Guitar pedals are on the market for electric guitar so that you can completely change the quality of your performance without much work on your part. It's possible that you might not be the type of person that enjoys pedals, but some of them are essential for playing a near-flawless show.
More and more guitar pedals are being created every day and it can be confusing to know what they all do to the sound of your electric guitar. Here is a short list of pedals for your electric guitar that can add more practicality, awesome style, or killer tone.
1. Go back to the 60s and 70s with a wah pedal. There's a few signature electric guitar sounds that came out of the 60s and one of them was the unforgettable wah pedal. Connect your guitar to a wah pedal and you can transform your tones into psychedelic waves that can really get your crowd in the mood to protest.
2. Get rid of amplifier hum with a noise gate. Sometimes your guitar amplifier might have a very powerful distortion channel that hums and hisses in the background when your strings are not vibrating. To get rid of that hum, connect to a noise gate pedal and when you're not playing your electric guitar, you'll hear silence.
3. Check your string pitches live with a tuner pedal. Whether you like it or not, the pitches on your electric guitar are going to go out of tune at the worst times and you need to be prepared. Get a tuner pedal to hook up to your guitar live on stage and you won't have to worry about crazy strings again.
4. Compression pedals will level the muscle you put into strumming. If you're the type of guitarist that varies their strumming during a show, but wants almost all of the material to stay level, you might get a lot of use out of a compression pedal. Compressors not only give balance to the level of effort you use to strum, but can add some attack to your electric guitar's notes as well.
5. Boost your distortion with an overdrive pedal. Sometimes an electric guitarist just needs some more distortion and buying an overdrive pedal is the way to solve that problem. The next time you feel you need more pump on a solo or raging verse, just stomp on your overdrive and blow the roof off the auditorium.
6. Mess around on stage with a loop pedal. If you're a guitarist that likes to repeat sections often and then add new riffs over-top, then a loop pedal will be perfect for you. Imagine playing your electric guitar once and then having that section to play along with while it repeats over and over again. It's your own personal back-up guitarist!
Guitar pedals are easy to abuse since they can distort sounds, alter pitches, and block noise, but using them in their context is the most important part. Think about this list of guitar pedals for your electric guitar the next time that you go to the music store.
