Essential Guitar Effects Pedals

If you’re an electric guitarist then you probably want to play some songs you know and make it sound like the song, right?  Well, then you’ll need some sort of guitar effects pedals to get that sound, but what pedals?  There’s a ton to choose from and if you look on the Musicians Friend website, (and what musician hasn’t bought something from them) then you’ve got pages to choose from. Well, the big three of guitar effects can be debated but the three pedals that most guitarists use are distortion, delay, and chorus.

You may be thinking why do you need a distortion pedal when you can use distortion on your amp.  That’s a valid point, and if you really want to save some money you can do that.  But, if you’ve got a small practice amp you’ll notice that your distortion will sound better coming from a pedal, and it will be easier to control, meaning you won’t sound as sloppy.  You won’t get as much fret noise and palm mutes will sound cleaner.

Delay is a useful pedal because you can use it to make a reverb type effect or double each note as you play (think of the intro to Another Brick in the Wall by Pink Floyd.  The country chicken picken’ sound depends on delay, as does the 80′s and 90′s guitar sound.   It can thicken up your sound and make your guitar sound bigger, or give a clean sound more “shimmer”.  The Edge, guitarist for U2 uses delay a lot, and in very creative ways, or you can hear it in “Sex on Fire” by The Kings of Leon.  If you go to Musicians Friend, you can listen to the sound clips of each effect pedal to hear what it sounds like. Keep in mind they use more of the effect than you would normally use to emphasize it.

The third guitar effects pedal to have in your board is a chorus pedal,  it’s great for thickening a thin guitar sound, but it’s not as obvious as a delay or echo pedal.  It gets used for a lot of acoustic guitar sounds to make them sound larger.

Now these aren’t the only guitar pedals, but there the three everybody seems to use the most. Of course it depends on the type of music that you play, but these are three effects that get used in pretty much any style of music.

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