Help on boosting front end of certain circuits...

[erick4x4]

Ok, so its been a while since I've been tinkering, but I'm back at it, and had a question for you smart guys!

I love using stacked overdrive pedals to increase saturation, often more than just one pedal. Don't always know why, but I guess I like having two pedals that can be stacked to a third sound, to save room, etc.

So like many of us guitarists I often use typical od pedals like a tubescreamer, mini-boost, etc to boost things like my Blues Driver, or many other diode clipping op-amp type pedals like DS-1's or MXR disto, etc.

So my question is why doesn't this work on pedals like a tubescreamer or mosfet based things like the supa-nova or Box of rock/Distortron? I think maybe these pedals are designed to get the input voltage really consistent so all the overdrive happens in the circuit, and not from the circuit being driven from the guitar, but I'm not sure.

Any takers on the theory? The mosfets tend to just get noisier but don't really get louder or more saturated. Where a boost in front of a tube screamer is the weirdest to me as it usually increases volume not saturation, which is pretty uncommon boosting the front end.

[Astronaurt]

One thing I've found is whether or not there is a buffer in between the 2 pedals makes a huge difference. I love the sound of my handmade Octavio before my Tube Amps beautiful gain stages, but when I brought to a friends house with a Solid state amp, I figured I'd put my Boss SD-2 after the Octavio to try and get some of that Overdriven octave feel. Little did I know, it sounded like complete poop. I haven't tested it yet to see exactly why, but my guess is that the Octavio's unbuffered output impedance is quite high, so going into the SD-2's low input impedance takes out a lot of the volume/ as well as grossly filtering out the highs- making the octave effect dissapear and generally make the idea useless. Oddly enough I got something a little closer to what I actually wanted by placing the SD-2 in front of the Octavio, but that also ended up being a wild mess of mostly unrelated harsh harmonics.

Long story short, If I can say anything helpful, it's about the importance of input and output impedance; a lot of the more undesirable artifacts of cascading pedals together comes from bad impedance matching. Also, just a side note, You might want to look into putting an optional pad switch on the input to some effects. The Vox Satchurator has one that comes in handy, basically takes down your signal a handful of dB so the next box distorts more like it should if a guitar was in front of it, instead of hitting the rails and sounding like poop.