No longer exclusively used by guitarists and bassists, more people than ever are assembling pedalboards to accomplish their musical goals with effects pedals, including keyboard players, producers, and even drummers. Pedals are incredibly useful for performing live, but can also serve as great tools for composition or studio work, whether they inspire you to play a certain way or offer a unique sonic spice that's unlike any of your other tools. Best of all, there's so many options out there that it's possible to get a collection of pedals going at a fairly modest price.

But the nearly endless possibilities might lead you to feeling some amount of option paralysis—where do you start in building your first pedalboard? In this article, our goal is to share some advice on picking and arranging pedals for your board. For the purposes of demonstration, we'll be using some specific products, but the overarching concepts should be applicable to nearly any scenario, from establishing goals to considerations for future expansion.

Defining Goals for Your Pedalboard

Whether you're planning out a pedalboard, modular synthesizer, or any other highly configurable and personalized collection of tools for making music, defining goals is the key to success. It's easy to throw a bunch of different pedals together and call it a finished board, but it's another thing entirely if they all work together and complement each other. Some goals may be practical in nature, such as remaining under a certain budget or working within airline carry-on size constraints, while others might be more creative in nature or influenced by your personal taste. It's also fairly common to lay out a pedalboard for making specific kinds of music—while anything is possible, it's unlikely that someone would use the exact same collection of pedals to craft ambient soundscapes with a synthesizer, and then pack up the same board with your seven-string guitar to shred it out with a metal band.

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For this article, let's keep things simple and plan out a budget-friendly, all-rounder sort of pedalboard. We'll aim to keep the initial total cost of the pedals themselves around $500, and make choices that could work in a number of different musical scenarios. With all of the options that are available these days, it should be possible to achieve nearly any sound at this price point, with enough room to account for personal preferences. Of course, these choices are often highly subjective and dependent upon your own personal needs, but in sharing my thought process for choosing pedals, it should hopefully serve as a role model for your own pedal board planning adventures. Once we have everything laid out and have elaborated upon a few ideas, we'll then talk about ways to think about expanding the board in the future.

Before we get into the actual pedals themselves, I want to note that for the purposes of this article, we're not going to be worrying about the power supplies, cabling, or the actual board itself. There's quite a lot of variance in how these elements can affect a budget, and truthfully you can get pretty far by grabbing a plank of plywood from a craft store and daisy-chaining power from something like a One-Spot. Down the road, it could be worth looking into some more professional and robust options, but if money is a big concern it's easy to get something affordable to hold everything together.

Pedal Rundown

Finally, to complete our spatialization package, I've chosen the 3 Series Reverb from JHS. It's the most affordable reverb pedal that we currently have in our catalog, though that should come with no negative connotations as far as its sound is concerned. It's a solid, versatile reverb that balances well with any instrument, and it couldn't be more straightforward to use. It's also worth mentioning the 3 Series Hall Reverb, which is available for exactly the same price and provides a lush, modulation-capable alternative to the standard Reverb. They're both great, though I imagine the classic flavor will have more universal appeal, and so I went with it for this particular setup.

Some Brief Thoughts on Pedal Order

One of my favorite parts of building a pedalboard comes after I've chosen the pedals to be included, and that's determining the order in which everything will be connected. In a previous article, I went into a bit more detail on exploring different pedal orders, where I talk about some of the basic ideas on a general level. But here, we're going to put some of those concepts into practice, and discuss why you might want to patch things up one way or another.

Let's start with talking about stacked drive pedals, or the idea of engaging multiple overdrives and distortions at once. Theoretically, stacks could contain three, four, or even more pedals, and your preferred order may vary depending on your personal taste, musical needs, and the actual pedals that you have. For our modest board today, we'll just be playing around with the order of the Plumes and DS-1, as those are the only two drive pedals we have here, but it should be enough to demonstrate the idea if this is a new concept to you.

Finally, on the topic of experimental pedal placements, try throwing your compressor at the very end of your chain, including your delays and reverbs. Interesting sounds can be achieved by pumping long trails and tails of effects into a compressor, especially with more percussive or transient-rich source material, so give it a shot and see if it's something that works for your music.

Considerations for Expansion

Of course, there might come a day where you'd like to expand upon your basic pedal setup. Ideally, your decision should be influenced by how you use your pedals, and supplement areas that you feel are lacking in your current musical needs.

First off, if you don't have a tuner pedal yet, I'd highly suggest grabbing one. Your music will probably benefit from your instrument being in tune with itself or other musicians, and this type of pedal will usually also work as a mute switch. It's hard to go wrong with a tuner pedal: the classic TU-3 from Boss, for instance, is a dependable choice that I've often turned to over the years. It primarily operates in a chromatic mode, which is useful for those that aren't using a guitar or bass, or who frequently play in non-standard tunings.

If you're happy with the core of your tones, but are looking to carve out or boost a few pesky frequencies, then it's probably time to look at investing in an equalizer pedal. There's a number of reasons to do this: maybe you're looking to coax a bit more aggression out of your drive pedals, or you're frequently dropping your pedalboard in front of a different backline rig every night and need to compensate for variations in amps, speaker cabinets, or characteristics of the venue. The most straightforward EQ would be something with graphic band controls like the MXR 6-Band EQ, but you'll also find parametric designs like in preamp and EQ combos like the JHS Colour Box V2, or more creative approaches like Fairfield Circuitry's Long Life. EQ is a valuable tool for anyone's toolbox, and there's plenty of options out there as simple or complex as needed for your particular application.

For a more exploratory route, there's always the expansive world of modulation pedals. We've talked about some neat choruses and phasers recently, but that's merely a small bit of what's out there: tremolo, vibrato, ring modulators, rotary, and much more. In the video above, I'm using the Neo Mistress from EHX, which is a flanger, but it's worth spending some time familiarizing yourself with the different types of modulation pedals to see what kind of textures they could add to your music.

If you found the part of the process where exploring pedal order was the most fun, it could be worth looking into tools which facilitate pedal arrangement as part of the creative process. Some of these tools lean more into the practical side of things, such as the various Loop Switchers or Radial Engineering's BigShot EFX, but that's not the full extent of this category. Others like the Boredbrain Patchulator and Xotic X-Blender really encourage exploration, through directly re-patching the connections or blending in separate effect chains, respectively. I'm also a fan of mixers like the Old Blood Signal Blender and the BASTL Dude, which allow for several parallel signal paths to converge in one place.

Lastly, if you envision yourself descending deep into the pedal rabbit hole, it might be wise to grab a buffer or two. Buffers are simply unity gain stages placed at the front, rear, or both ends of a pedalboard, and serve the purpose of combating the build-up of capacitance over the course of long cable runs. This manifests itself as a gradual loss of high-frequencies, but buffers are the exact tool used to prevent this from happening. Many pedals from the likes of Boss contain internal buffers, while others like Strymon offer selectable modes for either true or buffered bypass. But if you're exclusively rocking a decent number of true bypass pedals, standalone buffers exist and might help to bring life back to your tone.

Time to Rock!

Assembling a pedal board is a journey of exploration in itself, and while it may seem daunting the first time around, breaking things down and staying true to your goals is going to ensure the success of your build. Plus, the great thing about pedalboards is that they can be put together over time, and if something doesn't work out it's easy to swap one pedal out for another. And at the end of the day, remember to trust your ears—if you like how it sounds, then you must be doing something right!