The 9 Best high gain Guitar Pedals (2023 reviews)

Boss line of pedal come in a pretty wide variety of styles, so you can definitely find one that suits your individual preferences and needs. It is the ideal compact tone processor for performing guitarists. The stereo effects are really excellent and even with two small 30watt amps (with 12" speakers) you get a virtual wall of sound. The "manual" setting is fantastic and easy to turn off and on. It runs on batteries or from a wall wart, so it's easily portable.

The onboard expression pedal can be used for foot volume and pedal effects like wah, octave shift, and freeze, and it is also possible to control effects parameters such as mod rate, delay oscillation, and more for expressive real. It is easy to play with sounds without getting buried in endless menus. The POD is much more configurable signal path and tone-wise as well as having a ton of downloadable patches that can help get your sound where you want it. The default setting for the expression pedal is a very smooth volume pedal.

Why We Like This:

Great for recording and jamming sessions
Good investment for long term

Best For playing styles: Joyo high gain Guitar Pedal

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The joyo high gain guitar pedal might be a relatively new release, but it's still nothing short of impressive this year, thanks to multiple price cuts and added new features over the past few months. It offers a unique flavor of overdrive that is very amp-like and pleasing, and should be able to find a home on any guitar player's pedal board. It provides 8 overdrives, each with its distinctive flavor, to color your music. It can function like a clean boost, tube screamer, or mosfet overdrive. The volume knob alone makes your amp louder and the tone and gain knobs add more texture to your guitar signal. The addition of attachable rubber feet is a bonus.

The gain is fantastic, but the Bias knob really allows you to dial in the sound without getting any fizziness that so many high gain pedals have. It stacks well with other milder drive pedals and is great with rangemaster circuit styled boosters. All the controls are very responsive and it has a very nice range. The ability to turn them on and off is a great feature as well.

Why We Like This:

Strips the tone from your guitar, replaces with unmusical static
Excellent range from low to mid od and touch sensitive
Adds a bit of fat without being muddy

Best For practice sessions: Flamma high gain Guitar Pedal

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The flamma high gain guitar pedal is capable of outshining several other pedal featured in this list in overall features for the price point. Not only it gives you access to a bunch of tools to create atmospheres, colors, and audio keys, but it gives you a built-in tuner and a looper, which are some features that you will probably use more than you think. It's great and versatile, and has so many good clean and distorted tones, even a few acoustic guitar simulators. It can be connected to a Windows PC or mac via usb for direct recording, software updates, or preset editing using the dedicated editor software.

The built-in looper can record up to 80 seconds of playing, allowing you to create your dynamic, multi-part arrangements. It can be used for both foot volume and pedal effects for dynamic real-time effects adjustment. It is good enough for beginner/intermediate players who want to learn more about effect chains, wah pedals, and loopers.

Why We Like This:

Works great as a home studio guitar interface
Excellent build quality and nice sound
Very cool and versatile guitar fx processor
Tones are great, comes with a looper, tuner and modeling effects

Best For new To intermediate guitarist: Kokko high gain Guitar Pedal

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Not everyone likes to purchase pedal for their daily purpose, but the kokko high gain guitar pedal would be an anomoly. This compressor produces a high quality sound for electric guitar. It lacks some of the features of nicer compressors but its still pretty versatile. It is quite small, which is good, because you can fit WAY more on your pedal board. It is a soft clipping, low gain overdrive that's perfect for blues. It is a great little pedal for a new intermediate guitarist. This gives a kick to both pedals and rounds out the sound nicely.

Why We Like This:

Small, compact, inexpensive and does the job
Perfect pedal that does exactly what a comp should and does it well
Metal enclosure, substantial knobs that glow in the dark

Best For synths: Zoom high gain Guitar Pedal

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The zoom high gain guitar pedal's material feels more premium than its price would suggest. You can get really nice sounds with this multi-effects processor. They're very basic looper to begin with, you can have two tracks at most, no real dynamic layering, splitting, reversing or mixing of tracks within the looper. This thing is so much fun, with a good pair of headphones you can play many different guitar tones including pretty awesome fender deluxe reverb and old marshal/vox styles.

Via the USB connection, the software allows real-time creation and tweaking of patches while selecting from a huge effects pool, consisting of Dynamics, Filters, Amps, Drives, Cabinets, Modulations, SFX, Delays, Reverbs and Pedals. The Guitar Lab software is easy to use, click and drag to add or remove patches, change names, reorder, and remove unwanted patches. It also provides a quick and easy way to name or rename User Patches.

Why We Like This:

Built in compression, modulation, reverb, delay
Effects are great and the amp sounds are very nice too
Each effect has 4 knobs for adjusting parameters, which makes it really easy

Best For HX Stomp: NUX high gain Guitar Pedal

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Nux offers a variety of pedal for personal choice and yet maintaining quality in all the variants. The effect block beautifully recreates the awesome signature sound of real analog overdrive / distortion pedals. The nux will go into self amplified monitors, direct connected to the speaker, with headphones, or your computer without a guitar amplifier. You can use it in front of a PA mixing board, powered speaker, with headphones, or your computer without a guitar amplifier. It has great capacity to reproduce some warm ambient and lush sounds as well.

The tones are awesome and it even has an acoustic amp plus IR's for 2 high end guitars. The pedal creates a hum once amp gain and OD are used. The expression pedal works great for volume swells and other effects after it is calibrated. It comes with a look through the manual, the pedal has decent frequency response range.

Why We Like This:

Being able to load your own impulse responses is a massive plus
You can use with headphones/guitar 0r bass amplifier's and any powered speaker systems
Usb audio stream for recording interface with routing setup
Stunning product, amazing sound, and versatility

Best For All Bass playing scenes: Valeton high gain Guitar Pedal

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Best part: valeton high gain guitar pedal costs comparatively low and it is available to ship in 24 hours. This pedal has a chorus effect which is perfect for the 80s songs. It is a booster and compressor combo which contains tuner, boost amp amp octave chorous and fx loop guitar bass effect pedal & bass multi effects processor. It has an fx loop after preamp section. It's not very loud in the lower notes but at least it doesn't wander.

It comes with a charger so no concerns about voltageamperage vs + or. The compressor/boost circuit works fine and really helps beef up the amp simulator's volume and clarity. On high notes, it does have a nice synth-y tone though.

Why We Like This:

You can have two diff compressor settings
Built-in tuner for turning your instrument at any time
Compact size and light weight that you can put it to your bag easily
Great as a backup pedal too

Best For Acoustic Or electric guitars: Vangoa high gain Guitar Pedal

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This little chorus pedal is well built. The Vangoa fuzz guitar pedal gives you the wild fuzz tone, which is plump and rich, ensuring the best performances. It produces a primitive tone, which is rugged and powerful. The volume and repeat knobs illuminate when the pedal is active, and marked with position indicators that are clearly visible. The knobs are backlit when the pedal is engaged. The pedal has a narrow sweet spot but is a terrific value at $. If you like touch / pick attack and volume responsive fuzz circuits, you’ll like this.

Why We Like This:

Pedal combines the iconic vintage tube overdrive
Led indicators, indicate the working status
Sound with a wide dynamic range, and produces
Comes with rubber feet and velcro, bare bottom plate

Best For Price: Vox high gain Guitar Pedal

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If you often find yourself scrambling for convenient and suitable pedal, vox high gain guitar pedal should be your first option for buying. The VOX Tonelab ST multi-effects processing unit is a hot little device packed with features. It is equipped with thirty-three spot-on amp simulations, including vintage amps, coveted boutique amps, the latest high-gain amps, and entirely new amp models designed by vox. It gives a rich variation of very many voices, all with a charming tint of softness in all the very diverse sound spectres.

The tube amp really warms up sounds. The effects are excellent, the programming is simple (perhaps too simple -- you can program over your existing programs with no warning), and the construction is great. The idle hiss even with the unplugged guitar may be a serious obstacle for the studio usage, and is quite audible on stage when running the signal to either PA or via an amp.

The preset Amp Models are organic and authentic, and the Cabinet Models can be used to create an enormous variety of sounds. The best thing about this pedal is the amp simulation options, you can choose from several different models of amps, and it sounds great.

Why We Like This: