Best guitar pedals for blues

Blues playing lives on the guitar volume knob. You roll back for a verse and forward for a solo, and the pedal has to follow that rather than flatten it. The Blues Driver does, because its gain comes from discrete stages rather than from clipping diodes inside an op-amp's feedback loop — the frequency response stays flat through the mids and a great deal of dynamic range survives.

That flatness is the feature here. It adds grit to an amp you already like without imposing an EQ curve on top, which is exactly the brief in this style and exactly the wrong brief for metal.

The cons, and one of them is specific to this page. BOSS publishes no mid control, and the pedal is deliberately flat — so if your problem is a solo that vanishes under a band, this is the wrong tool and the EQ further down is the right one. No adaptor in the box, and it is buffered rather than true bypass, which matters if a vintage fuzz is going in front of it.

The other half of the blues drive tradition. A Tube Screamer cuts bass, humps the mids and compresses, and into a cranked amp that combination tightens the low end and pushes the midrange forward where a solo can be heard. It is the sound on a very large number of records and it is not subtle about being a specific EQ curve.

At 8 mA it is the cheapest pedal here to power, and Ibanez publishes that figure, which not every maker does.

The cons: the mid hump is not defeatable, so on a clean amp it sounds honky rather than transparent — this is a pedal for pushing an amp, not for being the amp. The tone stack is a single treble-tilt knob over a fixed mid hump, there is no bass control, Ibanez publishes no impedance figures, and the TS9 is buffered rather than true bypass with no supply in the box.

Clean blues playing exposes uneven picking in a way distortion hides, and a held bend that dies before the phrase ends is the most common complaint in this style. Both are compressor problems.

The blend knob is what makes this usable at settings that would flatten a two-knob compressor: the dry transient passes at full strength while the compressed signal fills in behind it, so you keep the attack that makes a note sound picked. The single-coil / humbucker switch matters too, because a compressor set for a Strat over-compresses a Les Paul.

The cons: no attack or release control — the blend knob is how you preserve the transient, not a time constant. No battery compartment, no supply in the box, and Keeley publishes no electrical figures, so you cannot budget a shared supply output for it without measuring.

A Klon-style circuit mixes a clean path alongside the clipping path, so what you add sits on top of your amp rather than replacing it. At low Gain it is a treble-forward clean boost, which is the setting most blues players actually use it at, and it stacks in front of a driven amp without turning the whole thing to mud.

It is the least dramatic pedal on this page and the one most likely to stay on.

The cons: one tone control rather than an EQ section, no battery option at all, and it is buffered — fine here, and worth knowing if a vintage fuzz ever joins the board. It also cannot make a dark amp bright on its own; it lifts treble and mids around what is already there.

The delay this style wants is short, dark and nearly subliminal — a slapback that thickens a lead line without anyone identifying it as an effect. That is precisely what a bucket-brigade delay does well, because each repeat loses top end and sits further back than the one before it.

MXR publishes an all-analog signal path, true bypass and two internal trim pots for modulation width and rate, so you can add a little wobble to the repeats without a second pedal.

The cons are the ceiling and the controls. 600 ms is the limit, there is no tap tempo and no presets, so a long ambient wash is not available at any setting. The repeats darken by design and cannot be made bright. Dunlop publishes no current-draw figure, which is the usual gap with this maker.

We are not picking this one, and it is not a bad pedal. The MT-2 has more tone-shaping than any other BOSS compact dirt pedal — three bands plus a sweepable mid frequency — and the parametric mid is a genuinely useful control.

It is here because it is what gets bought when a player decides their blues lead does not stand out. In this style it almost never is a gain problem. More gain compresses away the dynamic range that the whole idiom is built on, and a pedal that will not clean up on the volume knob takes your main expressive control away.

What actually makes a blues lead audible is a midrange lift and a little more level — the Tumnus above, or an EQ. If you want a genuine high-gain sound, the distortion roundup is the right page and this pedal is on it.