Fx loop built into amps

The fx loop gives you the flexibility to have your effects placed before or after your amp in the chain. This can be especially important when utilizing the drive channel on your amp and time-based effects (delay, reverb, chorus, flanger, phaser, etc) on your pedal board. Some effects sound very different before distortion verses after. Imagine your amp is set to distort your guitar tone. Do you want the amp to distort your reverb or do you want the reverb to echo your distorted tone? Effects not in the loop will have the distortion added to them. Effects in the loop will be added on top of the distorted tone. This is also really helpful for stacking drive pedals or using pre-amp pedals.

On a typical pedal board, my guitar goes into my tuner, then pitch modulation, then eq, then wah, then drive pedals (boosf, od, distortion, fuzz, etc), then chorus/phase/flange, then delay/tremolo/reverb, then finally looper before going into the clean amp.

However, if some of your drive is coming from your amp, you would stick the tuner, pitch modulation, eq, and wah where they would normally go, but put everything that was behind the drive pedals in the effects loop.

The loop is the bridge between the amp's preamp and the power amp. Think of your amp's preamp as just another stompbox in your signal chain. Your clean channel preamp is like a clean boost/eq hybrid, and your dirty channel preamp is like a OD or distortion stompbox.

Then think of what pedals would sound good behind the above, and experiment with running them through the loop. Anything you run before your distortion or OD effects will rarely sound good through the loop in my experience.

But the golden rule with multiple effects, how to chain them, what goes and doesn't go in the loop, is THERE ARE NO RULES. Experiment and do what YOU like and what YOU think sounds best.

I probably have every popular time, modulation and/or ambience effect in my stomp collection. And the only thing I like in my loop is a digital delay. Everything else is out front.

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Am I missing something with the fx loop?

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If your running your amp clean and using pedals for your distortion, then no your not missing anything imo.

This including all other pedals if you're running into the input of a clean amp.

You generally want your delays, reverbs, and chorus after your distortion. If you're using your amps overdrive channel then the effects loop let's you put those after the preamp (where the distortion comes from) and before the power amp.

If you only run clean or you only use overdrive/distortion pedals then you can run all your effects straight into the preamp.

You can run delays and reverbs before the distortion but it gives some strange results and most people prefer it the other way around.

As a couple have talked about, the pre-amp and power amp, I assume you know exactly what these are and what they're doing?
Helps me if I see it in a diagram, then it makes more sense whats going on, which has already been explained. I hope this helps.
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