Guitar Pedals 101: How Do They Work?

Ever since the electric guitar became a musical mainstay, guitarists have been trying to make their tone sound different. Back in the 1930s, these effects were built into the guitar itself, which meant they were limited in scope. A good example of this is the Rickenbacker Electro Vibrola Spanish guitar, which used pulleys to move the bridge, creating a vibrato effect.

Jump forward further in time and guitarists were finding new ways to make their own sounds. Link Wray famously slashed his amp's speakers to help create the tone used on Rumble. These weren't sustainable solutions: the guitar pedal would make effects sustainable and easy to achieve.

It had actually been invented back in 1948: the first guitar pedal was the Trem Trol 8000 Tremolo pedal which used mechanical means to create a tremolo effect that entranced audiences. In the 1960s, the guitar pedal would become mainstream, with stompboxes a hallmark of the British Invasion sound.

Today, guitar pedals are a big industry in and of themselves. Guitarists like John Frusciante, Andy Summers, and The Edge have huge pedalboards that warp and distort their sound into something unique.

Yet how do guitar pedals work? In this bite-sized article we're going to give you guitar pedals 101, showing you exactly how these little boxes can change your sound so massively.

Ready to find out more? Keep reading and happy playing!

How a Guitar Pedal Works

The problem with talking about how guitar pedals works is that the subject is incredibly intricate. If you aren't an electrical engineer, you'd need thousands of pages to understand the nitty-gritty of how they work. Let's look at it on a fairly basic level.

Your guitar sends a signal along the wire. This signal can be modified or converted to sound by speakers. There are two main ways that the signal is changed, known as digital and analog processing.

Digital Processing

When a signal is digitally processed, it is sampled at high rates, often 44,100 times per second. These samples are converted into a binary code of ones and zeroes. An effects algorithm can then be applied to these samples, changing their form.

One example of an algorithm would be with amplification: if you multiply a signal by two it can amplify it. The sample's numerical values would be multiplied by two and you have your new distorted signal.

It doesn't end there, though. The digital signal now needs to be converted back into analog.

To do this, the numerical values of these samples are converted into voltage levels. These voltage levels are smoothed out and reproduced as sound.

Analog Processing

Analog effects pedals reigned supreme before the 1980s. These don't sample electrical signals and convert them to binary: instead, they modify the signals directly.

Amplifiers boost the signal strength using transistors or op amps, clipping diodes cut off anything that is outside a certain voltage range, etc. Every analog effect affects the electrical signal differently, and it would take too long to go into all the details.

Let's take a look at how a few of the most popular effects change the signal.

How Fuzz Pedals Work

Fuzz pedals are a type of guitar pedal that gives your tone a fuzzy sound. You've heard fuzz pedals famously used in songs like When the Music's Over by The Doors or Satisfaction by The Rolling Stones.

Analog versions of these pedals used transistors to boost the signal and feed it through other transistors. The boosted signal will clip on the second transistor, giving it a whole new sound, which will then be clipped further by any other transistors in the pedal.

The number and type of transistors used will determine the final sound of the signal. A Big Muff pedal, which uses silicon transistors will sound different from a fuzz pedal that uses germanium transistors.

Extreme versions of fuzz can be seen in songs by Kyuss, Royal Blood, and other hard rock/metal bands.

How Wah Pedals Work

The wah pedal changes the sound of the guitar to a "wah" sound, almost like a crying baby. A good example of the wah sound can be heard on the legendary Sweet Child O' Mine by Guns N' Roses and Voodoo Child (Slight Return) by The Jimi Hendrix Experience.

When you move the pedal up and down with your foot, you're changing the parameters of a filter that only allows some of your guitar's sound through. This sound is then boosted and passed on down the effects chain.

How Reverb Pedals Work

Reverb pedals mimic the sound of an echo. They're used all over rock music but are a cornerstone of shoegaze and post-rock.  To get that echoey sound, your pedal takes the sound that's being passed down the chain and alters it so that you have two copies of the sound "dry" or unchanged and "wet" or changed.

Using the pedal's controls, you can change the effect ratio, which is the difference in volume between these two, the decay, which is how long the wet sound will be audible for, and the pre-delay, which is the delay between the dry and wet signal. Using these controls, you can mimic echo from any number of different-sized venues.

Other Ways to Change Tone

A guitar pedal represents a great way to apply effects to your guitar tone, but they're far from the only way to do so. Here at Gerlt Technologies, we make hundreds of different rack effects, comparable in price to guitar pedals. Instead of having cumbersome pedalboards, all you need are an effects rack and you're golden!  Visit Compares To for the full list of effects we have available right now.

The best part of using rack effects is that there aren't any limits: you're not going to be limited by the size of your pedalboard, nor will you need to lug around all those different pedals. You have our enclosure and that's it: your effects have been made more portable!

If you've got any questions about us, our effects, or our services, please get in touch with us! We'd be happy to hear from you.