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Getting a better clean sound while using a pedal board?

I am playing a strat through a twin reverb and straight from guitar to amp the clean tone is awesome but as soon as I put my pedal board in front the quality goes down. Is there anyway to get around that. An external effects loop? I only have 4 pedals on my board and I didn't think it would make much of a difference but it does. Any ideas?

What you are noticing is something called "tone suckage" - this is usually loss of signal, especially

It can happen with long runs of cable... poorly designed pedals.... and crappy bypasses in many pedals as well.

Most often, its the bypass in the pedal. When a pedal is off, it shouldn't affect the tone of the guitar. All too often, though, it does.

The reason for this has to do with something called "impedance"... think of it like resistance. Any given audio device will have a certain level of impedance for signals coming into it (input impedance) and for signals coming out of it (output impedance). For a signal to keep all of its integrity, it needs to be sent with low output impedance into a high input impedance device.

Normally, you don't need to worry about this - most devices don't have an issue.... until you start talking microphones and instruments with passive pickups, like guitars. Guitar pickups have high output impedance.... which means they're more likely to interact with things like cable capacitance, which means tone suckage (loss of signal, especially treble frequencies).

There are two ways around this - implement proper buffers and/or use true bypass.

Me, I prefer using an onboard buffer amp on my guitar, since that solves the problem right from the get-go.... lower noise, no problems with tone suckage even over long runs of cable, keeping all of your treble, etc etc.

Beyond that, though, using pedals with proper true bypass is indeed important.... as is understanding the truth about true bypass! Links below. True bypass can be a very good thing, but it can also be wildly overused and just completely mislabeled/improperly implemented. See the muzique.com link below.

Your solutions? Get different pedals, put a buffer amp in your guitar or at least get a buffer pedal at the beginning of your signal chain. That, or use a pedal explicitly meant for signal chains, ie Boss. Link below to that, too.

Personally, I'm a big fan of Boss... all of their pedals are buffer bypass, which means minimal tone suckage.

Saul

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