We included this on our best tremolo pedals post because it’s just a great pedal, no qualifier needed. It’s an easy, pedalboard-friendly way to add a dynamic effect to your chain.
Controls include Depth and Speed, which are obvious, as well as Bias, which handles the wave shaping function you’d see on pricier units. Inside is an optical tremolo circuit and the knobs all have a great deal of range. It’s hard to go wrong with this offering.
When I was your age (sorry — I have no idea how old you are, but go along with the gag), Danelectro pedals took the form of colored plastic devices with weird, squishy switches and knobs that would break at the slightest provocation. They sounded okay, especially for limited applications, and were named after food. You know the ones. And, boy, were they ever cheap. They’re still out there, and maybe they should have a place on this list by rights.
Or they would have if Danelectro had not rolled out this entire new line of relatively affordable pedals, all clad in cast metal with real metal switches. The Billionaires are not quite in the $20-$30 range that the old plastic standbys were, but they’re still inexpensive in a boutique pedal world. The line includes the Filthy Rich tremolo, Billion Dollar Boost, Pride of Texas overdrive and Cash Cow distortion. All of these are perfectly serviceable pedals worth a look if you have less than $100 to spend on a pedal today.
The one that takes the cake, though, is the Big Spender. This is a spinning speaker emulator and it’s actually very, very good. Does it sound like a Leslie? Nah, probably not. But it has the functionality and the tones are definitely right for the price.
Controls include Volume, which has enough gain for breakup at the top of the range, Treble, and Speed. The Ramp switch performs the brake function and goes from the slowest to fastest in ten seconds. The helpful Ramp LED blinks green at the minimum speed and red at the maximum speed to let you know where you are. It’s a great effect that is well worth considering.
Those who play them are usually pretty defensive of their favorite wah pedal. There’s the Dunlop v.s. Vox camps, those who have the change for something like the Xotic XW-1, even the Bad Horsie fans. But for your very first ever wah, when you’re just trying to get an idea of how you’ll use the effect, it’s no crime to save a little bit on it.
The Hell-Babe actually has a pretty dedicated following and might be one of the best-loved Behringer offerings. The wah control is optical, so you won’t run into wear and tear issues as you might with other more traditional options. You can adjust the resistance to dial it in for your style of play, while the frequency range is also adjustable. The Range control allows you to drop the heel-down frequency from 440Hz to 250Hz, which means it’ll work for your bass, too.
The Fine knob controls the toe-down frequency up to 2.2kHz. There’s a +15dB boost in it, and the Q control shapes the filter across the tonal range. LEDs indicate wah and boost status at all times. It can use either a 9V battery or DC power. Lots of functions in a very cheap unit make this a strong contender.
By and large, boutique pedals tend to be made by hand in the domestic territory of their headquarters. This isn’t universally true, of course, but it goes some way to explaining the price difference. Most mass-market effects are made in China, as with virtually everything else in the world. They have the factories and the inexpensive labor, so big companies go there to have their goods made. Recently, though, Chinese companies have been developing their own product to build in their local factories and the results are starting to be really impressive.
Joyo is just such a company. They’ve focused on developing ultra-cheap clones of well-known pedals and a few of these are very successful attempts, including this Ultimate Drive. Meant to copy the Fulltone OCD we included in our best overdrive pedals list, this is about $100 cheaper and nearly gets the job done.
For controls, you get Gain, Level, and Tone, as well as a High/Low switch that is basically a Bright switch like you’d see on an amp. It’s a good thing that switch is there, too, because one drawback to this very inexpensive unit is that it’s a little on the dark side compared to its more expensive counterpart. If you take the time to dial it in, however, you can save yourself a huge chunk of change. Pair it with an EQ pedal coming later in our list and you should be set to go.
By and large, bitcrusher pedals tend to be on the expensive side. They’re generally made in lower numbers by boutique outfits, so if you need that downsampled goodness, you often have to pay for it.
Mooer has come up with a solution well under our price limit in this Lofi Machine. I hesitate to call it a proper bitcrusher, since it’s somewhat limited in comparison to the real deal, but it does give you some delightful scrambly tones at an excellent price. It’s true bypass and offers three modes for guitar, bass, and synth.
Controls include the Sample button to select the mode, Mix to dial in the level, and Bit to control the amount of downsampling. It’s also enclosed in a tiny form factor to save you pedalboard room. Great for experimentation or for adding just a touch of extra flavor.
This Mooer device was created to take aim at the flanger side of the vaunted Electric Mistress. To be sure, the EHX version is a more complete offering with stereo outs. Still, Mooer make a fine effort here, which is far more pedalboard-friendly than than the Mistress.
Controls include Rate for the speed, Range to adjust the sweep, and Color to control the feedback. Like the Electric Mistress, there’s a Filter mode which locks the flanger in place and allows you to manually control the effect with the Range knob. If you turn the Color knob up sufficiently, you can get some intense and almost uncontrollable self-oscillation, if you’re into that sort of thing.
For an in-depth discussion of the legendary Tube Screamer, check out our best overdrives post here. In it, you’ll see mention of the TS808, which was the original configuration of the machine called Tube Screamer. What you won’t find on that list is this super-cheap take off by the Chinese company Biyang.
Like the better-known version, the knobs on this are Volume, Tone, and Drive, which are all pretty straightforward. You could think of this as a modded TS808 thanks to the inclusion of a toggle to switch between Normal, Bright, and Warm EQ modes. That easily extends the usefulness of the Ibanez design but at a fraction of the cost. If you find you like the sound, you can save a huge pile of cash.
Coming up with a cheap version of EHX’s POG has proved a tricky business for the cheap pedal makers of the world. Rumors persist that the Mooer Tender Octaver had to be altered because it was too similar to the EHX original, such that the MKII that’s available now doesn’t track as well as the first version.
Ammoon has decided to wade directly into the fray with this offering, which has an identical control set to the Nano POG and comes in a very similar form factor. It’s also cheaper than the Mooer version by a considerable amount.
Definitely worth checking out if you’re in need of octave generation on the cheap, as other options at or below this price point, like the Mooer Pure Octave, leave a lot to be desired.
Admittedly one of the ugliest pedals ever conceived, Caline company doesn’t spend their money on making them look pretty. Besides, even Brian Wampler has said on his YouTube channel that he doesn’t really get why people care what it looks like.
All that aside, this pedal punches way above its price point as a boosting, overdriving preamp. If you have a tube amp, or are looking for more flexibility than an MXR Micro Amp on a budget, this is the pedal for you.
For controls, you get Gain, Treble, Volume, and Bass. The Volume is capable of up to +30dB of clean boost, while the Gain knob adds a very musical overdrive. Each of the EQ knobs boost or cut 15dB. For being as cheap as it is, there’s no tone suck or coloration. It has that sweetly compressed voice that feels great under the fingers.
Nux makes a very wide variety of cheap effects pedals, but this is probably the one most obviously targeted at something up-market. It’s modeled on the smaller Strymon pedals, though Strymon doesn’t offer one that’s just dedicated delay and reverb like this unit.
On one side is a delay pedal, switchable betwen 70s Analog, 60s Tape, and 80s Digital, though to be clear, it’s likely at this price that they’re all achieved via DSP, just like a Strymon. The footswitch for turning on the delay side also doubles as a tap tempo.
On the reverb side, you can choose between Spring, Plate, and Hall. While labeled “Hold for Shimmer”, the reverb footswitch actually activates a secondary effect, depending on which mode you’re in. On the Plate setting, it is indeed Shimmer, while on the Spring and Hall settings, it’s Freeze.
You have your choice of mono or stereo outputs, as well as routing options for which effect comes first and flexibility for wet/dry rigs. Controls include Reverb Level, Delay Level, Time, Repeat, and Decay.
Cheaper alternative to: Clearly modeled on Strymon’s smaller pedals like the BlueSky or El Capistan, but closest to the Flint minus the tremolo; competitively priced with anything our reverb delay pedals list
In the early 80s, Boss created the Slow Gear, which is basically an auto-swell pedal that could also emulate tremolo sounds. The core functionality is to moderate the attack of your notes based on how you set the knobs.
They don’t make it anymore, in part because it’s pretty niche, and because most people can achieve this with volume pedals or with the guitar knob and prefer that because of the finite sense of control. Since they don’t make it anymore, the used values have shot up an enormous amount, hovering around $500 on Reverb.
The Chinese makers are happy to fill the gap with either this Rowin option or the inexplicably more expensive Mooer Slow Engine. Both are far cheaper than a used Slow Gear, and both have the same threshold and attack knobs to match the original unit.
Obviously, the build quality is nowhere in the remote realm of a Boss pedal, but if you’re gentle with it, you can get auto-swelling goodness for a good long time.
To be fair, the pedal this emulates won’t exactly break the bank. Even at that, this Vintage Phrase is just a bit over one third the price, which makes it an excellent buy for those who don’t know if they even like phaser. It’s certainly much cheaper than the Earthquaker Devices Grand Orbiter that lives on my board.
True to its legacy, this pedal has but one knob: Speed. Perhaps if you’re of a certain mindset, you might even see this version as being a touch better than the MXR. The chickenhead knob is more like something you might’ve seen years ago, and it’s also easier to adjust with your shoe on the fly. That might be a stretch, but nevertheless, this pedal is worthy of your consideration.
Even among the crowded field of cheap effects pedals coming out of China, Mosky stands out as especially inexpensive. I used one of their compressors for awhile and found it to be quite a reliable and useful unit. If you’re after the amp-pushing effects of the mythical Klon Centaur, Mosky has somehow managed to deliver a solution at a price so cheap, you should just buy it just to have it.
This is pretty clearly aimed at the Wampler Tumnus interpretation of the Klon, sporting the same controls of Treble, Output and Gain. There’s a Silver Horse version, as well, meant to take on the J. Rockett Audio Designs Archer.
For initial experimentation with this type of circuit, this price cannot be ignored. You may find yourself moving on to the handbuilt options later on, but it will cost you precious little to try this in the meantime.
This is a great device for beginner guitarists to get familiar with effects and modeling. There are models for 15 effect types including drive pedals, modulation, delay/reverb and cabinet simulation, as well as a drum machine with 40 rhythms for practice.
Headphone jacks enable silent practice, while 16 user-assignable patches mean you can create your own presets. Excellent for those Christmas mornings with a new guitar.
The beauty of having a boost pedal on your board is that it can compensate somewhat for cheaper amps and guitars. If you have a generally low-output setup, you can still step out in front of the band now and again with the help of a booster. It isn’t a perfect solution and it won’t solve every problem, but it’s cheap and effective nevertheless.
This TC Electronics booster gives you 20dB of clean boost with one key advantage over many more expensive units. The switch can act both as a latch, or a normal on switch, or as a momentary switch. That means you can choose to accentuate an entire passage, or just a couple of notes. If you want to hit a really satisfying unison bend, you can boost only that by holding the button down. When you release, it turns off again, ready to be switched on for your solo that comes later.
Otherwise, you simply get a Level knob to set the amount of boost. It uses the mini pedal form factor, which again saves you pedalboard space. Put it before pedals that can be driven with additional signal to get even more from them.
In my opinion, every pedalboard should have at least one digital and one analog delay, though the second of these could take many forms, which we discussed on our best delay pedals post. It’s hard to beat this offering from Donner, which offers the warm, smooth analog tone with a very, very low pricetag.
Controls are as you’d expect: Echo (effect level), Feedback (regeneration), and Time. To be clear, some folks on the internet believe it’s actually a digital engine creating the sound. The current draw is only 36mA, which isn’t much more than the true BBD-based Carbon Copy it’s said to emulate at 29mA. If you can’t tell, it doesn’t matter and you’ll have saved a bunch of cash.
The budget-friendly line available from TC Electronic generally all have a familiar form factor, such as the El Cambo, Gauss Tape, or the Fangs. The one that stands out most is this offering, which appears to take inspiration from two different sources.
In terms of guitar effects, the wooden sides recall vintage synths, but more recently the now-discontinued Moog Moogerfooger line. What it actually recreates, though, according to Sound on Sound is the built-in chorus effect on the Roland Juno-60 synthesizer.
If you’re in the market for a great chorus pedal and want to keep the budget low, this is a good option. The flexibility is limited by the two mode operation, but it’s a legit BBD device that can do stereo out using a TRS cable, if needed.
Reverb is an essential effect. Most of the time, you find it built into your amplifier, and that’s usually good enough. All you need is a touch of it to liven up your amp sound. Totally dry guitar signal is almost never used, whether you’re mic’d up on stage or in a studio setting. Almost every recording ever made relies on reverb of some kind, and if you saved a little bit of money buying an amp either without it or saddled with a particularly poor unit, you’ll need to help it along with a pedal.
TC Electronic is once again the answer. They’ve released this HOF Mini that includes the iconic tone from the full-size Hall of Fame pedal but saves a few dollars by stripping away everything but the single loaded reverb. It looks suspiciously simple with it’s one Reverb control that dictates the amount of reverb. Between that and the mini housing, it’s all you need to add top quality tone to your board.
It’s not empirically inexpensive compared to the other options on this list, but because it’s TC, you also get the TonePrint editor totally free. Plug it into your computer and browse the library of legendary reverb tones or create your own. When you buy this pedal, you get access to hundreds more making this perhaps the best value on our list. It’s hard to go wrong with this unit, but it may require some hours of fiddling at the computer to get the perfect setting.
This blue overdrive is a send up of one of the all-time great pedals, which was improved upon by one of the all-time great pedal makers: the Keeley-modded Boss Blues Driver. Indeed, compared to the un-modded version, the Blues Mood more than holds its own, and in some configurations may even outperform it. I’ve heard it a number of times and I just actually love it. It has a slightly wider frequency response, even before activating the switch.
The simple controls include Level, Tone, and Gain, just like the venerable BD-2. These are meant as full-spectrum overdrives, in contrast to the Tube Screamer type above, so these controls are very responsive to your playing and pickups. The last control is a toggle between Bright and Fat, which is the Keeley mod part. A fine drive that will work for many setups.
The second Biyang on our list takes a novel approach to competing with the big names on the market. For under $50, the sheer amount of options in this unit make it worth the price, especially with stereo ins and outs. You could run a mono signal into the A input of the pedal and use the A and B stereo outs to split to two amps.
Controls include a Blend and Time knob, which are basically volume and decay. The toggle switch at the top selects between Hall, Spring, and Room. The Time range on Hall and Room are very similar, with the Spring range much shorter.
There’s an A/B toggle as well that boosts the input level. The B setting is normal, while the A setting is brighter and higher gain. With stronger pickups, this will cause a bit of reverb grit that you might find useful, or you can use it to boost weak single coil pickups in your favorite vintage Strat. True bypass utilizing 9V batteries or standard Boss-style adapter.
Like the boosts above, compression can be a subtle effect. To the untrained ear, it may even seem like it isn’t doing anything at all. Much like reverb, compression is applied to absolutely everything in the studio, and professional guitarists seek to recreate that same perfect sound when on stage. Single coil players will get massive benefit from a compressor’s effects, while all players will enjoy improved tone and longer sustain.
This mini compressor comes from Donner, a company seemingly formulated to go after Joyo more than to emulate the bigger American companies. Their prices are very low and they put most of their pedals into this form factor. The small size is great for things like compression, which for some folks is an always-on effect.
For controls, you get Level, Tone, and Comp, which combines the attack and speed knobs traditionally found on compressor pedals. Comp dictates how quickly the note is compressed and to what degree. There’s also a switch for Normal or Treble mode, which you can read as a Bright switch. Use it to complement your rig’s overall EQ. Tough to beat at this price.
If you want to see how expensive compressors can get, check out our best compressor pedals.
Fuzz and octave up is a classic combination. It provides a searing tone great for solos that slice through the mix, no matter how hard your drummer hits. The price on this thing is truly absurd and probably worth buying if you just want to try such an effect out.
Controls include the Fuzz (drive) level, Tone, and Volume. The Tone knob is further modified by the Normal/Mid-Cut switch which will shift your upper mids characteristics. Like the pedals it seeks to emulate, the overall fuzz bypass is separate from the octave up, each getting their own footswitch.
Formerly somewhat tough to get over here in the States, Tone City make among the best cheap effects pedals on the market. That includes their King of Tone clone King of Blues, as well as their Tape Machine and Angel Wing.
If you’ve read our best distortion pedals post, you know that mimicking the sound of a cranked Plexi is a staple for guitar pedal creators and a fantastic foundational tone with a clean amp. This cheap take is a good example, provided you understand its limitations. By that I mean: you’ll probably just want to crank the knobs up fully and leave it.
Set that way, it’ll give you a fantastic crunchy sound to augment with other pedals. It’s small, so if you use it as an always-on, it’ll leave room for more expressive options. Worth having, even if it’s a bit of a one-trick pony.
As we demonstrated in our best delay pedals post, delay is not exactly a cheap effect. Most of them are around $200 and you can spend far, far more than that if you want. When it comes to digital delay, all you’re really looking for is something crystal clear and reliable. For that, we’ll stick with Joyo for a moment.
This digital delay offers controls for Time, Repeat, and Level, which is just enough to set your desired repeats. Surprisingly, the tone on this isn’t a harsh, metallic repeat, but rather a warm-sounding delay with a natural decay. Given how much delay adds to the presence and atmosphere of guitar tone, it’s certainly more than worth the price.
Like it’s stablemate the Ultimate Drive, it’s not much to look at — graphic design seems to have been an area of cost savings with some of the Chinese-born products. Then again, you don’t buy a pedal for how it looks. Half the time, you’re playing on a dark stage, anyway, so if this sounds good to you, it’s certainly hard to ignore the price point. You can get virtually any two Joyo pedals for the price of any one from a big-name maker, so they might be worth a try.
In the land of cheap effects, two common complaints are that a given unit sounds either thin or “dark.” Higher quality parts means better control of filtering out the noise or compensating for signal loss that can occur in less expensive pedals. In an ideal world, you’d be able to afford the best of the best, but sometimes you have to make do with what you can afford.
You can ease some of this tension by adding an EQ pedal to your board. If you know your drive is thin, but it creates enough grit, you can thicken it up by boosting the lows. If you have volume issues with that cheap phaser, you can offset them to some degree by shaping the tone and boosting the signal.
An EQ pedal gives you a ton of flexibility, while also acting as an effect unto itself. You can set it to cut all frequencies but one to get a new sound altogether. This unit offers ten bands of EQ, 12dB of cut/boost, and a separate level slider for overall gain. It’s a bit of a pedalboard hog, but this level of flexibility at this price is very nice to have.
As we discussed on our best guitar tuners post, everyone should have at least one, and really more like five tuners. You never know when you’ll forget yours. If you have a pedalboard, of course, having one on there can eliminate the problem of forgetting to bring one.
This is a standard mini pedal affair with a very bright screen, chromatic tuning, and pitch calibration. Like better-known variants, it works as a signal mute and won’t take up much space on the board. There’s also a Pro Stage version, which is faster and slightly more accurate.
These aren’t as cheap as, say the Donner DT-1 or a host of other budget options, but the accuracy and screen are both better.
To step back to multi-effects for a moment, sometimes you don’t want all the overhead of a unit that tries to do it all. For one thing, they can be somewhat complicated to use and setup. For another, they don’t really play nicely with other single-effect units, so you might end up stuck playing only that one box. Pedals like this Behringer option conveniently bridge the gap between the two.
In a conventional Boss-sized pedal, you get a total of six pedals: flanger, chorus, phaser, tremolo, and pitch shifter. The knob on the far right selects which of these you’re using. True, they can’t be combined, but if you’re crafty about when you deploy each of them, you can switch between songs at the gig. It also works nicely for recording in that you can dub in separate tracks, each using a different effect.
The other controls include Level and two Par knobs. These control two parameters of each effect, which will change depending on the effect in use. For delay, that will be time and repeats, while for flanger, that will be speed and depth. This is a great way to sample several effects for very little money, and can later be used as a coloring device after you’ve replaced them with better dedicated units.
Vibe is a vintage effect meant to simulate rotating speaker cabinets of a certain era. You might have guessed from the name that it was integral to Jimi Hendrix’s sound, so if that’s the feel you’re going for, this would be a good place to start.
Controls on the Shaky Jimi include a switch for Chorus and Vibe effects, which enhances the value of the pedal further. There’s a Rate knob for the rotation effect or LFO speed and Depth for the intensity of the modulation. Hue controls the voice of the effect so you have options for how the effect sounds. With Hue all the way clockwise, you almost get into organ territory. Accepts the standard Boss-style power supply.
