hear, or are known for playing, while minimizing amp feedback and noise. Heavy metal, ambient, country – whatever genre all the same.
So compressors go after harmonizer pedals, envelope followers and wah-wah pedals. However, a best compressor pedal takes the whole signal and well, compresses it. So avoid putting it after pedals that are designed to generate noise, like an Octavia pedal.
Another tip is to keep distortion and overdrive pedals (or combo overdrive/distortion pedal) towards the front of the signal chain from low to high gain. This comes down to personal preference though.
Modulation Effects
If you’re using overdrive pedals and a compressor, it’s common practice to put your modulator effects after these. So any tremolo, vibrato, phase shifters, rotary or flanger pedals would fit into this category. Delay and reverb pedals also fit here.
Using flangers or phase shifters modulation effect in front of distortion can create that jet-engine sound Eddie Van Halen is known for.
One more important “do” for modulator effects is to be sure they are plugged into the effects loop on the amp. All others can be plugged into the amp’s input. Using the effects loop here isn’t completely necessary, try different things, but I find that they work very well inside the amp’s effects loop.
In position 5 you want to place your volume pedal (keep out of the volume pedal placement for swells in effects loop option) to keep the guitar signal consistent and allow you to play at full volume.
After this you can drop in reverb and best guitar delay pedals delay repeats effects to allow those sounds to continue after the volume cuts out. Delay can come before reverb effects to avoid getting an unintended boost in the level of ambient effect when the gain is increased.
Examples from Famous Guitarists
As noted earlier, the best order for guitar pedals on pedalboard setups is highly dependent on the individual player. Here is how a couple of the best do it.
John Petrucci of Dream Theater has a lot of firepower in his amps, but his board has an often changing overdrive pedal, an Axe-FX II, a wah-wah pedal, volume pedal and Boss tuner pedal. This is just the abbreviated version as it would take several pages to talk about everything his pedal board setup can do.
James Valentine of Maroon 5 has a signal chain that goes from looper (check out our best looper pedal for the money article here) to Octafuzz, wah pedal to overdrive, noise suppressor or noise gate to buffer/splitter, Dunlop Rotovibe to Boss volume pedal. In total, he has three favorite overdrives, and loves to try new effects in every show.
Lead guitarist from Primus, Ler Lalonde has had a pretty consistent setup for years that helped create the bands unique sound. His signal chain doesn’t contain as many effects as some boards, but he adds some effects pedals for certain songs. In his signal chain there’s a Rotary Phaser, Vibrato pedal, analog delay, Ultimate Octave by Fulltone, and a custom best Wah pedal.
For certain songs he also uses a chorus pedal (what are chorus pedals used for?), delay and OctaBass by EBS.
Bottom line, follow the basic setup rules above for your pedal order but don’t take it as gospel either. And add or subtract effects to as you develop your playing style.
PS – You are going to need the best guitar patch cable too in order to get that pedalboard in tip top shape.