Benifits/Downfall to over/under volting a pedal

[Wales]

Recently i have been wondering if putting a higher voltage to a pedal would effect the sound. I have witnessed the effects of lack of voltage to a pedal, and see how some would be intrested in this at a controlled level. However, I have not used pedals at a regulated higher voltage.

If your caps are rated for 16V and the circuit expects 9V can you run the pedal at 12V without consequence, or will other parts suffer and wear out sooner than expected?

Is there any benefit or "wackyness" of this or were pedals that were meant for 9V best at 9V to 10V?

[R.G.]

There is no possible canonic answer to this. Each circuit reacts as it does, not like other pedals. If something is on the edge, like a zener with a lot of current, transistor biased on the edge of wrong, or a resistor getting hot at normal voltages, then upping the voltage will affect that part ill. There is no way to know ahead of time how the innards will react without knowing the circuit and the operational details.

It's a lot like saying "I have been wondering if people in Montana like to eat cabbage." Some do, some don't; worse yet, can't tell til you try them.

[Wales]

It's a lot like saying "I have been wondering if people in Montana like to eat cabbage." Some do, some don't; worse yet, can't tell til you try them.

Awesome, that's great! Best Answer Ever! Right to the point. It might work for some layouts, but not other, it might work for some players, but not others. Breadboard it and find out.

Thanks as always

[rousejeremy]

At about two minutes in to this video you can hear the effect of voltage sag on a Silicon Fuzz. It's pretty cool. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzbgwMNvyhk

[panterica]

My battery has been dying in my T-Rex Bass Juice distortion pedal, and I've been getting some strange effects from it. When I turned all the knobs up, it started giving amp-like feedback and then started screaming non-stop. Before that, the breakup on the distortion at full gain (even with a new battery) got very interesting... kind of choppy and "sizzly" in a sort of cool way.

One problem I also started having, however, is the distortion is coming through even while it's bypassed. This thing is supposed to be a "boutique" pedal retailing for $369. I can't understand why it's doing this... or why they didn't include true bypass in the first place. Could a low battery be causing it?

[R.G.]

the distortion is coming through even while it's bypassed.

... indicating that the low voltage is messing with the bypassing circuits as well as the signal circuits. Hmmm... it's almost like the low voltage is having unintended consequences, isn't it? 

This thing is supposed to be a "boutique" pedal retailing for $369. I can't understand why it's doing this... or why they didn't include true bypass in the first place. Could a low battery be causing it?

Where to start, where to start?

a) "boutique" does not mean "well designed", only that someone has made a low volume (in the sense of numbers of pedals) and as tweaked it to whatever they think is good. Given what I've seen of "boutique" design skills, that may mean a guy who couldn't spell "electron" a few months ago has proclaimed himself the new tone guru. 
b) It's doing it because you're using it in a way that it was never intended to be used, if the "designer" even had intentions for the pedal other than making some bucks; furthermore, for the "designer" of a "boutique" pedal to know how it would react to low batteries, they would have had to either do the design work to figure that out. Failing an ability to do an on-paper design, they might have just tested it with low batteries to see. But chances are they didn't even think about it, or know what to do if they did think about it.
c) True bypass is *->NOT<-* necessarily an indication of quality in a pedal. There are good and present reasons why it may not always be the best idea, or produce the best sound from your setup. Some very well known pedal designers worthy of the word don't use true bypass for good and present reasons.
d) Yes, a low battery could be causing it, as I explained above. There is both and effects section and a switching section. Since they share a power supply, they *both* change their operation when the common power supply goes out of the bounds it was designed to work for.

Disclaimer: lest anyone think I'm leaping all over T-Rex with my comments about boutique and designers, I'm not. They may well be a class outfit; I don't know. My comments are about some poor examples in the boutique industry in general.

[SlashLP97]

Also, in the case of a non-diode clipping pedal (or to some extent a diode clipping pedal) increasing the PS voltage will most likely provide more clean headroom, aka the volume you can crank the pedal to before it produces distortion of some sort (distortion used here in either the "drive" kind of way or the unintentional way).  Since most pedals have either a transistor, FET or Op-Amp stage in them, whose swing is determined by the power supply voltage, increasing the voltage will increase the swing and decrease your distortion and/or add more clean headroom and available volume to the pedal output. 

This is pending all the components survive the voltage increase, it also may throw off the symmetry of the pedal because the biases will then be off on any transistor or FET amplifiers.

Also, if you look at active pickups (pickups with amplifiers in them, basically) you can use anywhere from 9-27V on most, with more voltage providing more clean headroom.

[panterica]

Thanks, R.G.

c) True bypass is *->NOT<-* necessarily an indication of quality in a pedal. There are good and present reasons why it may not always be the best idea, or produce the best sound from your setup. Some very well known pedal designers worthy of the word don't use true bypass for good and present reasons.

I hope this isn't too off-topic, but in what cases would it be better to not use true bypass? With passive pickups perhaps? I'm assuming true bypass is preferable in my case because my bass guitar has very nice 18 volt EMG/Aguilar electronics in it.