catherine evangelista's List: How to play the guitar?

Most guitarists have an intuitive sense as to where basic effects should go in their signal chain. If you have two pedals, a distortion unit and a digital delay, you would naturally put the distortion before the delay (the guitar goes into the distortion, the distortion into the delay, and the delay into the amp). But the more pedals you use, the trickier it gets, and some truly bizarre gizmos—like a digital whammy pedal—might put you at a loss to explain just effects go where they do relative to others in the chain.