Electric Guitar Lesson 18 - Guitar Effects

By now you’ve probably been browsing your local music shop and seen effects pedals and "stomp boxes." Guitar Effects can be used to twist and manipulate the mood of your music very quickly. You can make your music heavy with a distortion pedal, funky with a wah, or high and dreamy with a rotary speaker effect.

Distortion

Distortion pedals take the signal your guitar produces and tear it to shreds, put it back together, and send it to your amplifier as a heavy metal sounding crunch or an old school overdrive. There are many types of distortion pedals, and most amplifiers will come standard with some sort of distortion effect. What the pedal really does is takes the sound wave and chops off the rounded tops, making them flat. You can also do this by cranking the gain up on your amp and turning the master volume down. This overdrives the amp.

Reverb and Delay

Reverb and delay effects make it sound like you’re playing in a really big (reverb) or really small (delay) room. Reverb is better for creating a "playing-in-a-room" sound. Delay and echo pedals take the sound you make from the guitar and play it over and over, each time getting slightly less audible. Echo pedals can be adjusted to make the delay longer or shorter. There are also loop pedals that are similar to delay pedals, but instead of automatically playing what you play, they can be programmed to echo a certain length of what you play. So you can play a riff and push the loop button, and then the pedal will play that riff over and over while you solo over the top.

Wah Pedals

Wah pedals are one of the most popular types of pedals. Often used in blues, funk, metal and basically every other genre, they are the most versatile. If you have heard Jimi Hendrix’s "Voo Doo Chile," you have heard the wah pedal at its finest. The wah pedal is like a moveable low or high pass filter, making certain frequencies louder than others.  When the pedal is in one direction, the low notes might be louder, while the other end may have louder high notes. When you move the pedal back and forth, it makes a "wah-wah" sound that mimics the human voice.

Flanger and Phaser

A flanger pedal takes the guitar's signal, doubles it, and mixes the two signals slightly out of time with each other. A phaser takes the signal and splits it into two parts like the flanger, but instead, one path keeps the volume and amplitude characteristics and the other path makes the phase out of synch. In short, a phaser effect still has the original sound mixed with the phased effect, whereas a flanger mixes up the signal completely.