Best amps for pedals: maximize your tone with our choice of the best pedal platforms

Orange Pedal Baby guitar amp on a blue background
(Image credit: Future)

These days more and more players are using guitar pedals to craft their sound to get a great tone. Rather than relying on your amplifier to generate the meat on your tones, instead, you’ll need a nice blank palette that lets you paint your tonal composition candidly. With this type of approach, you’ll require one of the best amps for pedals.

You’ve acquired your mass of pedals and painstakingly connected them together in an orderly fashion. Chained your clean boost into your overdrive, and then into your distortion pedal. Time-based effects in the FX loop? Check. You even drew a signal path diagram, such is the complexity of your setup. Switching your amp on you strike your first chord and instead of an articulate, open, and well-crafted tone, everything goes a bit mushy and squashed sounding.

You can trust Guitar World Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing guitar products so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

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Matt McCracken
Junior Deals Writer

Matt is a Junior Deals Writer here at Guitar World. He regularly tests and reviews music gear with a focus on guitars, amps, pedals, modelers, and pretty much anything else guitar-related. Matt worked in music retail for 5 years at Dawsons Music and Northwest Guitars and has written for various music sites including MusicRadar, Guitar Player, Guitar.com, Ultimate Guitar, and Thomann’s t.blog. A regularly gigging guitarist with over 20 years of experience playing live and writing and recording in bands, he's performed everything from jazz to djent, gigging all over the country in more dingy venues than you can shake a drop-tuned guitar at.