Question about Buffer pedals (before or after pedals)?

Martymig

Martymig

Member
I'm just wondering about these. Using pedals is something I never used to do. I always went with the least amount of effects. I just used a wah wah and that was it. Lately though, after picking my guitar back up again in 10 years. I stopped playing for a long time after playing dedicatedly for 30 years....can you imagine the stress I'm going through trying to get it all back together again??
So, now I'm using pedals as a crutch and I have alot of them. Should I use a buffer pedal either before or after my signal chain ?
 
It depends on a lot of things, a buffer is one of those things you often hear about but there´s often some confusion about what they actually do and why you would need one. All it does is lower the impedance of the signal, so it helps with very specific electronic issues; long cable runs, lots of bypassed true-bypass pedals, (vintage) pedals with bad specs that load down the signal... do you have loss of treble and gain and does your basic dry tone change depending on which pedals are on?
 
Hey Martymig.. I played around with the buffer idea for a while and ended up on settling on the Providence SYSTEM TUNER STV-1JB. Its a buffer routing pedal with send/return as well as buffered input and outputs. It also has a tuner built in using the Korg Pitchblack technology.

The "recommendation" is to put a buffer at the start of your pedal board's guitar input and a 2nd buffer at the end of the pedal board to "rejuvinate" your guitar signal back to the pedal board. Alot of pedals have different input and output impedence, so running your signal over a number of pedals could possibly affect your tone and you could suffer highend loss. It also depends on how much cable you have in total from your guitar to your amp. For me, I have a total of about 33' from guitar to all the way to my amp and definitly notice the highend loss when not using a buffer.

The loop on the STV-1JB allows you to put all of your pedals in there. this helped me eliminate having 3 pedals (2 buffers and tuner), thus reducing the number of pedals on my board.

Good luck and hope that helps.
 
Any standard Boss pedal is a buffer. My TU-2 buffers the front end signal chain & i use a small buffer in my loop as i have 25 foot cable runs there.
Bottom-line is if you're not experiencing any signal loss then you likely don't need one.
 
The best one stop solution that I have found for a buffer pedal is the Musicom Lab System Interface. It has two buffers in one pedal space. I ran one before my out front pedals and one as the first thing in the loop. It retains that plugged straight into the amp tone and feel. I highly recommend them.
 
I really like the Bonafide buffer in my Polytune in front of my pedals.

I used to have a Boss TU-3 which had a terrible buffer. It noticeably thinned the tone out. I once tried recording it using a DI since it has dual outputs and I could visually see the signal being compressed much like an EMG's preamp does. Bye bye, TU-3. You won't be missed.
 
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