The Joy of FX (loops)

djspecialist

This is a story about the frustration of noisy pedals, and how I (mostly) solved the problem in my setup.

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Having recently bought a few new pedals and decided they were keepers, I set about rewiring my board. Here's the new layout:

Guitar > Polytune 3 mini > Digitech Ricochet > Magnetic Effects White Atom > Crowther Hot Cake > Snouse Black Box 2 > Walrus Julia v2 > Red Panda Particle v2 > HBE Psilocybe > Drolo Twin Peaks > Source Audio Nemesis > EQD Astral Destiny > Pigtronix Infinity 2 > Amp

Once I got it all connected, I plugged into my THR10C to do a quick check ... and was met with a load of hiss and noise, even with all the pedals in bypass A quick test with a bypass looper pedal confirmed that the noise was indeed coming from the pedalboard.

Perhaps it was the amp? (Although I've never previously noticed this with pedals into the THR.) So I tried the board into my Bad Cat Cub, and was dismayed to get the same result. Now, I can put up with a bit of noise on my home practice rig, but I definitely don't want it in my gigging setup.

So I disconnected everything, and started trying pedals one by one (with everything else both out of the signal path and disconnected from the PSU), and using different cables in case one of those was dodgy. That narrowed down the source of the noise to three pedals:

• Red Panda Particle v2
• EQD Astral Destiny
• Pigtronix Infinity 2

Any one of those raises the noise floor a bit, but when they are all in the chain it's pretty significant. The common factor is pretty obvious: these are all digital, buffered bypass pedals. (The Ricochet and the Nemesis are also digital, but I'm running both in true bypass modes at the moment, and neither adds any noise.) But those three above are good quality digital buffered bypass pedals ... so are they really the problem?

I started wondering whether my PSU could be at fault. That would be really annoying, since I'd recently bought the Truetone CS12 for its ability to provide sufficient current for the digital pedals, plus higher voltages for selected drive pedals. But swapping in a HB Power Plant Jr gave the same result, so I ruled out the PSU.

Maybe the wiring in my house is the problem? Given the current lockdown situation, it's hard to take the rig elsewhere for testing. I did however have access to a stepdown transformer, and figured that using that in 1:1 mode (i.e. 220V in, 220V out) would further isolate the PSU from the socket. Result: no difference.

OK, now I'm starting to tear my hair out. What else can I try? Well, there was one thing, at least when using the Cub: move those pedals to the FX loop. I had set everything up to run into the front of the amp, mainly out of laziness in terms of wiring. But now, I put everything from the Red Panda onwards into the loop, and ... total quietness! More than that, some experimenting with the bypass looper showed that, as well as raising the noise floor when run into the front of the amp, the digital pedals changed the tone a fair bit. In the loop they are totally transparent.

So now I've got the board wired up like this:

Guitar > Polytune 3 mini > Digitech Ricochet > Magnetic Effects White Atom > Crowther Hot Cake > Snouse Black Box 2 > Walrus Julia v2 > Amp > Loop send > Red Panda Particle v2 > HBE Psilocybe > Drolo Twin Peaks > Source Audio Nemesis > EQD Astral Destiny > Pigtronix Infinity 2 > Loop return

My Bright Onion patch bay has a switch via which you can move the second part of the chain to either be in the loop, or to be in front of the amp:

This means I can run the whole board into the THR without needing to muck about with cables, but that does mean I either have to terminate the chain at the Julia, or I have to put up with the noise coming from the digital pedals. For now I think I'm willing to do the latter, and unless I go down the loop switcher route, I don't really see an alternative.

The most important thing for me is that the board now sounds absolutely killer into the Cub. I really can't wait to try this out with the band - hopefully not long now ...

stickyfiddle

Nice. Interesting that those weren't playing nice all upfront. I'm sure someone more knowledgable might be able to offer an explanation

Supportact

Thanks for posting this, glad you got it sorted in the end. Interesting idea of having a patch bay on the pedal board, I've often thought it would be good to change pedal order in that way. It's hard to find the cause of these things sometimes. I had all sorts of noise using a digital pedal (OBNE Reflector) on my board at one time which I couldn't fathom. Eventually just swapping the pedal order about sorted it totally. Still no idea of the technicalities behind it, but there you go.

monquixote

Top tip with noise is that it's often the combination of two pedals.

Usually a digital pedal that's making electrical noise on a power line and an analogue pedal that's picking it up and putting onto the audio line.

I've also noticed that pedals that are noisy enough can even cause problems on isolated supplies

This is why I increasingly try and avoid multiple digital pedals and use a single multi FX for it.