Types of Effects
Form Factors
Effects generally come in a few traditional form factors:
- Stomp Pedals/Floorboards
- Rack
- Desktop/Other Devices
Stomp Pedals usually offer a single effect, switched on/off by stepping on the pedal (or its primary footswitch). Many players combine numerous of these effects, daisy-chaining them together on a pedalboard. Often only 1 or 2 are engaged simultaneously, although some players will layer many at once.
To turn many on/off at once, you have to quickly press numerous switches in a row - a difficult process known in the guitar community as tap dancing. To alleviate this, there are "loop" pedals that allow you to place several pedals in a loop that can be bypassed or made part of the signal chain with a single foot tap.
Effects are often lumped together in multi-effects (also called multi-FX or MFX) units, where groups of effects and settings can be stored and recalled as patches. Multi-effects often come in a floorboard format, which features several footswitches, as though it were multiple stomps in one unit. These are typically used to change patches, as well as toggle effects on and off, with many units allowing you to assign which effect each switch controls.
Rack gear typically offers more complex effects than stomps. While they often have an onboard display and buttons or dials to edit and create patches (or interface with a PC, tablet, or smart phone), they require an interface to external gear to switch patches or otherwise control them in a live situation. This is often done via a MIDI foot controller.
Desktop or other devices are more rare - often standalone devices that are fully hand-controlled, not designed to be integrated with other gear or into a live setting or do so with static parameters.
Traditional Effects Types
- Noise Gate - Expands the signal below a threshold to make low volume lower, essentially silencing hum and noise picked up by guitar pickups when muting the guitar
- Compression - Compresses the signal above a threshold to tame peaks and appear to increase sustain
- Wah Pedals - A foot-controlled pedal that alters the signal's frequency response before distortion to create a "wah wah" sound
- EQ - Adjusts the frequency balance of the signal
- Modulation Effects - Uses low-frequency oscillators to vary the tone over time in a variety of ways, including phase-shifting (Phasers), pitch-shifting (Chorus/Vibrato), delay times (Flangers), and volume (Tremelo)
- Delay - Repeats the signal after a specified time at a certain decay rate, possibly with various tonal manipulations
- Reverb - Emulates the reflections/reverberations of an environment
- Pitch Shifting - Shifts the pitch of the signal
- Boost - Used to boost the signal level before an amp to get it to distort more heavily; may also shape the signal a bit to get a different tone to the distortion
- Distortion Effects - Generate distortion, but often using solid state components rather than tubes for a dirtier or stranger distortion