What will an Electro-Harmonix Hum Debugger do for a distorted guitar signal?

Answer 1

that pedal falls into the "noise gate" category. those types of pedals work in a few different ways, but they all stem from the same family, so, here goes:

when you plug your guitar into an amplifier, you're sending a coded signal to the amp, then the amp decodes it, and makes it loud. tossing a Hum DeBugger pedal in the middle will take some of that signal you're sending, and it acts like a filter for certain frequencies so that those ones dont pass through, and the rest of the frequencies will.

the signals ppl usually want to get rid of are "white noise" or "pink noise". think of them as the same sounds you'd hear when you're listening to a cassette tape thats between songs. theres a kinda "hiss" or "air moving" sound, a 60 cycle hum sound from using a 9v adaptor, as well as other stuff we hear all the time and dont think much about, but if those sounds are amped up, they get in the way of the sounds you're trying to get.

these effects are a little bit tricky to set up with a real crunchy distorted tone, because they tend to eliminate not only the additional noise, but also a lot of the tone of a real heavy guitar sound. you might find that its removing some of your high end (treble) along with the sounds its reducing.

noodle with it a lot, little adjustments can make all the difference with an effect like that. tweak till you find a setting that you're happiest with, then compare to the best signal you can muster without it. hopefully after all that experimenting you'll be happy with your tone.