Over the last few years, despite having plenty of outboard gear and plug‑ins to choose from, I’ve increasingly found myself using guitar pedals while mixing. It started as a way to access specific effects that I couldn’t find in software form, but my experiments have led me to realise just how much potential my pedalboard has as a mixing toolbox. In fact, so useful have I found pedals when mixing that I’ve developed an entirely new workflow to accommodate them.
In this article, I’ll take you through what you need to know if you want to use pedals in this way, explaining how to hook them up and offering some examples of how I like to use pedals when mixing.
So what’s the attraction of pedals compared with plug‑ins or rackmount gear? I still use both of those, of course, but pedals inject more excitement into the process because they give me immediate hands‑on control of all the essential parameters. There’s no messing about with a mouse or configuring a MIDI controller and, unlike with rack gear, everything can be laid out in front of me. In fact, it’s rather like performing with a synth. This fun, experimental approach can lead you to rewarding results when mixing on your own, but it can also be a great way to involve clients: chain multiple pedals together, invite the artist (maybe not the bass player!) to take control of one and you might just capture something wonderful!
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Producer/engineer Joe Barresi uses pedals as part of his mixing process. I’m not alone in enjoying this way of working. In fact, some of the world’s best‑known engineers, have been doing it for years. Joe Barresi (Queens of the Stone Age, the Melvins), for example, started down this road years ago, as he explained in a 2016 interview with pedal manufacturers EarthQuaker Devices: “Back in my early days it was out of necessity because you couldn’t afford a $4000 Eventide Harmonizer, or a $6000 reverb, or whatever, so you bought a $50 guitar pedal and turned your volume down going into it. This was before reamps. We didn’t know what reamps were. We just turned the signal coming off the tape machine down, or fed it off a send on the console.”
But he found more to enjoy than keeping the costs low: “When you have a piece of gear in a rack, it tends to sit in the back of the room on a preset or two, but you don’t really tend to play with it as much as you do when you’re reamping with guitar pedals. That, to me, is definitely a more performance‑oriented way of making of music.”
If you’re new to using pedals in a mixing setup, you probably have questions about connecting unbalanced instrument‑level pedals to your audio interface. Googling for information might give you an idea, but there’s plenty of misinformation out there, so I’ll try to set that straight here.
Creative Uses For Guitar Pedals In Your Mix
First, note that, as when connecting any outboard gear to an audio interface, your interface must have at least three outputs, since you’ll need two for stereo monitoring. I can’t think of an interface with three outputs so, realistically, a two‑in, four‑out interface is the minimum requirement.
You can connect the output of the last pedal in your chain to your interface’s high‑impedance (or ‘Hi‑Z’) instrument input, just as when recording a guitar/pedal setup direct. If your interface doesn’t have such an input, you’ll need a DI box between the pedal and the interface’s mic input. Level mismatches are more of a problem at the other end, where the line‑level signals from a typical audio interface are much higher in level/voltage than the instrument‑level signal most pedals are designed to receive. Some digital pedals from manufacturers like Eventide and Strymon can be set to operate at line or instrument level, but really, you want the option to use any pedal. Creative distortion has its place, but feeding a full line‑level signal into a pedal that expects a much lower level will generally just sound bad. To avoid overloading most pedals, then, you need a way to turn down that signal.
Another potential issue is that professional audio interfaces are generally intended to work with balanced signals, whereas pedals have unbalanced inputs. In practice, most interfaces are happy working with unbalanced gear but it does depend on how their outputs have been designed, so it’s a good idea to check the manual, to see if a specific type of cable is required.
Tc Helicon Voicetone R1 Vocal Reverb Pedal Reviews
If you intend to use pedals a lot, I strongly recommend buying a reamp box. These take care of the level drop and the (un)balancing for you...
If you intend to use pedals a lot, I strongly recommend buying a reamp box. These take care of the level drop and the (un)balancing for you, and usually have a transformer inside, which can be useful in preventing ground loops. I’ve recommended some reamp options in the box elsewhere in this article; they needn’t be expensive, but if you just want to experiment, you may be able to get by with what you already have.
If you use a mixer, for example, you can try hooking the pedal(s) up to the mixer’s line I/O as a send effect, and use a channel’s aux send to control how much signal is sent to the pedal. If your audio interface has a headphone amp with an independent feed from the main stereo mix, you could try using a Y‑lead (ie. TRS to two TS jacks) to split the stereo headphone output and feed one channel to your pedal chain, using the headphone level knob to set the signal level. You could also simply attenuate the signal digitally, inside your DAW or audio interface routing software, and just use a standard line output from your interface. Alternatively, if you have one to hand, you can put a passive attenuator, such as a cheap monitor controller, between your interface and the pedal’s input. A passive DI box used ‘in reverse’ can make a workable substitute for a reamp box, as can a buffered‑bypass pedal with the bypass engaged. But, as I said earlier, a proper reamp box is my preferred option: it guarantees that you can hook up any pedal quickly and easily, and many also offer useful facilities like level adjustment.
Boss Ve 2 Vocal Harmonist Guitar Pedal Ln82589
Figure 1 shows a basic interface/pedal setup. I actually use an SSL 2+ (two in/four out) interface, which allows me to create two mono send/return loops or one stereo/mono‑stereo loop, while leaving a stereo out for monitoring. But as the SSL’s unbalanced RCA outputs 3+4 aren’t the norm, I’ve shown a more typical Audient iD14 MkII, with all four outputs on TRS jacks. In the diagram, the interface’s outputs 1 and 2 are used for monitoring, so a line‑level signal comes from output 3 to a Radial reamp box, which delivers an unbalanced instrument‑level signal to an EarthQuaker Afterneath reverb pedal. The pedal’s output is connected to the Audient’s front‑panel high‑impedance instrument input. The complete circuit comprises just the interface, three cables, a pedal and a reamp box.
You also need to set up the routing in your DAW, and Figure 2 shows a simple way to do this. I’ve used Pro Tools 12, but although the way you configure this side of things is a little different in every DAW, all of them should be capable of this sort of routing, whereby the ‘Sarah Vocal’ track is routed to the interface’s output 3, and the ‘Pedal Return’ track’s input is the interface’s Input 1. Some DAWs, including Pro Tools, Cubase, Logic, Live and Studio One, allow you to set up an ‘external effect’ plug‑in, which can be a slicker approach: once configured, you can insert this routing plug‑in on a track, like any other plug‑in (though you can only have one instance per hardware output).
Figure 2: A basic send/return setup in Pro Tools 12, with the pedal signal coming back to the DAW on a separate track.
Can You Use Guitar Pedals On A Microphone?
With native DAWs, you may encounter noticeable latency: the processed signal is delayed as it passes through your interface’s converters, buffers and any digital devices in your signal chain. This will be particularly obvious if you have a relatively high audio interface buffer setting, which many of us do while mixing because it places less strain on the CPU.
There are two aspects of latency to consider: first, how it affects what you hear as you tweak the pedal controls and thus your performance; and second, how the DAW compensates for latency when placing the recording on the timeline. If the former is a problem, you can use the usual latency‑busting remedies you’d opt for when recording, such as using your interface’s direct monitoring or reducing the audio buffer size. For the latter, the approach will vary according to your DAW.
Those ‘external effect’ plug‑ins I mentioned typically have a ‘ping’ feature, whereby they send an impulse through the (bypassed) chain and measure the offset between the sent and received signal. This allows them to declare the correct latency to your DAW’s automatic latency compensation system, which will ensure your recordings are correctly aligned. Where your DAW doesn’t have such a feature, you may need to measure the delay and compensate for it manually. To do this, make a recording on a track adjacent to the source signal, and zoom in on the two waveforms. You should be able to use your DAW’s timeline and selection
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