# Best place for a Wah pedal & gate in a daisy chain?



## taskforcestudios (Dec 21, 2007)

Hey guys,

This is pretty much my first *official* or worthwhile post, so hopefully somebody can give me some advice.

I've recently been expanding my pedal arrangement, and I'm just trying to figure out mainly the best place to put my Wah pedal and a noise gate. Here is what I have planned out so far, as I am also planning on building a new (and larger!) pedal board. The order in which the pedals are in the list below is how they will be connected sequentially:

-Boss TU-2 Tuner
-Digitech Brian May Red Special
-EH Big Muff
-DOD FX51 Juice Box (LoFi effect)
-Boss BF-2 Flanger
-Ibanez PM7 Phase Modulator
-DOD FX25 Envelope Filter
-Ibanez DDL Digital Delay
-Digitech Digidelay

I should mention that I am running this through an FX loop of a Marshall JCM2000 TSL100, which makes it alot easier to control the loop I have setup. Would you guys recommend putting the wah outside of the loop, or somewhere in there as well?

I have also toyed with the idea of putting in a noise gate, but am a little unclear of where the best place for it would be!

Any help/opinions/suggestions are welcome. Even if you see something wrong with what I have going currently, let me know!

Thanks guys,
Brian


----------



## Sneaky (Feb 14, 2006)

I always put the wah up front. I've never used a noise gate but I'm guessing it would go at the end, or maybe before the delay. As I've been finding out lately, the best way is to try all the different combinations for yourself.

Pete




taskforcestudios said:


> Hey guys,
> 
> This is pretty much my first *official* or worthwhile post, so hopefully somebody can give me some advice.
> 
> ...


----------



## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

I take a pretty partisan stance on noise gates, and a rather unconventional one, to boot. I think people should use two of them.

Why?

Many players, engineers, and others will complain about the manner in which a noise gate can seriously corrupt the feel of one's playing by chopping off either the onset of the pick attack, the decay, or both. My feeling is the reason they compain about that is because most people try to get a noise gate to do far too much in the way of rehabilitating their signal, and are forced to employ it in such a heavy-handed way that it ultimately HAS to produce the very outcomes they complain about.

If you think of it, the action of a noise gate is pretty straightforward; on and off. The *hardest* thing it has to do is tell the difference between signal and noise. That gets very tricky during the decay phase of a nte, as the level starts to converge with what may be the level of the background noise. Ideally, then, you want to stick it where that task is easiest for it to accomplish. And typically, that's at the very start of the signal path, where the difference between guitar signal and background noise is abundantly clear, where the dynamics are not compressed at all. That enables you to set the gating threshold at a point where it ONLY cuts out the noise between notes.

Of course, I'd be a complete fool to suggest that no other noise is added beyond that point. Even very well-designed pedals have at least a BIT of noise, and when you add that up over a dozen pedals on a pedalboard, there is a whole pile of audio junk ready to go to your amp input jack. So, small wonder people usually want to put them at the end of the signal path, before the amp. If that is the only point where it acts, though, the threshold has to be set high enough that is won't catch the onset of the note, and will likely choip off the tail of delicately picked notes.

Like I say, though, no one seems to talk about using *two* noise gates, each set in a gentle manner that interferes as little as possible with your signal. If you can set the threshold very low early in the signal chain, you can eliminate much of the noise that invades later pedals and gets amplified. If you only have the residual noise of your pedals to deal with, and you aren't taking, say, hum from your pickups and amplifying it by a factor of x200 in your overdrive, then you can afford to set the theshold quite low on the 2nd gate, making it less "invasive".

Something to think about.


----------



## BMW-KTM (Apr 7, 2015)

I am a big fan of noise-gates particularly in very high gain situations. As has been stated, the adjustment of the gate is the tricky part. As for where it goes, it depends on the quality of your other pedals in my opinion. I'm sure some will disagree with me on that part. The way I see it, if you have poor quality pedals with tons of noise and artifacts then the gate pretty much has to go at the end and that's where it is the most difficult to dial in without too many adverse effects. If you have good f/x that are quiet where they should be and don't add artifacts then you can put it first in the chain and set it to only mildly intervene.

I've never tried running two gates but I might look into it.


----------



## player99 (Sep 5, 2019)

I put my gate after my drives and before the time based pedals like delay, tremolo, chorus. If you have a subtle or more than subtle always on delay at the end when the gate kicks in the delay will smooth it out. I use the Rocktron Guitar Silencer pedal. It has both their Hush pedal (ACDC) and their gate in the one pedal. I like it alot.


----------



## vadsy (Dec 2, 2010)

wah goes first


----------



## Chito (Feb 17, 2006)

Wah goes first for me too, well right after the tuner. And I will also take the dirt pedals out of the FX loop.


----------



## mhammer (Nov 30, 2007)

Most vintage fuzz-wah pedals have the wah hardwired _after_ the fuzz. That's not better or worse, just how they decided to do it in the late '60s.

If you're into synthesizers, you'll know the difference between *subtractive* and *additive* synthesis. Most traditional analog modular synths use a subtractive method. The oscillators generate a harmonically rich waveform, and the filters and such carve away or select what you want and don't want to keep, in order to achieve different harmonic content and timbres. 

The best-known example of additive synthesis is probably the Yamaha DX series (recently brought back to life in the Yamaha Reface DX, the Korg Volca FM, and new Korg OPSix), in which basic oscillators are modulated by _other_ oscillators to *add* harmonics over time in a controlled way to achieve different timbres.

The question of where to best situate a wah, depends on whether you wish to approach your tone like additive or subtractive synthesis. Vintage fuzz-wah pedals assumed the subtractive route. That is, you fuzz the bejeezus out of your guitar, producing gobs of harmonic content, and carve away what you don't want with the wah after it. Moving a wah ahead of a drive pedal of some sort, whether overdrive, distortion, or balls-out fuzz, is an attempt to use an additive strategy. By using the wah as a selective filter, you determine what harmonic content gets added by the drive pedal.

Again, neither is better, but they are not equivalent, and yield different tonal qualities. Many consider wah before drive to be a little more expressive, though.


----------



## Frenchy99 (Oct 15, 2016)

I like the Wah right after fuzz if the wah does not have fuzz on it.

Noisegate after my wife...


----------



## sulphur (Jun 2, 2011)

Do you think that the guy figured this out in the THIRTEEN years since the question was asked?


----------



## Chito (Feb 17, 2006)

Got sucked into this zombie thread. ugh


----------

