Where would the buffer(s) go in this situation?

[swinginguitar]

If I were building a looper that had a buffer, then 8 series loops, and then 4-8 parallel loops (meaning the signal gets split), would it be wise to buffer the signal again going into the parallel splits, or possbily a buffer on each split rail?

[R.G.]

The situation where a buffer is needed (in the micro-world of guitar effects) is whenever the load being driven is not more than 10X the impedance of the signal source.

What really brings this home is the typical guitar pickup, which has an impedance of severa K ohms in series with a 2-4H inductor. The inductive impedance gets up around 100K or so at the high end of the pickup's output, so a load of 1M or more is needed to not selectively reduce treble.

The problem you face is that you don't know what's going to driving the inputs or being driven by the outputs. If what's driving the inputs is a guitar pickup, you need over 1M, and that often means a buffer. But there are conflicting issues.
- most pedals these days have input impedances over 500K, usually 1M or more, and often because they have internal buffers
- some to many vintage pedals, notably the fuzz face and clones do not have high input impedances, and sound better to many listeners because of their treble loss
- most pedals have an OUTPUT impedance that's well below 10K, often below 1K; so these don't need what follows their outputs to be buffered.

Not knowing what's being attached to the loop sends and receives is a really a problem to you.

My personal opinion is that you need to buffer the first input in the string, and not sweat buffers elsewhere.

[swinginguitar]

Not knowing what's being attached to the loop sends and receives is a really a problem to you.

My personal opinion is that you need to buffer the first input in the string, and not sweat buffers elsewhere.

first input in the string of parallel loops, or the very first (series) loop at the beginning of the chain?

[mistahead]

Not knowing what's being attached to the loop sends and receives is a really a problem to you.

My personal opinion is that you need to buffer the first input in the string, and not sweat buffers elsewhere.

first input in the string of parallel loops, or the very first (series) loop at the beginning of the chain?

Ghetto newbie advice incoming - buffer the initial input WELL and use some of spade type connections when implementing the parallel loops.

Can you sketch up the basic idea (not wiring diagram or schem or anything dramatic) and give us a bit of an idea of how many parallel loops will be concurrently On?

A good input buffer at the start may well be enough (for an 8 series looper I would settle for that), but by using some spade connections where you pick up the signal for the parallel loops would made dropping additional buffer modules in there trivial, plus you could tailor the buffers to the loops - JFET buffer for the loops that it works well with, OPAMP buffer for another, BJT buffer here, Klon buffer over there...

I build minimally with a modular perspective - the above is an example of that.