Pros/Cons of different Bypass methods

[letsgocoyote]

Since i started building pedals I have been referring to the wiring diagram on beavisaudio to wire my pedals.  it is all clearly illustrated and works great:


However, I know there are other methods to wiring true bypass witha 3PDT and was wonder what everyone else uses and why?

For example, the seems to be alot of connections on stomp switch with the beavisaudio method and i tend to make it a little messy.

The layout from general guitar gadgets seems nice and simple although it does have alot of wires connecting to the board grounds...


This method appears to be the simplest and cleanest to me, but I haven't tried it yet.


So whats best for you and why?

[slacker]

The method Beavisaudio shows grounds the input of the effect when it's bypassed. This is useful because some pedals especially high gain distortion/fuzz pedals can self oscillate if the input is left unconnected, this results in a high pitch noise that can sometimes be heard even when the effect is bypassed.
The other 2 method are basically the same, the only difference is how the ground wires are connected together, they don't ground the input of the effect, just bypass it.

[soulsonic]

I use the wiring style shown on the Beavis site, except I use the outer two poles of the switch and the middle one for the LED - just to get a little bit more separation. I definitely prefer the grounding of the unused input, it can really make a difference with some circuits and it's a nice thing to do anyway.

[mars_bringer_of_war]

I personally use Aron's method pictured in the 3rd pic.
It seems the least messy and makes led wiring easier imho. However, I believe that method may have been a cause of some problems in a few high gainers I've built. I didn't try grounding the input with those, maybe I'll revisit those builds.

[soggybag]

I use the Beavis method also. I think I originally took the lead from the TonePad. But I placed the LED in the center. This method is a little different in that it uses all of the lugs on the stompswitch where the Beavis method leaves one lug unused and LED shares a lug to ground with the input jack.

I remember a discussion of this topic from a while back. I remember Analogman saying he had an even better method that was not any of these. But he declined to actually say what it was. The gist was that it was some super secret tech they use in Analogman pedals.

Here's a picture of a PCB that I use. You can see the 9 pads at the bottom and the traces that connect them. On the left is the out put jack, right is the input. The center lugs handle the LED. Imagine a resistor and LED connected to the top center pad with the other end of the LED going to V+.