Just like guitars, effects come in all shapes and sizes. For guitarists, the first effects were built right into amplifiers. Reverb and tremolo were about all you could hope for, and about a decade or so after that, the fuzz box made an appearance. While these effects seem downright quaint by today’s standards, they are still used on hundreds of recordings and thousands of gigs each year. There was a time in the not-so-distant past where guitarists were faced with decisions about how they should add effects to their rigs. True, there were a few amps and even guitars with built-in effects, guitarists settled mostly on the pedal approach. It is easy to see why: pedals were pretty inexpensive, sounded pretty cool, and most music required just a handful of different sounds.

Exit the Pedals, Enter the Rack

As recorded music got more complex (probably after Pet Sounds & Sgt. Pepper’s), guitarists became enamored with the effects that were available inside a recording studio. Recording studios used cool things like tube compressors, preamps, plate reverbs and actual echo chambers that were used and abused by recording engineers usually prompted by inventive players to get sounds that were different than anything else that had come before. These effects were The effects were generally (but not always) 19″ across. and mounted in large racks standing taller than the musicians themselves. The racks were essentially pieces of furniture, and the individual effects were mounted inside of them, much like the modern studio picture at the top of this article. Knobs and settings were in the front, and the back of the rack contained all of the wiring to the mixing board. It wasn’t unusual to have some poor engineer trying to make sense of the mess of wires in the back of such equipment racks. Each effect was designed for a specific purpose, and those pesky rock musicians were always asking, “What if we hook this one into that one? It isn’t supposed to do that? Just try. Tell them I asked you. Stop crying. I’ll take the blame.”

Fast Forward About 20 Years…

While both pedals and studio rack effects developed and matured, guitarists started thinking more like engineers. Instead of having small pedals in front of their feet, what if they had more advanced effects in a studio rack? Better yet, what if they brought these advanced studio processors on tour with them! They would have to get some sort of case to bring them in, sure, but then they would have that elusive sound that pedals just could not get at that time.

Big bands such as Pink Floyd started touring with more advanced guitar equipment, and brought the equipment that they used in the studio on tour with them. Special rack cases were built, and they were loaded up with equipment that was never designed to leave the recording studio. Of course, things broke, and fixed on tour. However, soon manufacturers started building more robust gear. Guitarists could keep their equipment in the back of the stage and control it with remote controllers.

Ahead Another 10 years…

Guitarists were naturally influenced by the bands they saw, so eventually the average guitarist wanted a rack of their own. By the mid-1980’s, pedals seemed to be losing popularity, as rack effects were all over stages and the pages of guitar magazines. Up until then, a rack effect had a very specific purpose. If it was a compressor, it would be set to a specific sound. If you needed another sound for another song, you needed another compressor to switch in, usually using complex relays. However, soon, the idea of presets and midi soon became commonplace. Presets allowed one effect to have many different settings, which were stored in the device itself. Midi was a system of messages that could control and change different effects. Now you didn’t need a special rack delay for a long echo and another one for a short echo. You could have one unit, and just switch sounds with a pedal sending different midi messages to each device. With one button press, you could change the echo time, turn on a chorus, turn off the wah, and crank up the distortion. While this sort of thing is obvious and commonplace now, it wasn’t so in the era of you get what you get and like it.

It All Comes Crashing Down

As technology trickled down to consumer level, the quality suffers just like in any industry. Cheaper rack effects contained thousands of sounds, but hardly the one you wanted. Plus, those of us without roadies had to lift these racks and transport them. We had to learn how to program each effect too, and when multi-effects became common, we had to program strings of effects on tiny LCD screens. If something wasn’t right when playing live, you couldn’t just reach down and turn a knob. And if you loved the delay sound, but hated the chorus sound, you compromised…or bought another piece of equipment. After a good run, guitarists turned their back to the rack and started chaining together pedals again. By the mid-1990’s, pawn shops couldn’t give rack equipment away as a new boutique pedal market flourished.

Rack Attack II: The Rackening

Everything old is new again, and guitarists are once again discovering racks. Equipment such as Fractal Audio’s Axe-FX II and Kemper’s Profiler have brought back the rack. These companies keep the quality high and leave the problems of old effects in the dust. Current rack-based effects do a lot more than just a bunch of effects too. They use computer modeling to allow you to build an entire rig, from effects to amplifier. Processing power today is thousands of times more powerful than what was available 30 years ago.

These days, pedals and rack effects can live together in any guitar rig. Guitar gear has evolved, and that evolution gives us choices. It isn’t a case of one or the other anymore. Just try out lots of gear, and get the right tool for the job. Yes, you might have to do a little bit of research, but that research includes a lot of playing. Not too bad, huh?