Bottom line: There are no hard and fast rules. You can order the pedals in whatever order you want to get the sound you are after. Experiment with all the different configurations to find what you like best. However, there are some fairly standard orderings that tend to give familiar and well liked sounds.

The thing to keep in mind when thinking about the order of effect pedals is that the effect is going to modify the sound that is coming into. So if you run a clean guitar into a distortion, pedal you get a distorted guitar tone coming out of that pedal, simple right? If you then send that distorted guitar sound through a wah pedal, the wah sound applies to the distorted sound and you get a very distinct sound, somewhat like synth sound.

If you reverse those two pedals it will completely change the sound, because the wah is now only having an effect on the original clean guitar tone. Experimenting with both of these orders will help you to understand your pedals and the sounds you can achieve better.

The following is a common order used by many guitarists and is a great place to start:

• Guitar
• Tuner
• Filter Effects – Phaser, Wah
• Compressor (a lot of people put these very first but there are some benefits to having it after the filters)
• Overdrive & Distortion
• Equalisers Pitch Effects – Harmonisers, Pitch benders, Octave Dividers
• Modulation Effects – Flanger, Chorus
• Level Controllers – Noise Gates, Limiters, Volume Pedals, Tremolo, Panning
• Echo Effects – Delay, Reverb
• Amp