WHICH GOES FIRST – HIGH- OR LOWGAIN DRIVES?
So, what is the best order to arrange your overdrive pedals if you use more than one at once, cascading tone from one into the other? Many opt for the traditional ‘highestgain-pedal-first’ approach, but Daniel Steinhardt of TheGigRig argues that the opposite way around also yields great results. “I’ve tried it every way and I keep coming back to this: lower-gain pedals first, cascading up to the higher-gain pedals. Why? Well, if you take a really high-gain overdrive pedal and put a low-gain overdrive after it, you’ve got this huge amount of gain and nastiness with the first pedal, but that gets tamed down by the natural compression in the low-gain pedal. However, if I swap it around and take that little bit of clipping and warmness from the low-gain overdrive pedal and push it into the high-gain pedal, it embellishes and enlarges the harmonics and the compression that I’ve already got going with the low-gain pedal.”