Loosing tone on my HT-5TH

[johnadamschaap]

I have some new pedals and I changed my routing of it, by using now also the send/returns, since I already needed to re-organize my pedal board. Now something suddenly occurs to me, that the guitar straight into the amp gives much more sparkle/high/dynamics. I noticed this since after installing my pedal to have some volume loss, so i experimented with it at yes.. a difference in tone.

Now my set up is as follow: guitar-wah-tuner-qtron-bigmuff-micro amp and in the send/return: chorus-univibe-delay.

Now when I mean with plugin straight into the amp, I still have my send/return pedal engaged. So here the tone is still ok. but when I go to the pedals in front of the amp, I loose tone. I des-engaged(?) one by one by putting it out of the chain (while leaving the others to see if it is because of one pedal) from the end to the start, so put the Big Muff off as the last and go back by step by step and putting just one pedal out of the chain. Until I came finally to the wah. But no change of better. Now I will also do it different by just put in one pedal by one..(later) and see if there is any difference.

But does any one have an idea? It's kind of sh*tty, since tone was ok to me.. the new pedals added/changed are the t-rex twister (chorus), micro amp and qtron. I wanted the mxr micro amp for sure to have some little more spark/gain on the clean channel, but now, with all infront pedals des-engaged/off , my tone is different

The micro amp gives it a little back but... it's not the same ..more flat (again with all pedals in the front in bypass-mode)

[johnadamschaap]

seems that using one pedal at the time, does not change the tone.. can this really be of cable thing? it all short, can not imagine

[thephantum]

Using a lot of pedals in front of the amp can cause the signal to degrade. It's commonly known as "tone suck", especially when the pedals are not true bypass. Even if all the pedals are true bypass, having a lot of them in the chain can still cause degradation of the original signal due to the long cable lengths. It won't be as prevalent in the effects loop since the signal there has already been amplified by the preamp and is at line level.

The chain in front of the amp is an instrument (low) level signal being carried by unbalanced cables. Unless you are buffering the signal someplace, you really want to keep that overall cable run under about 25 feet total.

How long is the cable between the guitar and pedal board? How long it the cable between the board and the amp? You also need to factor in the distance the signal is traveling through the board. Even with all the pedals disengaged...the signal still has to go across the pedals and interconnects. Then you also need to factor in whether the pedals are true bypass or not.

In addition, one or two pedals may be fine by themselves...but the cumulative effect of 4 or 5 pedals can cause tone suck as well.

If you absolutely need to have long cable runs on both sides of the board and need to have a lot of pedals in front of the amp, the first thing to do is use very high quality cables everywhere in front of the amp (including on the board). How well the cables are shielded will increase the maximum length you can run.

You can also try using a pedal switcher to only insert pedals in the chain when using them...which will not only shorten the lengths but also pull tone sucking pedals out of the signal path when not in use.

[johnadamschaap]

thanks for your explaination. i was alo thinking of a bypass switch but after some internet research, i think it is better to buy a buffer pedal and put it in front.

the cables are short and all quality. from my last pedal, the big muff, it goes with a curly cable to the amp, all patchcables are not longer then required between te pedals and the only long cable is a standard guitar cable..3..5 mtr. all cables are the same as my innitial setup, the picture above. and there all pedals were in front of the amp, without any problem. it could be that one of thos pedals functioned as a buffer(?) where therefore i did not had this issue.. do not know since this is the first time i deal with this

anyway i will buy some second hand cheap buffer pedal and hope it will solve the problem

thx

[thephantum]

It's very possible one of the pedals you moved to the loop has a buffered bypass, which negated the degradation all the pedals caused. It's also possible that you moved (or inserted) a pedal which changed the impedance a subsequent pedal sees on it's input. Towards that end, before throwing money at the problem, I would pull the specs on each pedal that you have and try and determine what changed.

So for example, was there a pedal that had a buffer in it that got moved to the loop? Or maybe a pedal got added/removed which changed the input impedance to a subsequent pedal.

If you understand what is happening at each point in a signal chain, it's much easier to determine what will happen when you make changes to that chain...and help you figure out what's going on when you have an issue.