Welcome to PedalScope
PedalScope measures what your drive pedals actually do to your signal and draws it in ways both a player and a builder can read. Plug a pedal between your audio interface’s output and input, run a measurement, and you get objective 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.
Why measure?
To support your ears, not replace them. Players and builders have to trust their ears — and listening tests have well-known pitfalls: the louder of two sounds almost always wins, ears tire over a session, and knowing which pedal is playing changes what the listener hears. PedalScope’s listening tools are built around those traps: every comparison is loudness-matched (why that matters), A/B comparisons can be run blind, and single parts of the sound — the even harmonics, or the intermodulation products of a chord — can be played on their own.
To characterize a pedal, not imitate it. Other software models amps and pedals in other ways. Neural-network models learn a device from recordings and can emulate it convincingly, while offering little insight into why it sounds the way it does. Circuit simulation works from the schematic, which requires exact knowledge of every component’s properties — and real units drift from their schematics through tolerances, aging and mods. PedalScope uses established methods from nonlinear system identification to measure the actual unit, giving an objective characterization of the signal properties that shape what a listener hears: its clipping curve, its harmonic recipe, how it responds to level and pitch, and how it treats chords.
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 emulate 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 plugins — and, in Simulation Mode, a deliberately simplified virtual pedal built for learning, measured by the same pipeline.
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
Set up your rig — one cable loop, five minutes, plus the level-setting habits that make measurements comparable.
Read the amplifier safety page — PedalScope measures pedals only, but an amp is rarely far from a pedal rig, and one wrong patch can destroy an interface or a tube amp.
Calibrate — a loopback run that measures your interface so the app can subtract it from every measurement.
Make your first measurement — a Fingerprint of one pedal at one setting: the full measurement suite, one click.
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.
Simulation Mode needs none of that. No interface, no pedal, no purchase: a virtual pedal you dial directly, measured by the same pipeline as hardware. What is free and what the one purchase adds is on its own page.
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.