TYPES OF PEDALS
BROADLY SPEAKING, THERE ARE FOUR MAIN TYPES OF EFFECTS TO FOCUS ON, ALTHOUGH THERE’S A LOT OF SUBTYPES THAT YOU CAN DELVE INTO AS YOUR TASTES AND NEEDS DEVELOP.
FUZZ
Generated by pushing transistors into clipping, this abrasive type of signal mangling defined the tones of early rock and psychedelia, becoming synonymous with players like Jimi Hendrix. Over time, more refined pedals came out, like the Big Muff, a pedal that promised smooth, ‘violin-like’ sustain that was a far cry from the lesscontrolled sound of pedals like the Superfuzz, Fuzz Face and Tonebender. Ironically for a fuzz, the Big Muff has more in common with most overdrives than fuzzes in terms of its circuit.
OVERDRIVE
Ushered in by the ground-breaking Ibanez
Tube Screamer, the goal of overdrives was simple – to emulate the distinctive sound of clipping or saturation of the guitar signal caused by a tube amp. To some degree, this was achieved, but something else incredibly useful happened – by boosting the guitar signal so that it drove a tube amp into distortion earlier, as well as making the signal more mid-forward, the Tube Screamer also made tube amps sound better too.
DISTORTION
Essentially a more aggressive overdrive, distortion pedals clipped the guitar signal more heavily. Where overdrives like the Tube Screamer or Boss Blues Driver employed ‘soft clipping’ diodes to clip the guitar signal, distortion pedals tend to employ ‘hard clipping’ after their amplification circuits, which chops up guitar signals into something that much more closely resembles a square wave.
DELAY
This effect which covers a deceptively large spread of pedals. At its core, delay is echo, and the first units in this area did just that, using tape loops. Pedals using bucket-brigade compact chips followed, and then eventually a jump to digital chips occurred.
The thing is, many other types of effects were created by time-based manipulation of signals; flanging was achieved in the early days by running two tape machines and slowing one down; chorus was the same concept but with alternating speed. The more that engineers experimented, the more effect types they created. Digital delays were the real game changer, as they simply recorded and looped a buffer of audio – this in turn led to not only the guitar looper pedal, but also the pitch shifter. Today even the wildest, most out-there delay, glitch and looping pedals, from the Red Panda Particle to the Montreal Assembly Count to Five can trace their origins back to being able to digitally record and replay a buffer of audio.