How to Connect your Pedals

List of pedals on my pedal board:

T.C.Electronic Poly Tuner

T.C.Electronic Hall of Fame Reverb

T.C.Electronic Alter Ego

JHS Morning Glory and Charlie Brown

Cry Baby Wah

Xotic SP compressor

Ibanez Tube Screamer

Roland EV-5 Expression pedal

Voodoo Lab Power Supply

Pedal Train Pedal Board

I will be covering the gear I use and also what order to connect your pedals to get the best sound out of them.

This is my current pedal board pictured above. As a disclaimer be warned that my pedals on the board change on a whim. So with that lets take a look at what I'm using.The order you connect your pedals makes a big difference on the sound you get from them. Some gear not on my list, but I use here and there are my Boss DD-20, Boss GR-55, and Digitech Looper. The most resent purchase is the Alter Ego which is an anolog delay pedal with a 40 second looper. All I can say is wow this pedal is amazing! the trials on the delay are so nice. This will be a pedal that always stays on my board. Another pedal that will always stay on my pedal board is my JHS Morning Glory/Charlie Brown Pedal. It is the blue pedal in the picture. I leave the Morning Glory on unless I'm switching to the Charlie Brown, so this pedal is always on even for my "clean" sound. I love the way it makes my guitar sound and it responds great when you back it off on the guitar's volume. I also have the Cry Baby mod from JHS pedals and I don't think I have heard a better sounding wah. OK, lets get into what we connect first. Normally the first thing I connect from my guitar is the Tuner, but on my board I opted to connect the wah first and then the tuner. The Mod on my wah included "True Bypass" so I'm not worried about putting it before my tuner. For those of you who don't know what true bypass is- It lets your signal path from the guitar pass through the pedal without the pedal effecting the tone when the pedal is not actively engaged. If a pedal (like my tube screamer) doesn't say it is true bypass, then even when it is not on it is effecting your tone in some way. So if you have too many pedals like this, you may hear some of your high end missing along with other tonal colors added. From the tuner I go into my Tube Screamer and then into my JHS Morning Glory. The Morning Glory is a lite overdrive sound when it's on by itself, but when I turn on the Tube Screamer with it, I get a heavier sounding distortion that is good for distorted chords. When I have both the Charlie Brown and the Tube Screamer on, I get a nice heavy distortion that is great for solos. The next pedal I go into after my JHS pedal is the compressor. I use the compressor as a volume boost for soloing and it gives me a little more sustain when soloing as an added bonus. Some people put the compressor before all their distortion pedals and this can have a nice effect too, so I recommend seeing which place you like the compressor on your pedal board. the next place I go is the delay pedal. If you have a chorus pedal or flanger pedal I recommend connecting them first before going into your delay pedal. From the delay pedal I go into my reverb pedal and if I am using a looper pedal I connect the looper pedal last before going to my amp. The Roland EV-5 expression pedal controls functions on my Alter Ego Delay pedal. Well that is my pedal board and how I have it set up. Let me know what works for you and feel free to try something different. If I get some feedback on this post maybe I can go deeper into what each pedal does and what effects you can get from them. until then see you guys later and thanks for checking out Uncut Stones!

 

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