The Essential Guitar Pedals Every Guitar Player Should Have
Any guitar player worth his salt has one or two guitar pedals at their disposal since they are crucial pieces of equipments for anyone looking to improve their skills and enrich their sound pallet. They can pave the way for making so many different sounds with your guitar and help you develop an ear for new and more creative ways to express yourself. Electric guitar pedals come in many different types, creating different effects and this is how they enable players to paint a picture that can’t be put into words or on a canvas.
If you are a beginner that has just started dabbling in the world of music, you need to be familiar with the following three essential electric guitar pedals that have the potential to immensely improve the way you sound: boost pedal, overdrive pedal and the distortion pedal. If you are even a little familiar with electric guitar pedals, these names should ring a bell and help give you an idea which one is used for what effect. Another important segment behind the main idea of guitar pedal is authenticity – finding your own style.
The simplest effect pedal is the boost pedal, used by Eric Clapton on the Bluesbreakers record. These types of electric guitar pedals are used to boost the signal of your guitar. Guitar players love this because it allows them to hit the front end of your amp with more signal. Both Brian May from Queen and Ritchie Blackmore used the boost pedal for their rigs to get more gain out of their amps. They also add more colour to your tone, which is something that any guitar player needs.
Another must-have is the overdrive pedal and the term overdrive stands for all of those moments when the tube amp is driven past its range to give us a cleaner tone. This is something that all guitar players have come to love and seek out. This type of pedal was pushed into legendary status by the great Stevie Ray Vaughan. The overdrive can be subtle and it can produce warm, slightly overdriven tones. The spectrum of this type of tones is huge, from BB King’s slightly overdriven tube amp tones all the way to Metallica’s thick distortion.
A distortion pedal can be a great addition to your arsenal. The distortion box is used to distort or overdrive a note from the bottom and top side of the sound wave, what is known as clipping. The more clipping is inflicted upon the wave, the more the sound becomes distorted. Many distortion pedals can be used as a overdrive pedal, which is called gain staging. Gain staging is putting one over-driven tone into another and cascading them to produce even more gain or distortion.
If you are serious about improving your guitar skills these pedals are a must-try for any beginner to get a more polished feel to their sound. They will add to your confidence and make you more enthusiastic about experimenting with your music, which is key to improvement and finding your own personal style.
