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wikiHow to Set Up Guitar Pedals

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Guitar pedals, sometimes called effects pedals, provide an easy and effective way to modulate your electric guitar's tone. The vast range of effects available makes it easy to get carried away and accumulate a wide array of pedals that you want to use all at once. While this is certainly possible, it is best not to simply plug everything in and start playing. To set up guitar pedals correctly, you will need to connect them in a certain order. This will help ensure that your guitar's tone sounds as good as possible.


  1. 1
    Position your tuner pedal first in the signal path. If you will be using a chromatic tuner pedal in your arrangement, you should plug your guitar directly into the tuner. Placing the tuner pedal first in the signal path makes sense - you want the pedal to try to tune your guitar's clean, unmodulated signal rather than the heavily distorted sound produced by running the signal through a few other effects pedals first.
  2. 2
    Connect filter effects pedals early in the signal path. Filter pedals, such as auto-wahs, envelope filters, and wah-wahs, should be placed just after your tuner pedal. Because filter pedals rely on the clean signal's attack to apply their filters and modulate the sound, placing them after other effects pedals would limit their ability to work. If you don't use a tuner pedal, filter pedals should be the first in your setup.
  3. 3
    Plug compressor pedals in just after filter pedals. Compressors are designed to "level out" your guitar's volume, which means boosting the volume of quieter tones. If these volume boosts occur after the guitar's tone has been heavily modified, lots of noisy, unwanted sound can arise.
  4. 4
    Add overdrive and distortion pedals next. Now you are ready to connect perhaps the most popular types of effects pedals - overdrives and distortions. These pedals generate and amplify the overtones of each note you play, which is why adding them before filter and compressor pedals is a bad idea. If these overtones are fed into these types of pedals, the resulting tone can be strange and unpleasant.
  5. 5
    Connect all other types of modulation pedals. After connecting the effects pedals mentioned above, you can connect any other modulation-style pedals you have. This includes effects like chorus, flanger, tremolo, and phaser. If you have multiple pedals of this type, experiment with the order in which they are connected to see how it affects your guitar's tone.
  6. 6
    Insert your volume pedal into the signal path. Volume pedals should be added after all the modulation pedals mentioned above. Volume pedals provide the best results when they are adjusting the volume of the finished signal, rather than adjusting a signal which will then be fed through a bunch of other effects pedals.
  7. 7
    Position delay pedals last in the signal path. The only type of pedal that works best positioned after the volume pedal is a delay pedal. Placing a delay pedal before a volume pedal can make it more difficult to control the volume of each successive delay or echo effect.

Community Q&A

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  • Where should a boost pedal go in the chain?
    wikiHow Contributor
    After the compressor, but before the gain (distortion) pedals. This will increase volume on clean tones and boost the drive on lead tones.
  • Where should a noise suppressor be placed?
    wikiHow Contributor
    It depends on what purpose the noise suppressor will fulfill. You may need more than one placement depending on your purpose. If you position it behind the tuner, it will remove any unwanted noise from the guitar signal before it gets modified with the pedals (this is the most common placement). Guitarists also use the noise suppressor or noise gate pedals after an overdrive to cut the riff sharply.
  • Should a heavy distortion be placed before a tube screamer and a blues breaker or after?
    wikiHow Contributor
    This depends on personal preference; changing the order of drive pedals changes how they sound when used together. For instance, a clean boost placed before a heavy distortion or fuzz will result in a louder boosted signal hitting the heavier distortion circuit which in turn works that circuit harder and you get heavier distortion. If you place that clean boost after the heavy distortion, it will just make the original distorted sound louder. Experiment with different placement order and you will find your own preference.
  • Should a looper pedal be the last one put in?
    wikiHow Contributor
    Your looping pedal should be the last pedal in your chain, assuming you want the effects of every other pedal to be part of what is being looped; any pedals placed after the looper will not be part of what is looped (i.e. if your reverb pedal is placed after the looper, your looped riffs will not have reverb on them).
  • Where in the chain should I put a reverb pedal?
    wikiHow Contributor
    Reverb can be treated like delay, so before the looper, but after everything else.
  • Where should I put my equalizer pedal in the chain?
    wikiHow Contributor
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  • For keeping your pedals neatly arranged, you can buy pedal boards (or "pedal platforms") of various sizes. These boards often allow you to plug each pedal's power supply into a single outlet, which can reduce cord clutter and prevent you from having to power your guitar pedals with batteries.
  • Guitar pedals should be connected to each other using very short cables called "patch cables." The longer the cables used, the more the signal will degrade and cause your guitar's tone to suffer.

Things You'll Need

  • Guitar effects pedals
  • Patch cables
  • Pedal board (optional)

Article Info

Categories: Guitar

In other languages:

Español: conectar tus pedales de guitarra, Italiano: Disporre i Pedali per Chitarra, Русский: подключить гитарные эффекты в правильном порядке, Português: Configurar Pedais de Guitarra, Français: installer des pédales pour guitare

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