Today marks day one of Amazon’s Big Deal Days sale, and with it comes a myriad of budget stompboxes available at serious discounts, but which should you get? Let’s face it, cheap pedals can be hit or miss. For every diamond in the rough, 8 or 9 should probably end up in a landfill.
So with that in mind, before Prime Day guitar deals even started, the Guitar World team bought 8 of the most talked-about cheap pedals on Amazon to test them and see what they’re really good for. We’ve used them with real tube amps, with a modeling amp, and through an audio interface with guitar plugins to see how they hold up.
Tonally, there’s some really great stuff here, especially if you’re willing to tweak. You can absolutely use them to record and rehearse. Where they typically fall short of more expensive models, however, is build quality; they’re fine for a home pedalboard, but I’d stop short of playing them live.
For the money, it’s hard to knock these pedals, especially if you’re building a budget second-home board or want to try some iconic pedal circuits without committing to spending hundreds of dollars. Of the 8 pedals we tested, 7 were on sale, so here’s what we thought of each one. We’ve also ranked them by preference.
