Everything on this page and the two planners below runs through one closed taxonomy (pedal-chain-planner.js's PEDAL_TYPES) of thirty pedal types in fourteen families, each with a placement rule and a written reason attached to the TYPE — never a quality score, never a claim about a specific pedal. Nothing here is invented from a review or a guess: every rank, every reason, and every worked-example number on the planner pages is computed or quoted straight from that one module and its power-planning sibling (pedal-power-planner.js).
The two planners
The Pedal Chain Order Planner answers "what order should my pedals go in": enter your pedals by name and type, and it returns the conventional signal-chain order, any ties where two types have no settled precedence, pedals that are not links in the chain at all (a switcher, an expression pedal, a power supply), ordinary defensible alternatives to the conventional order, and warnings about real interactions the taxonomy can see.
The Pedal Power Budget Planner answers a different, harder question: "what can actually power what." Enter your pedals' voltage, polarity, current draw and isolation needs alongside a supply's own outputs, and it returns a real assignment — headroom, daisy chains, and every pedal that cannot be powered, named with the reason. An unknown draw, voltage or polarity is never assumed; it is reported and left out of every total.
The pedal-type families
Fourteen families, each with its own page: what the family does to the signal, the types inside it with their rank and reason from the taxonomy above, where the family sits in the chain and why, and power notes stated as general guidance — never a specification for a named pedal.
- Tuner
- Buffer
- Filter — wah, envelope filter
- Dynamics — compressor, noise gate
- Pitch — pitch shifter / octave
- Drive — fuzz, overdrive, distortion, boost, preamp
- EQ
- Modulation — phaser, flanger, chorus, vibrato, rotary, ring modulator, tremolo
- Delay
- Reverb
- Level — volume pedal, looper
- Routing — DI, switcher, splitter
- Control — expression pedal, MIDI controller
- Power — power supply
Pedalboards, power supplies & switching
A separate index for board, power-supply and MIDI-switching hardware exists in the code today but is not yet live: /pedals/boards stays a 404 until this site has a sourced page for at least one such record, the same rule this site's brand-set index follows — an empty index is a 404, not an empty page.
What this site does not do
Gear Warrior curates and computes; it does not review. No pedal on this site is ranked, scored, or called better or worse than another — the taxonomy's rank is a placement RULE about a type, never a verdict about a product, and a pedal record renders a spec block only when this site has verified power and type facts for it (docs/gearwarrior-pedals-contract.md §5). Where the facts fall short of that floor, a record is listed rather than padded.