wrong effects orders questions

[markphaser]

What are some wrong effects orders please?

When putting effects in different orders can it cause:

1.) overloading problems?
2.) impedance problems?
3.) DB level input and output matching problem?
4.) phase output or input problems?
5.) some pedals have inputs or output buffers other don't
when putting them in different order what kind of problems can
this cause please?
6.) Why does putting a dirty distorted input causes a wah or phaser to react different than a clean guitar signal

[markphaser]

7.) some pedals have input passive or active summing and output passive or active summing stages and others don't
     what can this do when u put different effects in different orders with these factors to think about please?
8.) Some pedals are Positive ground Vs Negative ground what kind of problems can this cause when putting
     a Positive ground in series with a Negative ground or reverse the order or in parallel?

[blanik]

i just noticed that when i plug my tele straight into my TS, it sound good and powerfull but when i plug into a BOSS pedal before the TS (the BOSS pedal being OFF but still buffering the signal) the sound becomes thinner and weaker ?! (the other way around it sound OK) is it because of the input stage of the TS or the buffer of the BOSS pedal?

R.

[sfr]

There's really no "wrong" order - some might be more musical than others, and some might be more functional than others, but if all your gear is working okay, you shouldn't be able to break anything just by running one pedal into another.  Experiment, and go with what you like. 

Positive and negative ground really just refers to whether the ground is + or - in regards to the 9V supply - the ground is still 0V - as long as you don't have a situation where you've shorted the power supply (by daisy chaining a power supply across multiple pedals, you should be okay.)

That said, there are some orders of effects some people tend to like.  A quick google for "effect pedal order" or something like that should turn up some results.  A few links:

http://www.robertkeeley.com/faq.php#Effect Order
http://users.chariot.net.au/~gmarts/fx-order.htm
http://www.alesis.com/support/cc/fxorder.html  (this one deals more with keyboards)

One thing to be aware of is that some pedals have a limited amount of "headroom", and hitting them with a "hot" signal, from a booster or a distortion with a lot of gain at the end of it, may give you wierd results.  For instance, I get a great tone hitting my amp with my LPB boost.  If I hit my flanger with the LPB first, however, I get some distortion and clipping from the flanger, and don't get as hot a signal hitting my amp - my flanger just doesn't have the headroom to handle the volume levels the LPB puts out.  It makes an interesting sound, but not one I like to use, and it means if I turn my flanger on while my boost is already on and before it, I get a *drop* in volume level.  My diy Dist+ exhibits similar behaviour - I get more distortion out of it by hitting it with my LPB first  - but if I have a noticable drop in signal between my LPB and LPB w. the Dist+ after it.  (more noticable as a volume *boost* when I go to clean my signal up by turning off the Dist+ w/o turning off the LPB booster.)  Because of the weird interaction between boost pedals and some other pedals, I have 3 boosts in my chain, for boosting the signal before and after various effects.   I also use a volume pedal to keep things under control when I have a lot of "gainy" pedals running.

A few vintage fuzzes also like to be connected directly to a guitar, not off the tail end of another pedal.  Fuzz Faces come to mind.  The Bazz Fuzz (I believe) gets around this by using a transformer at the input to "simulate" a pickup - there's more info about that somewhere, (I believe AMZ? if you search around the board you should find it)

Phase problems shouldn't arise unless you're running effects in parallel or running pedals with a clean and wet outs.

I'll let someone a little more eloquent than I explain the wah/phaser pre/post distortion thing, I'm not ssure how to word it exactly.

But really, with the basically infinite possibilities for pedal chains, it'd be easier to answer a question if it was "pedal A sounds bad afer pedal B, why? What can I do to fix this?" or "I'm thinking of making this pedal setup - can anyone forsee any problems?" 

[Seljer]

theres nothing "wrong" in different effect orders, they just sound different. Some might sound bad, some sound good, its really just personal preference.



2,5.) Well wintage fuzzboxes (Fuzz Face and whatever else you may have) don't like to have buffers put in front of them, kind of sucks the reactivity to your playing out of them.
3.) With regular stompboxes: probably not. You might get some problems if you wanted to run regular rack type studio effects (eg: line level, not instrument level inputs) in your regular effect line; though in most cases you're putting them in your effect loop on your amp, which is usually line level or has a volume knob of some sort...
4.) In a single pedal chain you usually don't have to worry about phase cancellations (unless you're running effects in parallel or anything like that).
6.) Different effects orders give different sounds as you're effecting and allready affected signal (eg: do you distort the delay or delay the distortion?). A clean signal and a distorted signal are very different in the amount of harmonics they have (a distorted one has much more of them) and that will be shown when you run them through something.

[markphaser]

What kind of weird interaction between pedals do u guys get ?

why don't fuzz faces like buffer pedals in front of them?

What can cause wrong or weird interactions of different headroom problems?

[petemoore]

http://what%20kind%20of%20weird%20interaction%20between%20pedals%20do%20u%20guys%20get%20?
  Squealing, ducking, less linear response at hi/low ends of frequency band...other wierdnesses that may or may not be desirable.

why don't fuzz faces like buffer pedals in front of them?
  They do. but they don't change sound as much w/guitar volume decrease, and will sound different. Stick any commercial pedal that has buffers in front of a FF for more info.
What can cause wrong or weird interactions of different headroom problems?
  Say you boost the input to 4v peak to peak, driving input to a 9v supplied circuit, you have only 1 volt left, and part of that is used up because transistors and oa's need a little 'breathing' room, [there are 'rail to rail' opamps...OT].
  When signal input voltage amplitude exceeds supply voltage, the waveform is seriously 'distorted', or, the tops and bottoms of the wave swing will be cutoff. This effect can easily be replicated by reducing supply voltage on an active gain stage, as voltage decreases, so does signal amplitude first, then the signal will progress in amount of distortion, possibly compression, eventually only sputters will be produced as output signal. Different actives will act different, and bias requirements may need to be 'optimized' to the lower supply voltages.
  See AMZ's Low Voltage Jfet and Bipolar circuits for some 'usable' experiments...
 
 

[markphaser]

Why would it cause Squealing? or ducking?

[blanik]

the FF is notorious for that but not the TS...?! mine sound great straight from the guit but bad with a buffered signal coming into it?!

any idea?
change of cap or resist in my TS's input stage?

R.

[Seljer]

Why would it cause Squealing? or ducking?

3 words: too much gain

[markphaser]

u mean overloading right?

It seems when u put effect in different orders u get different interfacing

[Doug_H]

Some dirt pedals have intentionally low input impedance which loads the guitar pickup in a way that provides a pleasing sound- usually smoothing out the high freq response and adding the ability for the guitar to adequately "clean up" by lowering the volume. Sticking a buffered-bypass pedal between the guitar and a pedal like this will make it sound harsh since you will then always be driving it with a low Z instead of the high Z of the guitar pickup.

[Mark Hammer]

Some pedals use a sidechain or envelope follower to detect the level of the signal and do something  with that control signal.  It could be used  to turn a noise gate on/off, or for compression or limiting.  It could be used to vary the intensity of a tremolo or phase effect.  It could be used to sweep a filter.  It could be used for a lot of things.

The thing is that all such sidechain circuits *expect*, or are designed in anticipation of, a certain range of signal levels.  When the input level is too hot for the sidechain circuit the effect will not behave properly.  You can usually turn down the sensitivity, but then you might be stuck with never being able to set the control higher than maybe 8:00.  When the input signal is too weak, the user is obliged to turn the sensitivity control up full, and even then it might not be enough to product the desired effect.

IN this sense, there is no "wrong" position to locate the pedal in the order of things, but there may be less-than-optimal places to stick a pedal, such that it won't work nearly as well as it might if it was in another position where the input level was hotter or cooler.

[markphaser]

Thanks for the help

whats the difference between a sidechain VS envelope follower?

[Mark Hammer]

They are the same thing.  Just a different name for it.  People usually call it an "envelope follower" when it ONLY detects the envelope of the input signal, like on a Dr. Q.  They are more likely to call it a "sidechain" when it is a more complex part of a more complex piece of equipment.  For instance, some "dynamics processors" will allow you to control the dynamics with an external source, or perhaps have a send/return loop so that you can selectively process the dynamics of the input signal by only providing the envelope of part of it (e.g., in de-essing).  My sense is that once you have send/return jacks as part of the envelope follower section, people start calling it a sidechain because it becomes almost a separate parallel circuit for people to use.

[markphaser]

Thanks mark hammer

Most guitar pedals like wha or phasers are not made or design i mean to see a input with a squarewave that want to see a clean guitar waveform

Since the design on the preamp stage or the whole design is based on a clean guitar signal placing a "Squarewave" distortoin pedal freaks out the pedal into operational errors i guess

What or how can u make guitar pedals react better with seeing a Squarewaveform distortion pedal infront? change the preamp input stage section?

[Seljer]

Theres no "freak out" of any kind, the pedals are happy as long as the signal is quiet enough to be within its limits of operation, you can then feed whatever you want into it (even stuff like synths, turntables, etc... listening through CDs through a phaser is fun )

the difference is the way the pedal affects the signal. Take a wah pedal for example, it basically creates a huge boost of on range of frequencies and cuts the rest of them. Placing it before a distortion pedal means that the frequencies that are getting boosted will be more distorted than the other ones. Placing it after means that the entire signal will be distorted uniformly, and after it you'll place that spike of a certain group of frequencies. There are really 2 groups of people, some prefer the quacky sound you get with the wah wah first, some prefer the smooth sound you get placing it after the distortion...

Phasers are slightly different, when places before a distortion pedal they're very subtle since the notches they create end up getting distorted, when placed after however, their effects is much more apparent (go ask Eddie Van Halen who went to great difficulties to place his one after the output of his Marshall). This is also due to the fact that a distorted signal has much more harmonic content then a clean signal and the phaser has got much more material to work with.

[markphaser]

if u insert a buffer inbetween two pedals what does it do ?

If u change the output to out of phase the next pedal in the chain is going to be different and react different

[petemoore]

if u insert a buffer inbetween two pedals what does it do ?
  depends...
  If you buffer between two Original Puke Green TS's, or any other two which already have buffers, it probably adds/does little to nothing, except maybe an amount of distortion that is hard to detect.
  If you buffer between two non-buffered pedals, and before a 20' cable run which loads the signal, the buffer will reduce signal loading and treble content / volume level will be more intact.

[markphaser]

Thanks for the help

9.) Some pedals have true bypass (with no input impedance or circuit impedance) some pedals have non true bypass
     with have input impedance and circuit impedances.

     The non- true bypass pedals split the dry signal even when the pedal is off so half the dry signal gets the circuits
     or see's the circuits impedance

     The true bypass pedals have no input or circuit impedances its bypassed

What does this do when u try to mix or but different orders of non bypass pedals with bypass pedals?