Ricky Garvey – Music Production, Mixing, Mastering

There’s a pretty old debate regarding the order in which you should arrange your pedals. There’s the standard approach. And then there’s players who ignore the rules and do their own thing. I fall somewhere in the middle. And I encourage my students and friends to do the same. With that being said, I strongly believe that there’s a solid “starting point” that should be addressed. We’ll talk more about the overall order of your board in a later post, but today I wanted to talk about ordering your delays and verbs.

The topic of ordering your delays and verbs is one that isn’t touched as often as “Where should I put my volume pedal?” and “How should I layer my overdrives?” And these are solid questions. But if you know me, you know I love my delays and verbs. I grew up on The Edge doing his thing and I secretly always wanted a rig similar to this:

Ok. That might be a bit extreme. But it’s also true. By the way, the above statements from The Edge are like tone gospel. I encourage you to watch all 6 minutes of it.

Anyways, here’s my opinion on ordering your delays and reverbs.

Standard approach tells you to put your reverb last. And it makes sense. Your delayed tone is going into your reverb. Putting your reverb before delays will send a reverb’d tone into your delay pedal, which can muddy up the repeats. Which is totally cool if you’re going for that but you’ll want to watch out if this something you want to avoid. I actually mix these two worlds with the following approach.

Delay (Timed) – Reverb – Delay(Long Delays)

The reason I approach it this way comes down to the fact that I play with a wide variety of artists and this gives me the best of both worlds. If I’m playing for a singer/songwriter, I can use mellow timed delays going into my verb. No mud. Pretty clean tone. If I’m playing with one of my wild projects I can incorporate all three pedals and muddy up my tone to really be taken to spaceland.

If you look at the above picture, you’ll probably notice that layering my delays and reverb in this way allows for me to easily swap the order if needed. And I do that from time to time. If I absolutely need two delays going into my reverb which sits at the end of my chain, I can make it happen. It’s important to consider the strategic placement of your gear at time. But don’t ever be one of those nerds that calls the space on your board “real estate.”

At the end of the day, I’m just a nerd and I don’t think I should have any say in the order of your gear. But I hope you found some tips or learned something that will make you want to go experiment. There is NO wrong way to arrange your pedals. You’re your own boss. You’re in control. Do things your way.