Watch Out Boys, I'm Goin' In!

[László]

Straight in, that is.

Guitar >> cable >> amp.

Fact is, I, your mad friend Lesteban, usually deploy a pedalboard between my guitar and my amplifiers. And upon said pedalboard are wah, buffer box, tuner, clean boost, overdrive, distortion, modulation, a true bypass box, and delay effects. I engage the previously-referenced effects on a regular basis, too.

But sometimes something happens in life that forces even old Lesteban to change his evil ways (baby). And for the preceding two days that something has been a very sore knee and back. I haven't wanted to hook up the pedalboard because it would entail some pain. I've tuned up the guitar, and then gone straight into the amp with a ten foot cable.

You probably expect me to say that it sounded better straight in than going through a tone-sucking pedalboard and extra cable lengths, etc. You're no doubt waiting for me to decry the bad new days and go on passionately about how much better things sounded in the days when a player had only a guitar, a curly cord, and an amp. You probably think I'm going to insist that the tone is more pure with only a cable.

Well, you might be waiting a long time.

Today I got back to the pedalboard and found that times have changed. I might have said otherwise in days of future passed, but today's high quality buffers have obsoleted that notion in a big hurry.

The truth is, that with my buffer box on the pedalboard, the sound is exactly the same as going into the amp with only a cable between guitar and amp. There's no difference that I can detect. Sounds great either way (assuming equally high quality cables).

Confession time: I'm actually very surprised by this. Going straight into my amps after not doing that for quite a while, my expectation was that I'd say, "Man, why don't I always do this, it sounds so much better."

But it doesn't. So for players who like pedalboards and pedals, my advice is to get a good buffer and rock on. It sounds the same (again, as long as the associated equipment and cables are also good). Good tone for everyone!

Note: crappy buffers still sound crappy. I'm talking good buffers.

 

[Texas_minor_blues]

2 words Rack Effects
then you only need to hook up 1 thing. problem solved

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Guitar -> cable -> amp has been my modus operandi, lately. I like that ultra-clean sound.

 

[Mixstar]

Guitar -> cable -> amp has been my modus operandi, lately

And me, I love my guitars plugged straight in especially with my Marshall 8080 but now, I have another reason to plug straight in. I bought an Orange Micro Terror along with it's associated cab last month and it sounds fantastic on it's own, nice piece of kit worth checking out.

 

[andy474x]

I have a crazy amount of $#!+ on my pedalboard, including a run back and forth from my effects loop, and when I A/B there is a difference in high end sparkle, but it's incredibly slight. To the point that I've concluded in a live situation, it's too negligible to matter - the only way one would ever pick it out would be to also A/B my rig with and without. I have a few buffers in my chain here and there, wah, and a couple Boss and Visual Sound pedals. Not absolute top of the line stuff, but for a guy that just likes to play for fun, they sound pretty dang good. That being said, I have a new, smaller and more streamlined board in the works that if anything will be an improvement.

I was playing lastnight with the Mira X, with the rhythm channel of my SE30 dimed, switching in a clean boost here and there, man did it sound GOOD. Great crunch tone on its own and a little more scream with the boost. A/B'd with my Plexi Drive, I think I slightly preferred the amp, which is saying a lot. That's the channel I had modded by the amp team, and they really nailed it!

 

[László]

Obviously I have no idea what you guys are using for buffers (or any other part of your signal chain), so I can't comment.

What I can say is that my tone sounds identical - not merely close - going straight in or with my pedalboard. Certainly that speaks to the quality of the buffer, cables, and pedals (that are admittedly on the pricier side of things). I also use a true bypass box to take the digital effects out of the loop unless they're on.

The buffer itself is made by Suhr; after trying out a bunch of higher end buffers over the years, this is the first one I've had that's truly transparent. However Fulltone now has a buffer that's probably equally good, and I'm sure there are others coming to market as the concept of a good buffer becomes more entrenched in guitar land.

Without a good buffer there is a loss of high frequencies with any unbalanced cable that becomes noticeable at about 20 feet, but the shorter the cable from guitar to buffer or guitar to amp, the more crisp one's tone is going to be anyway. Capacitance per foot is an inescapable fact of physics that loads down the pickups, however it's also something that varies quite a bit from cable to cable, and even to a lesser degree between different plugs.

If you plug a 3 foot cable or even a pedal cable between your guitar and amp, it'll sound different from a ten foot cable, same brand and model. Try it!

However a good buffer makes all the capacitance issues following the buffer - the extra cable, the additional plugs, the extra pedal connections even bypassed - go away. It becomes like plugging directly into the amp. At least, that's the theory. In practice a lot depends on the buffer's ability to retain the signal integrity.

Anyway, my point isn't that buffers are so great when things work out, it's that today we really have options in creating our signal chains that, trust me, did not exist when I was even an old man (now I'm ancient!).

 

[andy474x]

Anyway, my point isn't that buffers are so great when things work out, it's that today we really have options in creating our signal chains that, trust me, did not exist when I was even an old man (now I'm ancient!).

It's definitely a good time to be a guitarist. I think about even the advancements that have come about since I started playing 15-ish years ago, not just in pedals and buffers, and I feel fortunate to be playing guitar in 2015. The golden vintage era is over, but I really think we're better off now. PRS makes guitars and amps that live up to those benchmarks of days past, and does so with much greater consistency too, from what I can piece together from history. And there are also better quality instruments available at on lower budgets, I think (not having been there myself way back when). And the advancements in digital technology, which have made home recording so easy, as well as being able to get lots of effects in a simple package via multi fx processors - I don't use them, but I think they've advanced to a point that they could be a useful tool depending on how serious you are and what you need them for (hopefully we can all agree and not have "the digital dialogue" for the millionth time). Anyways, very cool time to be a guitarist.

So, Les, back to the original topic - do you put your buffer at the start of your effects chain, or the end? And are your effects with their own buffers on a true bypass loop, to avoid the internal buffer when not using them? Be careful, I am happy with my tone, but I also have a bad tendency to go down rabbit holes just for the fun of it...

 

[László]

So, Les, back to the original topic - do you put your buffer at the start of your effects chain, or the end? And are your effects with their own buffers on a true bypass loop, to avoid the internal buffer when not using them?

My buffer's the second thing in my effects chain. The first is a Fulltone wah. After experimenting a little, I found that the wah really needed to interact with the pickups in order to do what I wanted, so I put it ahead of the buffer. To go from the wah to the buffer I used a very low capacitance cable to minimize the effect of the extra cable length.

The buffer then splits off into a separate output I use for my tuner, so it's out of the signal path (it's true bypass, but my goal was to keep the signal chain as short as possible). The buffer also has an output that goes to my signal processing pedals, and they're all true bypass. I have a Fulltone Plimsoul (overdrive), a Suhr KokoBoost (clean boost), Bogner Burnley (distortion), and a Suhr Jackrabbit (tremolo). From there the signal goes into a true bypass loop box and can be split off into two separate signal chains, but I only have one hooked up on the board, an Eventide H9.

I found that even though the H9 nominally has a true bypass option, the electronic switching it uses still does something to the tone, so I have the option of removing it completely from the signal path via the true bypass box.

I know players who use two buffers, one at or near the front of the signal chain, and one at the rear end of the chain, but I haven't found that necessary with the Suhr as my cable runs aren't very long from the pedalboard to the amp.

Here's the board's current configuration. The small square box just to the left of the wah that's reflecting the flash is the buffer box. It's actually black anodized aluminum.