You might wonder why I’m still drawn toward effects pedals when plug‑ins can often do so much more, but in a way that answers the question. The majority of effects pedals have a manageable number of controls that enable the user to explore the full range of their capabilities in a short space of time. By contrast, some plug‑in effects take you way down the rabbit hole of adjusting obscure parameters. There are some pedals that take a little more exploration, especially some of the granular delay offerings out there, but in the main they do what they say on the tin.
Another reason to love pedals is that you don’t have to authorise them to get them to work and they won’t stop working when falling foul of an incompatible operating system upgrade!
Pedals tend to be free from any perceptible latency, which can be a big deal when it comes to playing feel, and all you need to connect them to each other is a supply of short jack patch cables. In the studio a pedal power supply unit that can run multiple pedals is a good option, and one with fully isolated power outlets will ensure no additional noise or hum creeps in. Fully isolated outputs also allow you to connect those pedals that have non‑standard, centre‑pin‑positive connections simply by using a polarity inverting power cable. In my own studio I have a low table set up with a multi‑outlet PSU installed and I have covered the tabletop with non‑slip mat so that I can hook up different arrangements of pedals without the risk of them sliding around. This is a good system for feeding into my DAW as my setups don’t usually require me to stomp on switches during recording, and if I need a volume pedal or expression pedal, I can still put that on the floor. In some ways, stringing together a load of pedals is the guitarist’s equivalent of a modular synthesizer, though that doesn’t exclude users of other electronic instruments from using them too!
Another reason to love pedals is that you don’t have to authorise them to get them to work and they won’t stop working when falling foul of an incompatible operating system upgrade! What’s more, a pedal often costs less than a plug‑in that tries to emulate it, and while you can run multiple instances of a plug‑in, I tend to use pedals while recording rather than for mixing so I don’t need multiple instances. And, should you fall out of love with a pedal, you’ll find that they are easier to sell than plug‑ins too, even where the plug‑in has an owner transfer policy, which many don’t.
There’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from setting up a pedalboard to meet specific live needs...
For those of us who still play live (I’ve suffered for my music so I make sure everybody else does too!), pedals provide a practical means to take effects on stage without the need for a computer to run plug‑ins, though that is of course an option if you like to work that way. There’s a great deal of satisfaction to be had from setting up a pedalboard to meet specific live needs, and in my case I have three of them: one for the covers band I play with, one for duo gigs and yet another for solo ambient gigs where I need things like loopers, granular delays, long reverbs, envelope shapers and so on. You can of course buy amp sim/effects units that do everything in one box, but there’s something reassuring about being able to just reach out to a pedal and turn a knob if something needs adjusting mid performance. And they come in such pretty colours!