6 Of The Most Popular Guitar Effects Pedals Explained

Guitar effects pedals, which are also called stomp boxes, are used by the musician to change the sound of their guitar. Stomp boxes get their name because of the "stomping" action needed to make the effect work. When the pedals are off, you are playing with the guitars clean (unaffected signal) sound coming out of your amp. When you step on it to turn it on, the signal that goes to the pedals are changed creating the desired effect.
You can also connect more that one effects pedal to your guitar. Simply use patch cables (short cables) to connect them to each other using the imput and output jacks. You can individually control which effects you want on and off at any time just by turning (stomping) them on or off. When a pedal is off, the signal will bypass it and go through anyone that is turned on.
For the best possible sound, you should place your gain and tone based effects at the beginning of your line of pedals. Gain and tone based effects include distortion, volume, wah and EQ. Next you should put the pedals that change the pitch or color of your sound. Then at the end of your chain, you can put the pedals that affect your timing such as delay, reverb and flanger.
If you accumulate a large amount of effects pedals, you can keep them all organized and protected by using a pedal board. Pedal boards are basically a flat board that all of your pedals can be placed on all connected together. You can even get them with covers, transformers and power cables to make it a breeze to pack up and move from gig to gig.
One thing to be aware of is that connecting too many pedals together can cause a lot of humming and unwanted noise. To fix this problem a noise gate pedal can be used.
With so many different types of pedals on the market today, I couldn't possibly list them all. So I'm doing the next best thing and will explain some of the more popular ones.
Distortion:
Distortion is used in many popular musical genres especially metal, rock and hard rock. The distortion pedals job is to clip the signal, giving it's distorted sound.
Chorus:
Chorus pedals give you a thick and lush sound by duplicating your original sound; adding some delay to it and then mixing it back with your original signal. This ends up making your guitar sound like a bunch of guitars or a "chorus of guitars" if you will.
Flanger:
Just like the Chorus pedal, the Flanger duplicates the signal, adds a short delay and then mixes it back with your original signal. The difference here is that the Flanger's delay includes several repeats that get longer and shorter at a steady rate. This produces a thicker sound compared to the Chorus pedal.
Wah-wha:
The Wah-wha pedal kind of looks like your cars gas pedal and you rock this pedal back and forth to allow lower and higher frequencies to pass though. This then produces the "wah-wah" sound. Jimi Hendrix in the late 60's and funk music in the 70's made this effect famous.
Reverb:
The Reverb effect emulates natural acoustic spaces by producing an echo making your tone sound like it's being played in a big concert hall.
Talk Box:
Last but not least is the Talk Box. The Talk Box pedal has a small speaker in it that plays the signal loudly up an airtight small plastic tube. This tube is taped to the side of the microphone where it sticks out just enough to be able to send the sound into the guitarist's mouth. The guitar player then makes shapes with their mouth to change the sound, which is then picked up by the microphone. Many performers have used the Talk Box over the years but one of the most famous was Peter Frampton who used it on his song "Do You Feel Like We Do" off his Frampton Comes Alive record.
Hope you have enjoyed my explanations of some of the guitar effects pedals that are out there. This is just a small fraction of the effects that are available to you. A good tip would be for you to do a little research on some of your favorite guitar players and find out what effects they use that give them "their sound" the most. For example if you were into hard rock or heavy metal, it would be a good idea to start off with a distortion pedal. Rock On!