So, where do you stand on the age-old argument of running a multi-effects pedal vs. individual pedals? When you think about it, there’s basically two main categories of guitar effect. There’s effects that add gain to the signal. These generally increase the amplitude and in doing so add harmonic distortion. Enough gain, and the waveform will clip. If more clipping is desirable, diodes can be used to either ‘soft-clip’, or ‘hard-clip’ the waveform shape. This covers all boosts, drives, distortions and fuzzes.
Then there’s effects that delay the signal in some way. Choruses and flangers delay a copy of the signal and manipulate it with an LFO, while delays and reverbs play it back. At the deep core of things, the same theory, maths and principles apply.
We’ve glossed over some utility types and filters, but you get the idea. Where we’re going with this is that, by the end of the ‘90s, a single DSP (Digital Signal Processing) chip was more than powerful enough to run common algorithms for gain and delay-based effects. Since similar signal processing code was used, having
