Best guitar pedals for metal

High-gain rigs hiss. That is not a flaw in your distortion pedal, it is what happens when you amplify a signal by a very large factor: the noise floor comes up with it. A gate is the fix, and the NS-2 is the one to get because of a feature most players ignore.

In the plain in/out configuration a gate has to decide whether you are playing by listening to the distorted signal — which contains the noise it is trying to remove. It either chops your sustain or fails to close. The Send/Return loop solves this: your guitar goes to the NS-2's input, the Send feeds your distortion pedals, the Return brings them back, and the gate makes its decision from the clean guitar signal at the input.

That is the whole reason to spend more than the cheapest gate. If you buy an NS-2 and wire it in and out, you have bought the wrong pedal and wired it the wrong way.

The complaint that a metal tone is 'muddy' is almost always a specific frequency problem somewhere between 100 Hz and 300 Hz, and no amount of the amp's three-band EQ has the resolution to fix it. Ten bands does.

Placed after the distortion it shapes what you hear. Placed before it, it changes what the distortion circuit is clipping — cutting lows before a high-gain stage is how you get a tight low end rather than a loose one. Both are useful and they are different moves.

The 18 V requirement is not optional and not a preference. If your board is a 9 V-only brick, this pedal needs its own supply, an 18 V output or a voltage doubler cable. The power guide covers how to plan for it.

Used the way it is usually used — mids scooped, gain high, straight into a clean amp — the MT-2 is the pedal that vanishes the moment a bass player starts. Used with the Middle Freq swept to find the frequency your amp is missing and the Middle level brought up, it is a genuinely capable high-gain pedal.

It has more EQ than any other BOSS compact dirt pedal: three bands plus the sweepable mid. That is the feature. If you were going to leave the EQ flat, a DS-1 costs less and does less badly.

Pair it with the gate above rather than instead of it. A high-gain pedal into a clean amp is the noisiest configuration in this list.

This is in a pedal roundup deliberately. The most common reason a metal tone sounds thin is that the gain is coming from a pedal into a clean amp, which distorts at one point in the chain instead of across a whole preamp. An amp with a real gain channel does not have that problem and no pedal fixes it.

EVH publishes two ECC83 preamp tubes and a single 6L6, two channels each with an additional gain voicing, an effects loop, dual parallel speaker outputs and a speaker-emulated DI with power amp mute. The DI is the practical part: you can record or go to a PA with the power section silent.

The 10-inch speaker is the limiting factor on low-end weight. Through an external 4x12 it is a materially different amp — see combo vs head and cab.

We are not picking this one for a metal rig. The Smart Gate is a perfectly good gate with three selectable gate modes and one knob, and in an amp's effects loop after the preamp it works well.

But in the configuration most people buy a gate for — in front of, or after, a distortion pedal on a pedalboard — it has to make its decision from the signal that contains the noise. That is the problem the NS-2's Send/Return loop exists to solve, and the Smart Gate does not have one.

If you already own it and it is chopping your note tails, moving it into your amp's effects loop will usually help more than replacing it.