A hipper flipper - reversing pedal order

[Mark Hammer]

Since the dawn of the DIY newsgroups in the early 90's, one of the topics that has regularly come up is whether this-before-that is better than that-before-this.  In most instances, the "this" (or maybe the "that" - and please note Seinfeld-like hand motions) is generally a distortion of some type.  The other one could be a wah, a phaser or UNivibe, auto-filter, compressor, booster, or EQ.

There are almost always cogent reasons for wanting it either way.  The problem is that flipping it around, especially if it is installed on a pedalboard is a royal P.I.T.A.  So it occurred to me the other day, "Why not just build in a loop in a distortion pedal of your choosing, and stick a distortion bypass stompswitch in one corner of a 1590BB, and a 4PDT (or electronic equivalent) order-reversing stompswitch in the opposite corner, and leave the damn pedals where they are?".  In other words, the distortion pedal itself has the capacity to flip the order around (wah before distortion, or distortion before wah).  That gives you the freedom to fix the physical position of the 2 pedals in question on the pedalboard where you need them to be, and change order without the nuisance of unplugging and repatching everything.

In some respects, a generic order-flipper, with two nondedicated loops that can be order-reversed, is preferred, but it will take up at least the space of a 1590BB that could be more productively occupied by another pedal.  Since the brunt of order reversals seem to involve a distortion, it just seemed to me to be more sensible and space-conscious to builder the order-flipper into the distortion and save space that way.  The bypass switch on the looped-to pedal will continue to work the way it always does, and so will the bypass on the distortion.

Make sense?  Frankly, I'm surprised no one has done this already on a commercial pedal.

[caress]

Make sense?  Frankly, I'm surprised no one has done this already on a commercial pedal.

give it a few weeks... 

[birt]

i built that in a fuzz many moons ago. that fuzz is already taken apart again but its a nice feature.

FROM A should be TO A and the other way around. but it's a perfectly working layout.