No bypass at all?

[Saturated]

Hi all,
I've just got into building my own pedals and I find this forum a wealth of knowledge so thank you all for the help you have already provided. I have a question which I cannot find an answer for in the archives so here goes.
I find a lot of argument between buffered bypass and true bypass. Is there a case for no bypass?
Please forgive my ignorance if I am way off the mark but my logic goes like this;
If worst case scenario is a little bit of high end loss when bypassed, can't we just turn the treble up a bit on our amps, or the bass down?
The problem also makes me wonder what percentage of us actually play clean parts with effects bypassed. We are into pedals right? Surely 90% of us use a chorus, or a reverb, or a bit of delay etc etc. and if this is the case we never actually use or signal bypassed so no point??
It also makes me think that many of the guitar greats we all love surely used pedals with no bypassing (I could be wrong here) and no one ever complained about their tone. True, they generally didn't daisy chain 20 pedals. Another point relates to what we do with guitars. Again, my logic may be twisted but if you are playing in your bedroom, are the negative effects of not having true. Toads really a problem? Similarly, if you gig or record, isn't your signal travelling through a mixing console which is full of buffers, and doesn't this make any attempt to have buffered or true bypass pointless.?
Seems like a problem that only affects a small amount of us, and if you get the dreaded tone suck from it, can't we just adjust our tone a bit to counteract it?

[thermionix]

Some circuits have more tone suck than others, old-style wah being one of the worse ones.  To me at least, true bypass is simpler than buffered, and seems to have no downside unless it's the life expectancy (and maybe size) of the switch.  If I want a buffer for some reason, I can build one stand-alone or just stick my TU-2 in the line.  TB also adds flexibility to the order of effects in the chain, I can't put my TU-2 in front of my Fuzz Face for example, sounds horrible.

[PRR]

Welcome.

> Toads really a problem?

Yes, toads can be problematic. 

I'm not clear what you are arguing. No way to get around the pedal? (Other than un-plugging.) That has obvious down-side, unless you always play the exact same style (which has worked for some major artists- I had to PA a minor artist who left his chorus hissssssing all the time.).

Pedal "buffers" have ranged from OK to awful. (Recording console circuits usually good.) The bad ones gave the idea a bad rap. Most players don't have a clue. If you do, then use it to build a good buffer.

[DIY Bass]

Me: Hi, I'm Peter and I'm a bass player
Raged call from the meeting:  Hi Peter

Ok, now we have that out of the way, I could see myself having a good compressor without a bypass.  I can see a bit of slight compression (say 4:1 ratio or so) being on all the time.  I can't think of anything else that I would want to have on all the time with no possibility of bypassing it.  Maybe if I played in a situation which a lot of bass players do, where I ran a preamp pedal to get my sound which went to front of house, then I might have that on all the time.

[robthequiet]

I can think of one argument to have a bypass, and a true one at that, is that if your pedal has an emotional meltdown and starts screeching, you can take it out of the signal path quickly.

[Saturated]

Thanks for all your replies. I guess I just like to know why I'm doing something. Does anyone build pedals, commercially or hobbyists, with neither buffered bypass or true bypass? Just a simple foot switch to turn the effect on and off? Would this result in catastrophic tone loss which could not be retrieved easily by tweaking the amp controls. Surely this is how the first pedals were built?
I'm just struggling to see any REAL benefits of either buffered or true bypass.

True Bypass - I feel it is unlikely to have a completely true signal chain, ie just having one TS or Boss pedal on your board would introduce a buffer (good or bad) and cause your signal to not be true, this would negate any benefit of having true bypass?

Buffered bypass - doesn't this also cause tone loss along with cable length, dirty contacts, cheap components etc.

Is it not better to just accept that it is necessary to absorb some level of tone loss in a real world environment and be prepared to do a small amount of tone manipulation to counteract any negative affect. Is there any point in considering this when wiring?

[drummer4gc]

I think what you're referring to is often called "hardware bypass", where the input signal is always connected to the input of the effect, and the footswitch switches the output signal between the effect output or the input. One thing to consider is the cascaded effect of a number of these types of pedals if you are using lots of them. You mention that true bypass is ruined if there is one non-TB effect in the chain, but consider the difference in potential treble loss in say, five hardware bypassed effects in series compared to four TB effects and one HB effect.

[Saturated]

Yes but would this loss of tone be irretrievable by say adding a bit of high end that has been lost. Pleas tell me if I am not making any sense.

[Phoenix]

The topic title says "No bypass at all", which I, and it seems also everyone else in this thread has interpreted as "no switch at all to turn off the effect, the only way to remove the effect from your signal is to physically disconnect it and re-patch your cables". Obviously, that's not very functional in the vast majority of cases.

From your last post, it seems you mean "Why not *UN*-buffered bypass?", like were featured on many of the earliest pedals, and is still featured on some modern production things, some wah's being notable.

Well, the idea that you can just turn up the treble on your amp to make up for the "tone-suck" causes its own issues - increased noise floor being one, and damping (destruction) of the resonant peak of passive pickups, which is probably the main contributor to individual pickups "tone" and uniqueness of different types and winds that we love - that you CAN'T recover with a simple tone control (you could mimic it with something like a graphic or parametric equaliser, but it still won't behave the same with certain types of effects, notably low-input-impedance stuff like Fuzz Faces, Rangemasters, etc.). Excessive loading of passive pickups tend to make them all sound much more "same-same" - if you load down a Strat single coil and a Humbucker both with 50k (as can happen with unbuffered pedals) rather than the typical amp input impedance of 1Meg, you begin to have trouble telling them apart.

It used to be that 3PDT footswitches were expensive, these days they are not, and even inexpensive ones are relatively reliable (maybe not reliable enough for big manufacturers, where a handful of negative user experiences are enough to significantly effect the bottom line). True bypass completely disconnects the effect from the signal chain, leaving only the cables/patch cables to have an impact, rather than leaving the input to an unused pedal hanging off the side, dragging everything down.

Buffered bypass is very common, and can work great. You seem to think that it provides no benefit over unbuffered bypass, but that is incorrect - it *reduces* treble loss, which is kinda their whole point. Of course not all buffers are created equal, but that is an entirely seperate argument. Oh, and having one buffered pedal does not negate the benefits of true bypass, they just work in different ways. In fact in many cases it will be beneficial to have the last pedal in the chain buffered bypass if say your pedalboard is a long way away from your amp, so you avoid treble loss from the long cable run.

Really, the only reason unbuffered pedals were ever made is that back in the day, DPDT footswitches (the minimum needed for true bypass) were prohibitively expensive. As soon as they became affordable, they were adopted. Soon after that, electronic switching became practical, and we started seeing buffered bypass. When 3PDT switches became affordable is when we started seeing people offering true bypass as a mod to older pedals, and then we saw it trickle upwards into the boutique and then big-brand offerings.

[Saturated]

Thank you Phoenix for your detailed reply.
So...just so I can put this to bed in my mind, adopting True Bypass OR buffered bypass is absolutely necessary?

[Phoenix]

Thank you Phoenix for your detailed reply.
So...just so I can put this to bed in my mind, adopting True Bypass OR buffered bypass is absolutely necessary?

I would say that there are VASTLY more arguments against unbuffered bypass than either true bypass or buffered bypass, and conversely, there are no good arguments FOR unbuffered bypass - it pretty much only has negatives.

Now, the choice between true bypass and buffered bypass is much more interesting, and depends on a lot of context - certain types of effects are much more suited to one than the other. Things like reverbs and delays with "tails" (repeats that do not abruptly stop when you bypass the effect but decay naturally) can only be acheived with buffered bypass.
Arguments for true bypass are simplicity, and redundancy (will allow signal to pass if battery goes flat or power supply is kicked out of socket during a set for instance).
Then there are options like relay true bypass, which can have lower switching noise than footswitch true bypass and allow things like remote switching or various interactive switching options, but decrease battery life if you use an unlatched relay, or introduce the same power issues if using a latched relay.

[Saturated]

Yep. I think I am just getting confused. 

[amptramp]

I could see a case for a preamp without a switch when you want to avoid tone sucking no matter what else you have switched in or out.  A split Tillman with the gate resistor, source resistor and transistor in the guitar or belt-mounted or in the cable and the drain resistor in the first non-stomp box would be good and it would work even for long cable like the next time you play a stadium.  The preamp box could have two outputs, a straight output and an output loaded with resistance and inductance suitable for connecting to a Fuzz Face or a classic Dunlop Wah.

Some guitarists always play similar material where they can put effects in series and maybe never make any changes.  Others have a different setup for every song.  Some use master controllers with all the switching in one long unit and the individual effects units need no switching at all.  Where you have certain units always connected together, they can be connected in series with switching of the entire loop being handled in a remote box and the effects boxes need no switches internally.

[antonis]

Yep. I think I am just getting confused. 

If you try harder you'll manage to soon get totally confused..

[iainpunk]

Me: hey.... Euhm... Im Iain, im also a bassist.
Raged call from the meeting: hi Iain

Euhm. I personally don't care if a pedal is true bypass or not, the first thing i run my guitar in to is a buffer, which i strap to my strap. As long as the buffer is decent, im happy. The only thing i always want to be true is true kvlt 

When im building a pedal, i usually use true bypass, for ease of building it, but when the person i build the pedal for wants a buffered bypass, i do that, but i ALWAYS build the buffer on a separate board, not even sharing the Vcc/2 (4.5 v bias) with the effect board, so that if the effect fails, the buffer will still work.
One time the client wanted me to build a buffered/true/silence switch on the pedal, in that case, the buffer i chose had an input impedance of about 10Mohm so i left the input always coupled to the signal wire, since it had no effect (the pedal had bipolar power supply so i could hook the input of the buffer up to the signal without a bias). The output of the buffer was connected to a of/off/on switch so he could choose to buffer, not to buffer or to silence the rig when the pedal was off.