The best guitar pedals for beginners: distortions, tuners and more
There’s nothing quite like pressing the footswitch on an effects pedal and hearing how your guitar sound is transformed. You can get fuzzes, distortions and overdrives that add gain to your signal, or time-based effects like reverb, delay and chorus that add character and texture, functional pedals including tuners and EQs, and countless other types and sub-types. Awww yeahhh, you might think, after activating each one.
It’s been suggested that guitarists love effects pedals even more than guitars themselves. Don’t get hooked on impulse-buying them, as it’s best to choose carefully, as you can only accumulate so many pedals before you overcomplicate your sound and setup – especially as a rookie guitarist.
To help you set off on the right foot, we’ve ranked ten of the best guitar effects pedals for beginners below. Most of the Guitar.com team are seasoned, callused-in-the-fingertip guitarists, but we were all newbies once, and both of these sides to our experience were factored into our recommendations. Each of the pedals below is just the right mix of great-sounding, fairly priced and technically accessible.
Remember that you’ll need a way to power your pedals. Keen guitarists who are in this for the long haul can save time and effort by getting a power supply that will deliver current to multiple pedals, while 9V batteries are a beginner-friendly choice that will work with most entry-level effects, as long as they’re not mini-pedals.
At a glance:
Best overdrive for beginners: Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
Best distortion for beginners: Pro Co RAT 2
Best tuner for beginners: Behringer TU-300
Best loop pedal for beginners: TC Electronic Ditto 2
Best reverb for beginners: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient
Best budget distortion pedal for metal: Teisco Mini Metal
Best delay for beginners: Earthquaker Devices Silos
Best chorus for beginners: Catalinbread Wake
Best effects processor for beginners: Mooer GE-100
Best budget multi-FX: Gear4Music Guitar Multi-Effects
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Best overdrive for beginners: Boss BD-2 Blues Driver
This Blues Driver has been a staple overdrive pedal for all sorts of guitarists – not just blues players – since its introduction in 1995. It’ll help make your lead parts cut through beautifully for as long as you play guitar, but it’s a particularly good pick for beginners thanks to its straightforward controls and quintessential overdrive sounds.
There are just three knobs on the top of the pedal to suss out: volume, gain and tone. Using the tone control to adjust the level of treble is the trick to getting a good sound (or a prominent one) out of this classic overdrive.
Best distortion for beginners: Pro Co RAT 2
The RAT 2
From a little added buzz to a thrilling wall of noise, the RAT 2 opens up a world of gnarly sounds via three foolproof knobs. This is often heralded as the definitive distortion pedal, which makes it all the more remarkable that the RAT 2 costs far less than many of its lower-profile rivals.
While the volume and distortion knobs shouldn’t give you too much of a headache (at least not in the figurative sense), it’s worth studying the filter control, as this makes the difference between controlled rock distortion and completely feral fuzz. Either sound is world-beatingly great in the right context.
Best tuner for beginners: Behringer TU-300
Until you’re already Jimi Hendrix, get a tuner pedal so that you can be sure you’re playing in tune. This one’s affordable and effective, with a digital display that tells you which note you’re tuned to, and LED indicators that show whether the string is flat, sharp or perfectly natural.
Behringer is undoubtedly a budget brand, but the quality of its pedals often means they’ll stick around on a guitarist’s pedalboard for years on end. The TU-300 has some features that will come in handy as you branch out musically, including flat, double-flat and chromatic tuning modes, and reference tone adjustment (so you can tweak the definition of an ‘E’).
Best loop pedal for beginners: TC Electronic Ditto 2
A loop pedal can be a brilliant tool for practice and composition, allowing you to capture parts of what you’re playing and then jam along to them as a looping backing track.
The only snag is that loopers are often intimidating for beginners, but this TC Electronic model is as simple as they come, with a clever ‘LoopSnap’ feature that can slightly adjust your loops to rectify errors in timing – not that you’ll make any of those, of course.
Controlling the Ditto 2 is mercifully easy via the multi-functional footswitch on the top, and there’s a level control so that you can adjust the volume of a loop while (or before) you play along to it.
Best reverb for beginners: Walrus Audio Fundamental Ambient
Image: Walrus Audio
Psst… Did you know that reverb is basically the third dimension to your guitar sound? Affordable and feature-packed, the Walrus Audio Fundamental Reverb brings out the joy in exploring this sense of space in your playing, with controls for the reverb duration (‘decay’), tone, and prominence (‘mix’).
There are three reverb types to play around with: ‘Deep’, ‘Lush’ and ‘Haze’. These are aptly named, but they have some nuances that you might not expect. The ‘Deep’ mode adds a lower octave to your sound, fattening up the bass, while ‘Haze’ introduces a dash of distortion. As with any good reverb pedal, much of the fun lies in tweaking the controls to find the sounds you relish.
Best budget distortion pedal for metal: Teisco Mini Metal
Credit: Teisco
This plug-in-and-slay metal distortion pedal from Teisco sounds just as massive as its enclosure is small. Its high-gain sound makes classic rock and metal riffs sound their beastly best, and it’ll also be a great choice for rhythmic chugging, once you’ve gotten the knack of the playing style.
The on-unit controls let you dial up the distortion, adjust the volume and tweak the tone. There’s also a three-position ‘boost’ switch that can give you some extra high-end cut-through, which comes in handy when you’re finding your frequency range at a band practice or gig.
Best delay for beginners: Earthquaker Devices Silos
From The Edge to Omar Rodríguez-López, many guitarists consider delay to be one of the key effects on their pedalboard. This Earthquaker Devices model is both straightforward to use and packed with sounds, and its dedicated tap-tempo footswitch lets you control the timing of repeats by simply pressing to the beat with your foot.
Between the three delay styles bundled into the pedal – analogue, tape and digital – you can probably find the sound in your head (and on some of your favourite songs) via the Silos. This is a slightly more complicated pedal than some of the others featured in this guide, but if you’re in the market for quality delay sounds, this is as accessible as they come.
Best chorus for beginners: Catalinbread Wake
Credit: Catalinbread
Chorus is another fun modulation effect that will colour your playing, a la Kurt Cobain or Johnny Marr. This Catalinbread option gives you plenty of parameters to tweak and comes at a sensible price.
Our correspondent described this as the perfect tonal thickener for lush, atmospheric sounds. There’s certainly depth to its offering, with eight chorus voicings to play around with and octave control that can fill out the low end of your tone. Despite providing all these options, it’s a simple enough pedal for beginners to use, with just the four knobs to get your head around. Hit the footswitch and bliss out.
Best effects processor for beginners: Mooer GE-100
A cost-effective and convenient way to access lots of different guitar effects is to get an effects processor, like the Mooer GE100. It’ll take a while to suss it out, but this unit is a valid alternative to effects pedals for beginner guitarists, with 66 effects to explore. Overdrive, chorus, delay, reverb – it’s all here, albeit in less artisanal forms than what you’d tend to hear out of a quality effects pedal.
In addition to its many digital effects, the GE100 has various features that could come in handy for guitar practice, including a loop function, drum machine and scale lessons.
Best budget multi-FX: Gear4Music Guitar Multi-Effects
An even simpler shortcut to enjoying a vast array of effects is to use a mutli-effects pedal, like this super-affordable model from Gear4Music. This unit really is plug-in-and-play, with 36 presets to help you access the full gamut of its modulation effects, plus manual controls enabling you to sculpt each sound.
It’s worth noting that this multi-effects pedal is focused on delay, reverb, chorus, tremolo and a handful of other effects such as noise gating. So, it’s not an all-in-one solution for guitarists who want everything on a single pedal (especially if you need some overdrive or distortion options), but it’s a great way to broaden your sonic horizons at a stroke.
Why You Can Trust Us
Every year, Guitar.com reviews a huge variety of new products – from the biggest launches to cool boutique effects – and our expert guitar reviewers have decades of collective experience, having played everything from Gibson ’59 Les Pauls to the cheapest Squiers.
That means that when you click on a Guitar.com buyer’s guide, you’re getting the benefit of all that experience to help you make the best buying decision for you. What’s more, every guide written on Guitar.com was put together by a guitar obsessive just like you. You can trust that every product recommended in those guides is something that we’d be happy to have in our own rigs.
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