The 50 greatest guitar effects moments of all time

20. Rage Against The Machine – Bulls On Parade

EFFECT: Wah 

It’s always astonishing to think about the levels of heaviness Tom Morello has managed to achieve with relatively little gain, and this lead single from 1996’s Evil Empire is no exception. 

On the recording, Morello can be heard playing his custom-built ‘Arm The Homeless’ guitar through a Cry Baby wah into the overdrive channel of his Marshall JCM800 2205 50-Watt head, feeding his Peavey 4x12 speaker cabinet. 

Rocking the wah back and forth in time with the beat is a technique more associated with funk players, where guitar scratches and scrapes are used as dead notes to emphasise the pedal sweeping through the frequencies.

19. Heart – Barracuda

EFFECT: Flanger 

This 1977 single from the Seattle rockers was powered along by galloping rhythms that were heavily effected with flanger. The jet-plane whoosh coming from the custom-made pedal heard on the recording is what gives it sonic movement even when you’re hearing the same note being repeated.

18. The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army

EFFECT: Pitch-shifter 

It’s the track that launched The White Stripes’ career and turned Jack White into a guitar hero for the modern age.

While many initially thought it was a bass at the beginning of the track, it was in fact Jack playing his early 60s Kay K6533 archtop with one single-coil neck pickup through a mid-60s Sears Silvertone 1485 via his DigiTech Whammy, set to one octave down (most pitch shifters should be able to do this with minimal fuss).

It’s the kind of trick that has inspired bands like Royal Blood in recent years, who use a similar approach from the perspective of bass. 

17. The Police – Message In A Bottle 

EFFECTS: Chorus, flanger  

As well as being one of the finest riffs of their career, moving arpeggiated powerchords with an added 9th around the neck, this lead single from The Police’s Reggatta De Blanc also featured some brilliant use of modulation. 

During these years guitarist Andy Summers was closely associated with the Electro-Harmonix Electric Mistress, which could be used as a flanger or chorus, as well as Boss and Roland gear.

“Back then I didn’t even have a Pete Cornish pedalboard, so it probably was the Electro-Harmonix or the Boss, as well as an Echoplex,” he recently told TG.

16. Soundgarden – Black Hole Sun

EFFECT: Rotary speaker 

On this 90s grunge anthem, Chris Cornell fed his Gretsch Silver Jet through a Marshall and a Mesa/Boogie into a Fender Vibratone speaker.

To get the moody, withered sound of the verse arpeggios, the speaker rotator was set to high, and was then slowed down for that dark, doom-laden chorus. 

15. Peter Frampton – Show Me the Way

EFFECT: Talk Box 

Thanks to its prominence on his best-known hit, the English rocker became synonymous with this odd effect.

Frampton’s guitar riff is channelled up a tube into his mouth, with which he shapes the sound to give it that characteristic wah-like effect, and that’s captured by his microphone. Effective, if a bit of a mouthful...   

14. Cream – White Room

EFFECT: Wah 

Up there with Sunshine Of Your Love as one of Cream’s most recognisable tunes, White Room comes from their 1968 must-hear Wheels Of Fire, with Eric Clapton’s wah work a vital part of the song’s tapestry.

Clapton was using a Vox wah-wah around this time, but any decent model will do. In the verses featuring Jack Bruce’s falsetto (e.g. ‘I wait in this place where the sun never shines’) Clapton rocks the wah back and forth in fast, 8/8 time while playing the chords (C/G/Bb/A/C/G/Bb/C/D).

For the lead breaks, simply play your tastiest D blues licks while tapping your wah foot in time with the 4/4 beat. 

13. Led Zeppelin – Whole Lotta Love

EFFECT: Wah 

There’s so much effects cleverness on this stone-cold rock masterpiece (notably Jimmy Page’s ‘reverse reverb’ technique, clear on Robert Plant’s ‘Way down inside’ vocals).

Guitar-wise, note Page’s shrewd use of the wah-wah during the solo: he uses it as a tone filter to find a trebly sweet spot, so his timeless part cuts through clearly. 

12 & 11. Pink Floyd – Echoes & Run Like Hell

EFFECT: Delay 

An effects-savvy man, David Gilmour used an MXR M-113 Digital Delay across Floyd’s 1979 double album The Wall to add rhythm and texture to his parts.

On Run Like Hell, the effect is set to around 380ms, giving a dotted eighth note repeat that adds propulsion and movement to both the song’s D pedal tone and the riff’s main chords (all over D: D/A/G/D/D/G/Dadd9/D). 

Eight years earlier, Gilmour leaned into Floyd’s psychedelic roots in the spacey mid-section of their monolithic 23-minuter Echoes. A Binson Echorec unit was used to add a delayed, cosmic dimension to his atmospheric ‘shrieking’ noise experiments – themselves created through a wah-wah pedal with its input and output reversed.