Where do you place your Whammy pedal in the FX chain?

[chris101]

I noticed that in the instruction manual it depicts the Whammy before the OD/Distortion pedal, but to my thinking I'd expect any modulation type effect to be after any distortion unit, often in the amps FX loop. So to anyone thats got one of these, where do you place yours?
Thanks guys!

[Jemwielder]

Anything that really changes your signal like that should go before distortion. Distortion chops your signal up into little bits and makes it harder to read for a digital processor like that.

[chris101]

I just dont get it! If I put distortion after my G-major it sounds like mud, place it before and it sounds amazing. I'll have to experiment with the Whammy later, havnt got that many FX in my office at work to muck about with.

[Drew]

It really depends what you're using it for. If you're using it as a harmonizer, then you pretty much need it to go after. If you're using it for pitch shifting (octave up, octave down, whatever), before probably makes more sense.

Helpful, I know, eh?

[chris101]

Well after much mucking about I've quickly realised that if its placed after a distortion type effect then the Whammy totally kills the distortion effect (sounds muffled, dead), placed before it and there is no real difference in tone - some purists will say that it sucks tone, but if it does its fairly subtle. Another thing I noticed is that if a Wah is used before the Whammy and the whammy is set to harmonise then the wah has virtually no effect, totally bizzare!

[davester1234]

its always the first in my signal chain

[chris101]

davester, do you use a compressor pedal? My current chain is now: Guitar, Wah, Compressor, Whammy, TS-9, DS-1, Framptone splitter, amps, G-major. Might try the Whammy before the compressor next.

[Ferrous Lepidoptera]

I always put it first in the chain.

i think I've tried it in other spots, a long time ago, but don't really recall.

Just a guess, but my thinking was the pitch-tracking that it has to do would be thrown off by distortion, but maybe it's not. Also amp distortion (clipping, sort-of) introduces a lot of high frequency components of the signal. Some of those might be getting shifted right out of audible range, or it might be filtering out the high frequency stuff to make the pitch shifting computationally easier/faster.

I did try piping output from a CD player through the whammy pedal once, to try to "re-tune" the CD, and just to see what it would sound like to get a better idea of how much warping of the signal the whammy added. It worked sort of ok for very small shifts, audible distortion, but recognizable, but for anything radical, the signal got really warped and whacked out. Pitch shifting seems to work best on "simple" signals, the closer to a sine wave, the better it seems to work.

[AKMG]

Does anybody know where to put a delay pedal in a chain of:

-EQ
-Noise Suppressor
-Phaser
-Flanger

[mi2tom]

I normally see people place it first before all the other effects