Guitar pedal I/O direction..

equalsql

Just musing...

So.. given that we English speakers read from left to right.. and that amps and pre-amps feed the signal chain from left to right..(when facing the control panels).  

How come guitar pedals feed the signal in the opposite direction?  Who started this I wonder?  Has this always been the convention and has anyone bucked the trend?

Branshen

Kinda makes sense because most of us are right handed and the lead comes out from the right side of our guitars. If we had to feed effect pedals in front of us from the left, the lead would have to cross our path compared to not at all if we fed the effects from right to left.

jellyroll

This is why I've always been reluctant to import pedals from the USA....where I believe they put the drive on the other side......

guitarfishbay

It makes sense to me, based on where the cable comes out of the guitar.  Cables crossing over your feet are a pain.

Drew_TNBD

It's them Muslamics... trying to get us to go from right to left!

timhulio

Bucking the trend - probably lots of examples from the earlier years of effects pedals. Two ready examples are the Shin Ei Fuzz Wah and the Interfax Harmonic Percolator.

meltedbuzzbox

I think all of the Eventide pedals are left to right (not sure about the H9)

Sassafras

Fuzz Face: left to right.

dano

Think about building a pedal... you have it upside down.... so working left to right ends up back to front when you plug into it.

I collect my £5.

ICBM

'Backwards' pedals are really annoying.

Ages ago I bought a Mesa V-1 pedal on Ebay. Tried it briefly at home, working fine. Took it to a gig, I think the same night but definitely within a couple of days before I'd had a chance to try it a band practice - provided-backline gig so I was expecting to get all my overdrive from my pedals, and the V-1 was going to be my 'amp channel'. Plugged it into the insert loop on my pedalboard with it to the side.

No sound when the pedal was on. Worked fine in bypass so I knew it wasn't a cable issue. Power getting to it no problem, valves lit up… oh well, must be broken. Then had the bright idea that if I turned the volume down to zero the output jack would be effectively an on/off footswitch, so I could use it to change channels on the provided amp! Worked perfectly. Did the gig and thought I was very clever for lateral thinking, even if it was the world's most expensive footswitch for a Crate amp…

Next day, I took the pedal apart. Couldn't find anything wrong with it at all. Puzzlement. Finally I decided to test it in the loop of the pedalboard just in case there was some sort of bizarre compatibility issue - and discovered that with the patch cables I had been using, one of them wouldn't quite reach the jack on the V-1… and then it finally dawned on me that I'd had it plugged in backwards .

So the moral of the story is, all pedals should be right-in/left out, or people who are supposed to know what they're doing end up feeling very silly .