True Bypass

[Rodgre]

i'd been doing some thinking. We know that legendary pedalboard guru Pete Cornish is pretty well not in favor of True Bypass in a lot of situations, and we all know, as DIYers, the majority of us are obsessed with True Bypassing our homemade boxes.

Knowing that I leave a mosfet buffer on my pedalboard pretty much ALL the time, shutting it off on the rarest of occasions, I'm essentially putting a buffer circuit at the front of every True Bypass pedal that I'm using. So to that effect (pardon the pun) it's similar to having buffered bypassed circuitry going through my pedals.

Granted, if I have six Boss pedals on my board, and a Tube Screamer, that's seven buffer circuits in a row. Could have undesirable results with the cumulative effect.

Still, just the theory of True Bypass has gotten a little cloudy for me, knowing that I pretty much NEVER shut off my booster.

I'm not sure what my point is exactly, but I guess this is why I'm not as afraid of having a couple of non TBP pedals in the chain.

Roger

[R.G.]

You can read all about the theory of true bypassing at GEO http://www.geofex.com in the article "The Technology of Bypasses".

You are correct in that if you have a quite high input impedance/low output impedance buffer right at the front of your effects chain that you never turn off, you will have minimal if any need for true bypassing. There will be the odd occasion that some effect works better with a higher impedance drive  - like the original FF - but those are fairly far between.

If all effects had high impedance buffers at their very input, there would be little need for true bypassing. An input impedance of 1M and up on every effect would do the job just fine. I suspect that the only reason that more effects don't do this is just that effects circuits have long been a bastion of minimalism - as little as possible gets put in the box for either economic or naivety reasons.

The minimalist history being what it is, non-technically adept guitarists have come to rely on true bypass as a touchstone for cleanness in bypass sound. If the signal is really, truly disconnected from the effect in bypass, then you have no degradation in the bypassed sound - for whatever good or ill that is worth.

You might also want to read the article at GEO on wrappers - how we wrap up the effects circuits we make to get them to be civil to us and one another.