The Most Important Guitar Effects Pedals for Aspiring Rock Musicians

here are a mind boggling amount of guitar effects pedals about and they come in all different shapes and sizes. What is an effect pedal you may ask? An effect pedal is a device that is put between your guitar and the amplifier to alter the output sound. A pedal is made up of numerous components put into a case. The sounds that you can achieve from various effect pedals are quite extraordinary.

Guitarists today use more effects than ever and are evident to the sounds of bands such as Pink Floyd and U2. Numerous effect pedals are used in succession to complicate the sound. There are two main pedals out there. One is the multi effects processors and these contain numerous built into a single device. Alternatively, individual pedals focus on giving you one sound and not more than two. Such pedals involve you playing around with settings in order to get your intended sound. Many amplifiers these days have built-in sounds for you to use but they are not as versatile as pedals. This is because it is hard to utilize more than one sound simultaneously on amps.

Pedals cost from $60 or £40 upwards and include a broad range of prices. Specialist brands include Boss, Marshall, Pete Cornish, Electro Harmonic, Yahama, Dunlop and Digitech. As a budding guitarist, you could easily wipe your bank account clean upon purchasing guitar effects pedals due to the countless variety out there. What I recommend is that you only purchase one pedal for each main sound.

Recommended guitar effect pedals

Delay and Reverb sounds give a strong echo sound and is great if you are really playing live. This sounds professional like and is very convincing. Distortion and gain guitar effects pedals are widely used with electric guitars and are certainly used in lead and solo guitar playing. This adds crunch and meat to your sound and certainly does sound sweet. As stated previously, multi effects processors are a great for beginners as they have access to all the different possibilities right in front of them. All of these mentioned are the essential pedals that you must have in order to sound great.

After you have gotten hold of the main pedals, you may want to look for a few more to sound even great! A wah-wah effect allows the sound pitch to be constantly changed through the use of a pedal. This was heavily utilized by Jimi Hendrix. Added effects include Flanger, Chorus and Phase shifter also know as a uni-vibe. These pedals sound slightly similar to each other, however they do sound beautiful. Chorus and Flanger pedals sound very sweet and made famous by David Gilmour and created the sounds of Pink Floyd. Most of these sound best with little to no gain or distortion.