Guitar Pedals: A Beginner’s Guide

In their simplest form, guitar pedals (and put more broadly, effects pedals) are small metal enclosures housing circuitry that change the sound of your instrument, be it an electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, synth or anything that has a quarter-inch jack output. Pedals are usually placed on the floor as part of a chain that you active with your foot, hence the slang term 'stompbox'.

A pedal can drive, distort, modulate, or reverberate your guitar tone and do plenty more depending on the design. There’s an infinite combination of effects to explore to add creative, unique dimensions to your playing or simply enhance your overall sound.

Pedal effects are used for a few different reasons:

• To make your instrument sound more textured, complex, exciting and interesting to listen to  

• To achieve a style associated with a genre of music, like fuzz or overdrive suited to rock, filtering in funk, or compression in country music.

• To help support live performance or recording, or for utility reasons like tuning or quickly switching tone settings

• To enhance your overall sound quality

As a guitar pedal beginner, there are so many effects for you to get your hands on without spending much money. Plenty of these affordable stompboxes have been used on classic records and are incredibly easy to use to get iconic sounds. Reverb, overdrive, delay and a modulation like chorus form the basis of most guitar pedalboards.

There are a few pedal effects that guitarists of any genre will gravitate towards. Here’s a breakdown of all popular types found as part of setups ranging from pop to metal that you’ll want to check out when buying your first few pedals.

An overdrive or distortion pedal simulates effect a guitar makes when its signal begins to crackle and distort when gain is fed into an amp, or if the volume on a valve amp is cranked high. Those crunchy tones are the foundations to a huge chunk of guitar music in rock, metal and even pop.

You can get pedals that produce light crunchy overdrive tone or thunderous distorted sludge. If you want to sound like anything from AC/DC and Arctic Monkeys to Metallica and Slipknot, get an overdrive or distortion.

If you’ve been in a church or large room, you would have heard reverberations as the sound bounces off the walls and back at you. Apply this to an electric guitar and voilà! Reverb adds life, fullness, padding and width to your sound, the same way you might have heard it when applied to singing.

 Almost all genres of music utilise reverb in some way. Reverb is a staple option to enrich a clean guitar tones and helps embed overdriven guitars into the rest of a track. The most common types are spring, plate, modulated and shimmer, which all have unique qualities.

Delay replicates any sound you make from the guitar and repeats it after you stop playing. Notable examples of delay in popular music include the intro to Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Welcome To The Jungle’ and ‘Walking On The Moon’ by The Police. There are a few controls you’ll find on almost every delay pedal, like the ability to change the speed of the repeats and how many repeats the pedal creates.

Probably the most common of the broader modulation umbrella, chorus creates a warbling effect by doubling your signal and playing one side slightly dipping in and out of tune. You’ll hear this all over Metallica songs, as well as Nirvana’s ‘Come As You Are’ and ‘Purple Rain’ by Prince. It adds a more complex, intriguing texture to your tone and helps you achieve a cool, classic vibe.

If you’ve already started on your guitar journey, you most likely have a clip-on tuner to keep your instrument in tune. But a tuner pedal is far more reliable and accurate, can be positioned neatly with your other stompboxes and it means you don’t need a silly device on the end of your guitar.

Multi-FX are larger pedals that contain several effects in one unit. These are great units because the cost of buying all the equivalent individual effects is likely going to cost you more than buying just one multi-FX. As a beginner, it’s a great way to hear and experiment with loads of different sounds without committing to more expensive individual pedals.

Fuzz – The original rock ‘n’ roll effect, fuzz is how the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards and Pete Townshend pioneered the genre dialling in spicy soaring guitar tones. Fuzz is like overdrive but a little harsher as it’s producing a chunkier square wave. It’s also an incredible effect paired with a synth to buff up a more aggressive, thicker patch.

Looper pedals – both a practice tool and a way to build out live performances, use a looper to record a snippet of your playing like a tasty riff and have it continually repeat automatically once you’ve clicked the button to stop recording. From there, you can play over the top of this section with a solo or hamonised melodies. Advanced looper can record and play back multiple parts at once.

Compression – An understated effect that boosts low volume signals and caps high volume signals to create a more consistent sound. You can use compression to enhance your instrument’s tone, help even out volume spikes which is helpful for dynamic playing, or push it further to squish your signal as is popular in country music.

Filters – There are a few different types of filter pedals that cut and boost certain frequencies and will shift these envelopes over time to create all sorts of wacky noises. The most famous use of the envelope filter is in funk for a duck-like quack.

Some guitar pedal brands are better suited to beginners than others. Price is a major factor, as some boutique companies make very expensive pedals. Another reason is usability, as brands specialise in unique sounds and effects suited to players in need of a specific application and a deeper understanding of how to dial in a certain tone. Here are a few companies you should check out.

Boss are one of the very first pedal creators. The Japanese company designed the OD-1 distortion back in 1977 and have since released some of the most well-known compact pedals in the guitar industry. They’ve never compromised on great sound and truly accessible prices, despite pretty much every effect in their line-up being used in a famous musician’s setup at one point or another. They also make their own line of multi-FX pedals that contain dozens of their famous sounds - an incredibly versatile bit of kit.

Another one of the concept originators. TC Electronic produce a ridiculous variation of effects in loads of styled cases, which is part of the beauty of buying pedals. Arguably most famous for their Polytune and Flashback delay, these effects are easily accessible at great prices and offer plenty of simple and crazy sounds to keep you occupied for hours on end.

Tone City are relative newcomer to the game who specialise in mini pedals, which are on average 25% smaller than a regular compact pedal. Great tones for pocket money prices and they come in loads of quirky designs covering just about every effect, emulating famous sounds like a cranked Plexi amp or Tube Screamer style overdrive to a tee. They punch way above their price range and have even come close to the top of our favourite pedal lists as part of our blindfold channel videos!

Not sure where to start, but certain of the musical style you want to pursue? We’ve assembled several pedalboards featuring Tone City and Landlord FX mini pedals, plus the board to stick them all on for you to quickly dial in a great guitar tone. These are curated to suit classic rock, glam rock, metal, blues, indie and more.