What 194 documented pedalboards add up to.
Every board in this archive answers one question: what was on this guitarist’s floor, and when. Read across all of them and different questions become answerable — which pedals recur, where each kind of effect actually sits in the chain, and how rigs changed across ninety years.
- 194
- dated pedalboards, each held to two independent sources.
- 174
- guitarists with at least one documented rig.
- 808
- distinct pedal models identified across the archive.
- 1165
- individual pedal placements with a known chain position.
- 429
- cited sources from 156 distinct publishers.
- 1936–2026
- the span between the oldest and newest documented signal path.
The most documented pedals
Ranked by the number of separate pedalboards a model appears on, not by how often it is mentioned.
There is no meaningful “least used” pedal: 667 of the 808 identified models appear on exactly one board. A long tail of single appearances is what an archive of specific, dated rigs looks like — most pedals are a personal choice, not a standard.
Every placement by category
Where each effect sits in the signal chain
Position of every pedal normalised across its board, then taken as a median per category.
0% = first pedal after the guitar100% = last pedal before the amplifier
Nobody planned this. The conventional pedal order — tuner, wah, gain, modulation, delay, reverb — falls out of 194 independently documented rigs on its own. Only boards with four or more pedals are counted, and categories with fewer than ten placements are left out.
How pedalboards changed, 1936 to 2026
Boards grew. The gain stage in front of the amplifier changed character entirely.
Average pedals per board, by decade
Fuzz gave way to overdrive
Fuzz
Overdrive
Read as a share of all pedals documented in each era. Early eras rest on far fewer boards than recent ones, so treat the direction as the finding, not the exact figure.
How the archive is sourced
A statistic is only worth what its evidence is worth, so here is the evidence.
By source type
By evidence type
Most cited publishers
The uncomfortable number: only 11 of 194 signal chains are traced cable by cable. The rest are described by a source or reconstructed from partial evidence, and every board says which on its own page. Average of 2.3 sources per board, with two independent ones required before anything is published. Read the methodology.
The odd corners of the archive
The oldest entry has no pedals at all
Robert Johnson, 23 November 1936 — a guitar, a microphone and a hotel room. The archive starts 90 years before the newest board.
One board holds 44 pedals
Kevin Shields · Reunion tour three-board switching system, against a median of 6 across every documented board.
56 years of service
The Fuzz Face appears on documented boards from 1966 to 2022, still in use on stages today.
27 rigs use no pedals whatsoever
Straight into the amplifier, or an acoustic path into a microphone. Another 27 boards carry exactly one pedal.