I've never found stutter pedals I've tried to pop, couldn't you put a resistor on either side of the switch to help with that?
Resistors as pull downs are not a magic amulet.
The real story is that any switch that causes a sudden change in voltage level when turned on or off will cause a pop or click. Period and end.
If you want clickless switching there are two practical ways I read about over the years. One is to only switch as the signal passes through zero volts, the other is to ramp the signal up and down slowly enough that there isn't any audio-band frequency contant in the resulting signal.
Imagine that you have a SPDT switch with the common terminal connected to the DC blocked input of an amplifier system, with a proper pull down to DC on the outside of the cap, so the amplifier sees 0Vdc as an input if nothing else pulls its input around. The two throws are connected, one to a 1.5V AA battery and one to ground. What happens when you throw the switch?
You get a massive popping thump on each switch transition. When you change from ground to 1.5V, that sudden 1.5V step is amplified. BIG pop, with lots of low frequency thump. The thump is controlled by the lowest frequency the input capacitor to the amplifier will pass, as the capacitor loads up to a DC condition of 1.5V. When the switch flips the other way, it connects the +1.5V level on the input capacitor to ground, and the amplifier sees this as a -1.5V transient, and thump/pops the other way.
Now imagine that you have instead of a 1.5V battery, a sine wave which has + and - 1.5V peaks. If you flip the switch back and forth, sometimes you will catch it at +1.5V, sometimes at 0V, and sometimes at -1.5V, as well as a lot of times in between. The input capacitor and amplifier can't tell the difference between the switch turning on a +1.5V (or -1.5V) battery and the peak of a sine wave at the instant the switch makes. It's only later, as the signal voltage starts dragging the input voltage around that the amplifier's input sees this as a signal, not a step in level. Amplifiers have no memory on this time scale, and only see the instantaneous input voltage.
(N.B. Yes,, to all the hifi reviewers, there are things which cause a non-zero transit time and an internal history, but it's not significant for this discussion. Let the beginners get this down before confusing them with transient intermodulation distortion, slew induced distortion, and other tweako concerns.)So by flipping the switch, you get clicks and thumps depending on where in the wave you hit. If you happen to hit near zero, the changeover is nearly silent. This is one reason a hard-metal-contact bypass switch cannot ever be consistently silent. If you have a combination of DC and signal at the switch input, you get a combination of the effects. If you have some way of magico-electronically picking the switch time to be only when the signal is passing through the zero point, then you can make silent transitions, and this is what some digital signal switching/modification circuits do.
The other main way to get silence is to force the transients to be at a signal frequency you can't hear. In practice, this means not suddenly switching, but replacing the switch with a pot. The ends of the pot are signal and ground, the wiper is the input to the amp. When you want to "switch" the imaginary pot shaft is rotated. At some speed, the rate of change of voltage at the input is below the frequency that either (a) the input capacitor can pass into the amplifier or (b) your ears can hear. Typically, ramping switching circuits try to ramp up/down over maybe 1mS to 10mS, that being viewed by a human listener as "instant" switching and also slow enough that the transients are inaudible, or nearly so.
So, if your stutter pedals didn't pop, they were (a) not switching a DC level and (b) switching a small enough signal that the transient was inaudible if they were using hard-contact switches.
hey, RG,
do you think that trying this may help with the switching problem i've been having with pnp fuzzes and digitech pedals?
I haven't forgotten that. Still mulling on it. It's a bit mysterious right now.