OT: My experiences with my rig and sound...

[John Egerton]

hey guys...

after swapping and chaning my rig for about 3 years now... trying different amps, pedals and guitars I've finally settled on the sound I like.

Its a line6 hd147 modelling amp on the vox ac30 top boost setting, set really clean, using this in conjunction with a keeley modded boss ds-1 distortion pedal...

I also own a line6 dl4, a boss sd-1, a boss rv3 and a boss phaser... In addition to this I also own a boss ch-1 which have been subsequently removed from my rig because of the following reason...

They all suck tone when bypassed.

After toying with effects and my sound for this long I have developed a very discerning ear for how my tone sounds and this has caused m to part company with some of my favourite pedals... The line6 dl4 was one of these...

I have an original digitech whammy which i removed the switch from and mounted a true bypass box ontop as i use this pedal quite often...

what I'd like to know is why these pedal companies knowingly release a pedal into the market that will suck a person's bypassed sound... If that was me it would b the first thing I would check going through quality control...

I ressurected the rv3 this moring and realised the reason why i abandoned the pedal a long time ago... It looks like i'm going to have to make another a/b box for this pedal.

My advice to anyone who stumbled upon this great forum like I did, looking for their ultimate tone would be to firstly take a day off work, and really look at your current setup.

I started off with about 20 pedals of all different brands in my rig and wondered why my ton was so lifeless. I did the WRONG thing and changed my amp, so don't make this mistake.

Rather than buying all your pedals all at once, start off with NO pedals...

Buy one pedal at a time, turn the volume up and compare the sound of your bypassed sound with both your newly purchased effect both in and out of your rig... I'f there's no noticable difference then you can add it to your rig. If however there is, you have to weigh up your options.. you can either:

A: Modify the pedal for ture bypass/build a true bypass box/look for mods that improve the tone of the bypassed signal
B: Take the pedal back to the store as the benefits of having the pedal do not outweigh the time and effort needed to modify it.

Most of you might be thinking "this guy is stupid... everybody knows this" but I can assure you, somebody else somewhere is making the same mistake and thinking like this will save them a lot of time and money as at the end of the day, effects are to aid your playing and if you're wasting every waking hour tweaking your rig, you aren't spending enough time with your beloved guitar.

I only wished someone would have strapped me to a chair, slapped me accross the face and begun to explain this to me as I proceeded to blame 'this' and 'that' part of my rig and proceed to download countless schematics and projects for building 'the best' or 'better' distortion pedals, tremelo pedals, chorus pedals etc. stupidly thinking that this would be the answer to my search for a better guitar sound...

I spent a whole day modifying the boss sd-1 to get rid of the bleed through of distortion when the pedal was bypassed only to find that the bypassed signal lacked tone and clarity... ad the silly thing was, it was like his before i began modifying the pedal!

There are still a couple of effects that I would like in my rig, but it would be handy if somone could suggest some very good pedals of all different makes and types for those of us looking to make an addition to our rig, and not destroy our bypassed sound as a result of this.

Another good idea would be to make a blacklist of pedals that people like me should stay away from. I try to read the opinions of people on harmonycentral however I get the feeling that many are biased and do not contain the relevant technical reasoning for their opinions.

I've read countless arguments for and against true bypass and my opinion is that I really don't care.... As long as I can't tell the difference between the 2 individual pedals when bypassed then I'd be quite happy to add thm to my rig.

another thing that might also seem obvious to most of you is the golden rule...

Less is more....

Less pedals=better tone
Less distortion = better overall sound when playing in a band environment

I nearly cried the first time I dialed in what i thought was the best ever distortion sound only to find that when i played in a live venue one of m friends came to me and said "the soloing was great, but when yo were playing chords it sounded like the background noise coming from your amp was louder than yor actual guitar sound".

Simply put, when cranking your amp, you don; need an immense amount of distortion and so pedals entitled "uber metal", "thrash box", "metalzone", "death to all distortion", "this distortion could kill a small animal" (you get the picture) ae better left on the shelves...

I found that the humble ds-1 whaich was in fact the very first pedal I ever owned, set to a reasonable amount of gain provides me with just the right amount of distortion to give me my 'ultimate guitar distortion' and more importantly, does not change the tonal characteristics of my bypassed sound.

of course when as lower volume levels I have to increase the gain to compensate for the shift in frequencies when the volume dial was backed off.

back in the day, I would have probably thought flectcher munson was a football player for some lower league team.

I hope somebody got something from this post as I personally feel a lot better now that my experiences are shared with others. Theres loads of other things I've encountered and when I remember them I'll be sure to post them in this topic.

Cheers...

John

[Mark Hammer]

Here is the dilema, John.  If you design a pedal that anticipates a specific set of circumstances, there will always be an anomalous real-world circumstance that brings out the worst in it.  If you design a pedal to anticipate every conceivable circumstance, it will generally be unnecessarily complicated, possibly limited in unanticipated ways, and generally costlier.  Maybe even noisier.

Most manufacturers have a rough hunch of what you will be feeding their products, but they can never know for sure.  You might be plugging directly into the pedal or the amp, but you might be plugging into something else first, too.  That something else might be buffered, but it might not.   If you read Pete Cornish's diatribe about the evils of true bypass, some of what he says is perfectly true.  But of course, he is assuming the worst case scenario.  There are times when true bypass is precisely what works best, and times when it won't.  If the manufacturer knew just what YOU were going to be doing, they'd design the product around your needs and context, but the problem is they never do, so they don't.

The chief problems people face when stringing together gear into a nicely integrated rig are:

• making sure the first thing the guitar/bass hits can easily accommodate the output impedance of the instrument
• making sure that everything else AFTER that first device sees a low enough impedance
• making sure that all signal levels at each branch point are appropriately set to achieve the best balance between S/N ratio and clean headroom
• making sure that cumulative bandwidth restrictions are not too excessive

So, your instrument will have something in the vicinity of an 8k-10k output impedance, we'll say.  Something like that shouldn't be run over huge cable distances.  The first thing it goes to should have a nice high input impedance and should remain in the signal path at all times.  If that device is "true bypassed", then whatever cable length comes after it is simply added on to the cable length leading up to it.  That can suck tone big time. 

The optimal thing is to assure that everything in the signal path is always seeing a low impedance load.  That way, whether you have true bypass in those devices or not, they will be seeing what they were *designed* to see, and nothing more challenging.  Let me emphasize, I'm NOT dissing TB.  Rather, as Pete Cornish wisely notes, TB can unintentionally "pass the buck" with regard to needed buffering.  I don't think EVERYTHING needs to be buffered and use electronic switching, but one needs to be cogniscent of whether the bypass scheme in device X is diminishing or augmenting the problems introduced by impedance issues.

What about input stages?  All pedals/effects that use electronic switching will have an "always-on" input stage sometimes op-amp, but often a discrete single-tranny stage, and the same thing again on the output.  Individually, these do not result in noticeable noise or distortion, but when you add up a large number of them, there can be nonlinearities introduced into the signal.  So, if you crank pedal A's output, pedal B's input (or the switching FET) may not be able to handle that comfortably (even when in bypass mode).  Similarly, no single pedal might shave off any audible high end or low end, but a 1/4db here and there can add up after a while.

Personally, I think the smartest thing to do is to have a first pedal like a clean booster that is always "on" and always providing a high-in, low-out impedance-matching function.  One of the things I like about the AMZ MosFet booster is that it can do this and provide switchable boost without ever having to take the device out of circuit.  If the first thing does the impedance matching, and is never out of circuit, then you can TB anything that comes after it and make full use of the putative benefits of TB without experiencing the downside of it.

If you want to hear what tone-sucking sounds like, plug your guitar directly into your amp with the longest cable you can find (or fake that by pluggin two moderate-length cable into a known TB pedal set to bypass mode).  Next, plug your guitar into the same amp using the shortest cable length you have (a 6" patch cord works nice).  the difference you hear between them is what tone-sucking is and does.