My first pedal was a Zoom multi-FX. I couldn’t tell you the model now, and honestly, it sounded pretty terrible. Thin, fizzy, a hundred presets that all wanted to be a stadium. None of that mattered. I spent weeks on the thing, jumping from a clean shimmer to a heavy crunch to some seasick warble I had no business using, grinning the whole time.
That’s the bit nobody tells you when you start. The pedal doesn’t have to be good to teach you what you like. It just has to be in front of you.
So before you start spending real money, here’s a plain-English run through the main types of guitar pedals: what each one actually does, and the one I’d buy first in each camp. No spec sheets. Just the stuff I wish someone had told me.
Key Takeaways
- The four families you’ll actually meet: drive (overdrive and distortion), modulation (chorus, flanger, phaser), time (delay and reverb), and wah and filter.
- My first-buy picks: a Boss BD-2 for overdrive, a ProCo RAT 2 for heavier dirt, an EHX Small Clone for chorus, a Boss DD-8 for delay, a Boss RV-6 for reverb, and a Dunlop Cry Baby for wah.
- Order matters: tuner, compressor, wah, drive, modulation, delay, reverb, into the amp. Reverb goes last.
- Reverb is the effect beginners overdo. I keep mine at 15 to 20% with a band. More than that and your tone turns to mush.
- Don’t buy a pedal to fix your playing. I bought a compressor to do exactly that. It didn’t.
- Buy cheap and used while you learn what you actually reach for. A rubbish multi-FX taught me more than the five pedals I bought after it.
What Are Guitar Pedals and What Are They Used for?
Guitar pedals are electronic devices that change your guitar’s signal before it reaches the amplifier. You plug your guitar into the pedal, then run the pedal into your amp. Small boxes, huge effect on your sound.
What Do Pedals Do?
So what can these pedals actually do? Here’s a glimpse of the sounds you can create with guitar pedals:
- Add distortion or fuzz
- Create spacey, ethereal reverb
- Produce wild, wobbling wah-wah effects
- Generate rhythmic, pulsating tremolo
- Layer your sound with lush, swirling chorus
And that’s barely the start of it.
Why Guitar Players Love Pedals
Guitar pedals aren’t just about sounding cool (though, let’s be honest, that’s a big part of it). They’re genuinely useful tools. Here are four reasons guitar players love effects pedals.
1. Inspire Creativity
Pedals push you to explore new sounds and techniques. Each one offers effects you wouldn’t otherwise reach for, and that often drags new riffs, solos and chord progressions out of you that you’d never have written on a dry, clean tone.
2. Help to Recreate Iconic Guitar Tones
With the right pedals, you can chase the signature sounds of your favourite artists and bring those classic, tried-and-tested tones into your own playing.
3. Change the Sound for Different Songs and Genres
Pedals let you adapt your sound to fit any musical context. Switching from a clean, jazzy tone to heavy metal distortion, or laying ambient reverb over a ballad, is a stomp away.
4. Stand Out in a Mix
Live or in the studio, pedals help your guitar cut through and shine. They add texture and depth that a dry signal just can’t.
The Main Types of Guitar Pedals Explained
One of the biggest mistakes new players make is buying a load of pedals before they understand what each one actually does for their tone.
There are four main families of guitar effects pedals:
- Distortion and overdrive pedals
- Modulation pedals
- Delay and reverb pedals
- Wah and filter pedals
These four are the tip of the iceberg. There are far more out there, but for the sake of our sanity, I’m keeping this to the ones you’ll actually meet first.
Overdrive and Distortion Pedals
You know that crunchy, gritty sound in rock music? That’s mostly overdrive and distortion. Two pedals, same job description, very different attitudes. Both add character and punch to your tone.
What’s the Difference?
Overdrive replicates the sound of a tube amp pushed to its limit. Warm, smooth breakup, the sound of blues and classic rock. It adds grit without burying the note.
Distortion goes harder. More saturated, more aggressive, more compressed. It’s the staple of heavy rock and metal, and it’ll do everything from a chugging rhythm tone to a screaming lead.
You can read more in my article where I break down the difference between overdrive and distortion in detail.
What I’d buy first is the Boss BD-2 Blues Driver (around £91). It’s an overdrive that happily tips into distortion if you push it, so it covers more ground than most first pedals.
Here’s how I actually run mine. I set the gain to about 1 o’clock, which is normally a touch more than I need, then roll my guitar’s volume back to take the sting off. With the BD-2 that roll-off isn’t optional, it’s the whole trick. Wind the guitar volume all the way down and you get a beautiful glassy clean. Push it back up and the dirt comes with it.
For something heavier, the ProCo RAT 2 (around £81) is the workhorse. Forty years of records, built like a brick, one knob taking you from light crunch to nearly fuzz. Not boutique. Just right.
Modulation Pedals: Chorus, Flanger, Phaser, and More
Modulation pedals add movement and texture to your tone. Let’s run through the most popular ones.
Chorus
You might know chorus as that lush, watery guitar sound from the 80s. It makes a slightly detuned copy of your signal, so it sounds like more than one guitar playing at once. Great for adding depth to clean tones or fattening up a lead.
I like to use chorus when I’m gently picking arpeggios and broken chords, for a dreamy, floating feel.
The pick is the EHX Small Clone (around £75), the same wobble Kurt Cobain used on “Come As You Are”. Start with the rate around noon and the depth low, about 10 o’clock. Push the depth up and it goes from shimmer to seasick fast, so add it in small doses. When you’re ready to spend more, the Boss CE-2W is the lovely upgrade.
Flanger
If you’re after that jet-plane swoosh or a psychedelic swirl, a flanger is the one. It splits your signal, slightly delays one part, then combines them back together, giving you a sweeping, metallic sound that runs from subtle to intense. Great for adding movement to rhythm parts or for otherworldly solos.
Learn more in our guide to flanger pedals.
Phaser
A phaser adds motion. It sweeps a series of peaks and notches across your frequency spectrum for that undulating, swirling effect. Subtle on clean chords, trippy on leads.
Eddie Van Halen built half his sound on one. That orange MXR Phase 90, the script-logo version, is the “Eruption” swirl. If you want it, MXR still makes a signature EVH90 reissue you can buy off the shelf.
Tremolo and Vibrato
Tremolo and vibrato don’t always get filed under modulation, but they belong here. Tremolo pulses the volume up and down. Vibrato wobbles the pitch instead. Both drop a vintage, watery shimmer over a clean part, and both are easy to overdo. A little goes a long way.
Delay and Reverb Pedals
My favourite effects, and the most addictive on this list. Both add space and depth. Both are very easy to drown in.
Delay
Delay repeats your signal back after a set time, like a second guitarist a split second behind you. Dial it short for a tight slapback (around 80 to 120 milliseconds, one quick repeat) or stretch it out for spacey echoes that seem to run forever.
It’s also how you get that rhythmic, dotted-eighth chime The Edge made famous on “Where the Streets Have No Name”. The trick isn’t faster picking, it’s the delay locking in with the beat. The maths is simple: delay time equals 60,000 divided by your tempo, times 0.75. At 120 BPM that’s 375 milliseconds. (He actually used a rack unit, not a stompbox, but any decent delay with tap tempo will get you there.)
The pick is the Boss DD-8 (around £125 to £155). Tap tempo, plenty of modes, and it nails that dotted-eighth sound without much fuss. If you’d rather keep it simple, the MXR Carbon Copy (around £149) is gorgeous warm analog echo with three knobs and no menus.
Reverb
Reverb simulates the natural echo of a room, from a tight, springy sound that mimics a classic amp to a huge, cavernous wash that makes you sound like you’re playing the Grand Canyon. A touch makes a clean tone shimmer.
But less is more, and I mean it. I keep my reverb mix down around 15 to 20% when I’m playing with a band. Any more and your tone turns to mush, especially once there’s overdrive in front of it. Reverb is the one effect beginners reach for too hard. Use it like seasoning, not a sauce.
The pick is the Boss RV-6 (around £148). Set-and-forget, eight modes, a genuinely lovely shimmer, and the usual Boss tank build.
Wah and Filter Pedals
Wah and filter pedals add expressive sweeps and unusual tone-shaping to your playing. Let’s look at what they do and why you might want one on your rig.
Wah Pedals
Wah is the “waka-waka” you know from funk and rock. You rock the pedal with your foot to sweep through frequencies, and the result is vocal and expressive, almost like the guitar is talking. By rocking it back and forth you emphasise different parts of your sound, adding emotion to solos and bite to riffs.
I use a wah to highlight key moments in a solo, or to add rhythmic interest to a funky rhythm part.
The pick is the Dunlop Cry Baby GCB95 (around £89). It’s the best-selling wah ever made, it’s the Hendrix and SRV sweep, and nobody really gets argued out of it. Plug in and go.
Filter Pedals
Filter pedals work like a wah but open up far more tone-shaping. Envelope filters respond to how hard you play. Auto-wahs sweep on their own based on your picking attack. Both are the route to funky, synthy, from-another-planet sounds. A rabbit hole you fall down later, not a first buy.
What Order Do Guitar Pedals Go In?
Once you own more than one pedal, order matters, because each effect processes whatever’s in front of it. The standard chain that works for almost everyone:
Tuner, then compressor, then wah or filter, then your drive (overdrive and distortion), then modulation (chorus, flanger, phaser), then delay, then reverb, and finally into your amp.
The logic is simple. Reverb goes last because you want it washing over your finished sound, not getting chewed up by the distortion. Drive sits early so everything after it reacts to a consistent tone.
The manual won’t tell you this, but the rules are there to be broken once you know them. Run reverb or delay before your drive and you get a smeared, ambient wash that’s brilliant for atmospheric stuff. The Edge famously ran his delay into a slightly dirty amp, which is technically “wrong” and sounds incredible. Learn the standard order first, then break it on purpose.
Which Guitar Pedals Should You Buy First?
Here’s the honest answer: none of them, specifically. You don’t need one of every type, and you definitely don’t need the boutique version. Some players run a two-pedal board their whole life. Others build something that looks like the cockpit of a spaceship. Both are fine.
If you want a starting shortlist, this is what I’d buy, in rough order of usefulness: a Boss BD-2 for overdrive, a delay like the Boss DD-8, then a reverb like the RV-6. Add a ProCo RAT 2 if you want heavier dirt, a Small Clone for some 80s shimmer, and a Dunlop Cry Baby if wah is your thing. That covers every sound in this guide for less than the price of one boutique pedal.
A few things I’d tell my younger self before he spent the money.
Don’t buy a pedal to fix your playing. I bought a compressor early on, convinced it would tighten everything up. It didn’t. I just needed to practise and learn my volume knob. A compressor is a great pedal at gig volume, but it won’t paper over technique, and most beginners reach for it for the wrong reason.
Don’t buy boutique before you can hear the difference. The £400 “transparent” overdrive and the £40 clone are closer than anyone selling the £400 one wants to admit. Buy the cheap one, learn what you actually like, then spend big later if you still want to.
And buy cheap and used while you’re learning. My first pedal was that rubbish-sounding Zoom multi-FX I can’t even name now, and it taught me more than the five pedals I bought after it, because it let me try everything and work out what I actually reach for. Buy a cheap multi-FX or a couple of used singles, find your taste, and you’ll lose almost nothing reselling. The expensive board can wait.
If you don’t like a pedal, sell it and buy one you do. Don’t become a pedal hoarder. Unless, of course, that’s the hobby. No judgement. I have a few drawers full.
