Basic Guitar Effects Pedal Order

The world of effects pedals is a big and very interesting one! There are so many different types of pedals available these days that it can be overwhelming trying to work out how to use them.

You may have got a particular pedal because it is the one that your favorite guitarist uses, or you might have found a pedal that gives you “your sound” and inspires you to play better and maybe even write your own music. That is one of the most amazing things about effects pedals, many great songs have been written when the guitarist tried out a pedal and the sound coming out of it basically wrote the song for them 

One of the first questions you will have when you start to collect a few effects pedals is “What order do I plug them in, and does it really matter?”.

In this video I show you how I plug in a basic pedal setup. I take wah, boost, overdrive (distortion), tuner, phaser, delay and reverb pedals, and put them in the order I like, with sound examples.

Now, there is a common saying, “rules were made to be broken!”, and this is very true when it comes to the order that you plug in your pedals. One persons perfect order might be the complete opposite of the sound that you are going for. So, while the order that I show you in the video is how I like things, and is a very common order to use, it may not be the sound you are looking for, or hearing in your head. So experiment! Take my video as a baseline to start trying things. Swap the order or your delay pedal, your chorus, put things in the effects loop, take them out, see and HEAR what sounds best to you 

For you gearheads, like me, here’s the full list of gear that I used in this video:

• Fender Elite Stratocastor
• EVH 5150 III amp
• EVH Wah
• TC Electronic Polytune
• Red Witch Lily Boost
• Crowther Hot Cake Overdrive
• TC Electronic Flashback Delay
• TC Electronic Hall Of Fame Reverb Mini

Enjoy your pedals!!