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question for any guitarist - need help buying pedals to make a pedal board?

i am looking to buy some guitar pedals to have a pedal board. i play guitar in 2 bands, one is metal, the other is rock. i am trying to make a pedal board with different effect pedals, and i need someones opinion on which pedals to buy, ones for the music i play. so far i have a Digitech RP50, and a Digitech Death Metal. i preffer Digitech or BOSS, thank you

Well, you want to get pedals that will help you create the sounds you need to create, so usually that means more sounds = more pedals.

My philosophy is to keep it simple! The more time you spend on stage, the more you'll understand that the more things that can go wrong, will go wrong. Fewer pedals means fewer batteries, power supplies, cables, fewer things to get lost, etc.

So you mention a death metal pedal, does that mean your amp isn't very good? That sucks. I rely heavily on my amp for my tone, and that really is the best policy. Your amp is far less likely to die than your pedals! If you're playing in two bands, just have two different settings for your dirty channel, and call it good. That takes a pedal or two out of the chain in front of you, which means better tone, a simpler chain, and just remembering to hit the channel switcher when you need to. It's worked well for my Marshall Valvestate, and of course with my Mesa Boogie TremoVerb....

... But maybe you don't have a Marshall or Mesa. That's okay, we'll still make it work.

What i've done with my rig is i've finally started to incorporate multifx pedals as well. The thing is, I can't stand their distortion, but I've noticed that just about all of them have pretty decent or even great clean tones - so I've been using my multifx for clean fx only, and relied on my amp for distortion. For you, that would mean putting the digitech first, then whatever distortion you have second.

This way you can use chorus, delay, clean boost, trem, etc, whatever fx you need from your multifx and not have to have extra guitar pedals to do that stuff. Some multifx pedals can do more than one effect at a time, making it even better - put on some reverb, some delay, a bit of compression, and a phaser sound, for instance, all at once. That's four pedals you don't have to worry about (or buy, or power, or have sucking your guitar tone)!

I'm not too familiar with what the RP50 can do, nor am I familiar with what you'll be expected to sound like, but I would venture to say that if I *didn't* have an amp with decent distortion, and I was playing in two different bands, my pedal chain might look like this:

guitar -> Boss Tu-20 -> Digitech RP50 -> Death Metal -> Boss DS-1 or Big Muff -> Boss EQ pedal -> amp

The TU-20 is a tuner - if the Digitech can do that, too, then I wouldn't need it, and would instead get a buffer pedal. A buffer pedal converts high impedance signals and turns them into low impedance signals, which helps preserve your treble and keep noise down. The DS-1 / Big Muff is for the rock distortion (depends what you like), and the EQ pedal is either for tone tweaking or a solo boost. You could also use an overdrive pedal (Digitech Bad Monkey, Boss SD-1 I think) to do basically the same thing.

There's other things you could do, including just using the DS-1 as a solo boost (turn gain way down, volume up) for the metal band and use it alone for the rock band, but that's a start for you.

Some pedals just sound better than their digital equivalents. A Boss Chorus (CE-1? something like that) is one of the best chorus pedals I've ever heard, only the H20 pedal sounded nicer than that. If you have a delay you probably want it to be a tap-tempo delay. An MXR Phaser is usually going to sound better than the digital version.

So, you've got some options - but I still like the flexibility that a multifx + distortion pedal + booster pedal gives you, in terms of you still being able to do a lot but not having a lot that can screw up. Even if the multifx fails, you've still go clean and distortion, so it's not like it's the end of the world - and if you have two distortion pedals, even one can fail and you can still use the other.

I love EQ. EQ is your friend! If you cut some of your bass frequencies before they hit the distortion, you'll tighten up and clarify your distortion tone a great deal - that alone is a great reason to have one and leave it always on! Boosting mids before distortion then cutting them after is a great way to add more apparent distortion to your tone without turning it into sonic sludge. Danelectro pedals may be cheap, but they make a great little EQ. It's a little hissier than the Boss EQ, but if you're playing live and/or have a noise gate no one will notice or care anyways.

Oh yeah, noise gate - Boss NS-2 I think. It's a good idea to have one of these, especially if you can put it in your fx loop. I found recently that putting an octave pedal in my fx loop thickened + warmed up my sound, as long as I didn't set it too ridiculously.... Same thing with delay, a little delay in the fx loop (keep it short, low in the mix) and you get the same thing.

And there I go rambling again.... good luck!

Saul

KLON Centaur guitar effects pedal demo with King Bee Guitars relic Tele and Jaguar Jr amp