First Post: Effects Tips/Things I've Learned

So I don't blog a lot, but I figured I'd start this to have some discussions, teach, learn, and just fill some spare time. So, tonight I'm gonna talk about Effects and tips for using them.

First and foremost, don't use effects to try to compensate for poor playing. I'm by no means am amazing at the guitar, but use your effects to add and enhance your sound, not make up for poor playing.

With that being said, here's some tips for effects use.
1. Try cranking your boost/EQ pedals for a slight bit of an overdrive, it takes a usually simple pedal and makes it a little more versatile.

2. Run your overdrives before your compressors. Distorting a compressed signal will bring up a lot of low level detail and can muddy up your sound. Compressing an overdriven signal will usually tighten up your sound and really harness that low end.

3. Set the "level" or "volume" knob on your overdrives then use the gain knob to add level. This way, you're not adding too much grit to your tone and making it really muddy.

4. Change pickups. Simple, but new guitarists tend to just wanna use the bridge pickup.

5. For a tighter low end, run your reverb before your delay. This clears up a lot of muddy-ness that comes from using reverb and delay together.

6. Try turning off your reverb if you're using delay and just bring up the effect level slighly. Too much reverb with delay will cut away clarity and definition in your tone.

7. So I know money is tight, but try to buy true-bypass pedals. Lots of cheaper pedals suck away tone and that expensive guitar will have been a waste. You can get pedals modded as well to be true bypass, so that's something to check into.

8. Lastly, order really matters. There's no "right" way to arrange your pedals, but there are ways that tend to work better than others and give better tone results. Robert Keeley has a great little paragraph on his website, so that's something to check out.


So here's a list of gear I'm currently using, and this may take a while to read, but the pedals will be in order from my guitar to my amp.

- Gibson Les Paul Standard
- Fender American Strat
- Fender Taco Tele
- Cry Baby Original Wah
- Fulltone Fat Boost 2
- DMB Stellar Drive
- Voodoo Labs Sparkle Drive
- Homebrew CPR Compressor Retro
- Ernie Ball Volume Pedal Jr.
- Boss TU-2 Tuner
- Line 6 Verbzilla
- Boss DD-5 w/Mod
- Boss DD-20
- BBE Sonic Maximizer
- 1968 Fender Bassman 50 Head
- 2x12 Avatar Contemporary Cab w/ Vintage 30's
- Mogami Line Cables
- Hosa and George L's Patch Cables

So, for that was probably pretty boring for most, but that's it for now. If you have anything to add please let me know.

God Bless

- Dan