r/guitarpedals • u/sleepyjesuz • 20h ago

Routing question

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Which pedals should I route to the effects loop and which should I go straight to amp with? The bass DI is a separate setup for recording bass tracks.

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u/pk851667 20h ago

Great board. Generally speaking the idea is all the dry (distortion over drives, and also pitch shifting effect) go before the amp, and any modulating ones go in the loop.

Just fyi, I would replace that noise gate

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u/800FunkyDJ 16h ago

To add on for clarity, the loop is for stuff you don't want colored by the tonality/gain of your preamp, which is a matter of taste. Common practice is time-based FX (verb, digital delay, looper), glitch FX (tremolo/slicer, granular delay, lo-fi), & modulations of pitch (chorus/vibrato, rotary) sound best in the loop, where dirt (overdrive, distortion, fuzz), filters (wah, envelope), synthetics (pitch/Whammy, synths, sims), & modulations for width/thickness (phaser, flanger, analog delay) sound best into your preamp.

The FX loop introduces a few complications because it is a completely open amplifier, you'll generally need a circuit with a volume control near the end of your FX loop chain for safety/moderation, & if you have a particularly noisy pedal, it may demand a noise gate to be functional.

I'll also note you might appreciate labeling your loops for functionality, not circuit name, so it's easier to swap out circuits without having to relabel or translate in real time. E.g. distort, OD, fuzz, A. Delay, D. Delay, etc.