How to Set Levels on a Pedal Board

Video Transcript

"Hi! This is Adam Anderson on behalf of Expert Village. I am going to talk about setting levels on your individual pedals on your pedal board. So once you've attached your individual pedals to your pedal board and you've powered them up and put all the individual cables in between them, the next thing you need to do is set the levels on the individual pedals. It is important to set the levels on your pedals because each of them interact with them in different ways. So you want to make sure each pedal is set to their optimal performance so that you get the best tone out of your guitar. You will want to start to set your levels on your game based affects first since that really determines the overall volume of your guitar tone. So when I say set your game based affects, remember I am talking about distortion pedals, EQ pedals, your compressors, that kind of thing. The next thing that you want to set is your noise compressor and your tuner. So setting your noise suppressor is very important because that determines the amount of signal that is going to come out of the pedal when you are not playing and when you are playing. So that really depends on the type of room that you are in, the type of tone you are going for, if it is a heavy rock sound or more of a clean jazzy type sound. So you want to set your noise suppressor so you have the amount of guitar tone and volume coming out of the pedal when you want it to and to cut that signal off when you don't want it to. So the next type of level you want to set is your modulation based affects. Those you really don't need to touch so much because those aren't dependent on the type of music that you are playing or the volume that is coming out of your car amp. Those are sort of your warbley kind of time underwater kind of sounds that add special affects. "