Welcome to PedalScope

PedalScope measures what your drive pedals actually do to your signal and draws it in ways a player can read. Plug a pedal between your audio interface’s output and input, run a measurement, and you get honest answers to questions like:

• How does it clip — soft and gradual, or straight into a wall?

• What happens when I dig in, or roll my volume back?

• Why does this pedal sound smooth on chords while that one turns them to mush?

• What did swapping those clipping diodes really change?

Every chart is built from a calibrated measurement of your pedal on your interface — not a simulation, not a spec sheet.

What PedalScope is not

Knowing the edges keeps the middle trustworthy:

• It is not an amp modeler. PedalScope never processes your playing and is not a tone you can perform through. It measures gear; it doesn’t imitate it.

• It is not a general audio analyzer. It does one thing — characterize instrument-level distortion circuits — and goes deep on that.

• It does not simulate circuits. No schematics, no component models. It measures real hardware (and, in a later sprint, a deliberately simplified virtual pedal for learning).

• It cannot measure feel. A measurement can show the compression curve your fingers respond to, but “feel”, pick dynamics against a moving amp, and room loudness are yours, not the app’s. Pages in this guide say so whenever a chart has limits — that honesty is a feature.

The ten-minute path

1. Set up your rig — one cable loop, five minutes, plus the level-setting habits that make measurements comparable.

2. Read the amplifier safety page — even if you only measure pedals today. It exists because one wrong patch can destroy an interface or a tube amp.

3. Calibrate — a loopback run that measures your interface so the app can subtract it from every measurement.

4. Make your first measurement — a Fingerprint of one pedal at one setting: the full measurement suite, one click.

5. When one setting isn’t enough: variants and family runs — measure a pedal’s whole switch panel without losing track of what was set when.

Part 2 of this guide has one page per chart — what it shows, how to read it, and the misreadings to avoid. Each chart’s ⓘ button excerpts its page, so you’re never more than a click from the full story. Most buttons and controls also show a short hover tip when the pointer rests on them; once you know your way around, Settings (⌘,) can turn the tips off — the ⓘ popovers stay either way.