Bbe Fuzz

Bbe Fuzz

What order should i put my guitar pedals in?

Hi i was wondering in which order i should put my pedals in order for it to sound the clearest/best.
I have
Original Cry Baby Wah
Boss D-1 Distortion
Boss Super Over Drive
BBE Free Fuzz
Some Chorus Pedal
and then a boss loop pedal

what order should they go in?

Wow, three different distortion pedals?

Something I have learned over the years is that simplicity is best - I've had more things go wrong when gigging than I care to think about, everything from forgetting a midi pedal or an adapter to batteries dying to patch cords shorting out to having knobs break off during a set because I tripped over it during one particular hard rocking moment (for the record, I did a particularly wild guitar hero style move, tripped over a pedal, breaking off a knob, landed on my back, narrowly missing the singers voice processing pedal, and still managed to finish the last few chords of the end of the song without screwing them up. I felt like a really smart dumb person for that one. *grin* ).

Anyways, the point of that is that simplicity is really important. Fewer pedals means fewer things can go wrong. My suggestion is that you use the absolute fewest pedals that you need to get your sound. When playing solo or jamming with your friends, well, it's not such a big deal (unless something goes wrong), but when playing live I really really recommend trimming the excess - power adapter cords tangle, leads can short out or get lost or come unplugged, batteries can be lost and forgotten and die at the worst times, etc etc.

Anyhoo, enough with the soapbox.

My initial suggestion would be to put them in this order

guitar -> SD-1 -> DS-1 -> Free Fuzz -> Chorus -> Loop -> wah -> amp

I generally put the wah last when I want to use it as a filter or as a solo boost. Sometimes it sounds better, though, when you put it before distortion, chorus, etc, it depends on the wah and the pedals.

Generally its buffer, tuner, compression, distortion, modulation (chorus, phaser, flanger), time-based (delay, echo, verb, loop), eq and filters, wah. If you're heavily into using your loop, the wah should go before the loop, so you can incorporate its sound into the looping process. Obviously if you don't have a buffer or compressor or tuner you don't need to worry about that stuff, but that's the general outline most guitarists tend to go with.

I recommend the SD-1 (super overdrive) first because it has the least gain and can be used as a boost for either your amp or the other pedals. The DS-1 can be used in this way too, but overdriving the SD-1 won't sound as good as the SD-1 overdriving the DS-1, Fuzz, or amp itself, so that is the logical order for me - least gain to highest gain.

Of course, experimentation is important - once you figure out what each thing does, you may want to do something different. Putting the SD-1 or the DS-1 *after* the loop, ie, last in your chain, could give you the option of having a very "lo-fi" tone... just turn your gain down and level to match volume with the pedal off... everything goes into the DS-1, and as long as the gain isn't too high, it'll sound fuzzy but shouldn't become too mushy or indistinct. One way to get an interesting character from your tone. You can do the same with a wah... set it to about 2/3rds forward, always on. Many guitar players do this to both round off the top end or to help "cut through" the mix.

Good luck!

Saul