The best guitar pedals of all time

More pedals are described as 'Tube Screamer-style' than as anything else, and the description means something specific: clipping diodes in the op-amp's feedback loop rather than to ground, producing symmetrical soft clipping, with a tone stack that cuts bass and pushes the mids.

That mid hump is why a TS in front of a cranked amp works so well — it feeds the amp exactly the frequencies its power section responds to — and why it sounds thin and honky into a clean solid-state amp with nothing to push.

Ibanez publishes the current draw and the power requirement and does not publish impedance figures. It is buffered, not true bypass, which is worth knowing if you run a fuzz.

The Big Muff has been in production in one form or another since 1969 and the topology has barely changed: a boost stage, two cascaded clipping stages, and a recovery stage, with a passive tone stack between them that scoops the mids.

It is on records across fifty years and four genres that have nothing else in common. That is unusual for any piece of gear and it is the case for calling it a classic rather than a favorite.

The versions are genuinely different circuits, not different paint. The versions guide covers what changes between the standard, Nano, Op-Amp and Green Russian.

The RAT's Filter knob removes treble as you turn it up, which is the opposite of every other tone control on every other pedal. It confuses everybody once and then becomes the reason people keep the pedal: it is a low-pass filter, so you are choosing how much of the top end survives the clipping rather than boosting what is left.

It sits between an overdrive and a fuzz in character — harder and more compressed than a Tube Screamer, more controlled and more articulate than a Muff. That middle position is why it turns up on records in genres that agree on nothing else.

Pro Co publishes very little electrical data. The battery compartment opens without tools, which is a small thing that says something about when it was designed.

A phaser splits the signal, shifts the phase of one copy through a series of all-pass filter stages, and recombines them. Where the two copies cancel, you get a notch; sweeping the filters sweeps the notches, which is the sound.

The Phase 90 has one Speed knob. No depth, no mix, no stage count. That means you cannot dial a subtle phase — you get the Phase 90 amount, which is a lot, or you get nothing.

Dunlop publishes no current draw or impedance figures for it. Powering it is straightforward regardless: 9 V battery or any standard supply.

The Dyna Comp is built around the CA3080 operational transconductance amplifier, and it compresses in a way you can hear working. There is no blend, no attack, no release and no ratio — Output and Sensitivity, and that is the interface.

For country and funk playing where the compression is part of the sound, that audibility is exactly right. For a player who wants dynamics evened out invisibly, it is the wrong tool and a blend-equipped compressor is the right one.

It also raises the noise floor at high Sensitivity, which nobody publishes a figure for and everybody notices.

BOSS calls it the world's best-selling stage tuner and the specification explains why rather than the marketing: C0 to C8 range, +/- 1 cent accuracy, chromatic plus guitar and bass modes with flat tunings, and a mute function so you can tune silently.

It is buffered, which is a feature on a long cable run and a problem in front of a vintage fuzz. That trade-off is the whole tuner-bypass debate in one sentence.

One cent is a stage tuner's accuracy, not a setup tool's. For intonation you want strobe accuracy — the PolyTune 3 publishes +/- 0.02 cent in strobe mode, at four times the current draw.

We are not picking this one as a purchase for most readers, and it belongs on the list anyway. The Fuzz Face is two transistors and almost nothing else, and the way it responds to your guitar's volume knob is the reason people still build variations of it sixty years later.

The catch is everything around it. Germanium transistors drift with temperature — a cold stage and a hot one are genuinely different pedals. It wants to be first in the chain with nothing buffered in front. It does not like sharing a power supply with digital pedals. On a modern board with a buffered tuner and an isolated brick, most of what makes it special is gone before you plug in.

If you want the historical circuit and you are willing to build the rig around it, nothing else does what it does. If you want a fuzz that behaves predictably on a normal board, buy the Muff.