Guitar Effects Pedals
Guitar effects pedals come in all shapes and sizes. They have one primary goal – to alter the sound that your guitar produces.
There are literally hundreds of guitar effects pedals to choose from – some creating noises and sounds that you would find hard to fit into, what I would call, normal music.
Guitar effects pedals can be bought as single pedals, multi effects pedals or rack mounted effects processors. Multi effects pedals will often have a whole bunch of different guitar effects to use but generally the quality is not as good as single units. Of course, the more you spend the better they become but this can cost hundreds, even thousands of pounds.
Here I am going to outline some of the more commonly used guitar effects pedals that the majority of guitarists use. These are based on single “stomp box” type effects units. These can be easily chopped and changed to get the sound that you want from your guitar.
Whilst the two guitar effects pedals above are different they do have similarities. Basically they take your clean sound and convert it to an overdriven or distorted sound. This gives you a rock type sound found on thousands of songs. Examples are Nirvana, Jimi hendrix and many other.
This is a great guitar effects pedal. Rather than just an on/off situation this is an expression pedal. This means that you have anywhere in between on and off. Called a wah pedal because quite simply, it makes your guitar sound as though it is saying “wah”.
This causes an echo effect to be added to your sound. A small amount of this can really beef up your solo sound. Players such as Joe Satriani use this to make their guitar sound up. If you are into lead playing it is well worth investing in this effects pedal.
Another nice pedal that adds to both your clean and distorted tone is the chorus pedal. This beefs up or thickens the sound 
by almost doubling up notes in layers a very subtle way.
With guitar effects pedals there are huge differences in sound quality. Generally the more expensive it is, the better it will be. It is also very true, especially with the examples above, the older the effects pedal is the better quality sound it will produce. As the famous saying goes – they don’t make things like they used to.
