avoID tone-suckIng

The infamous ‘tone suck’ associated with big pedalboards is signal/tone loss through long cable-runs and multiple pedals. On the one hand, you can lose high-end and general fidelity when using long cable-runs as a result of capacitance. A buffer can help with that. On the other hand, some pedals that are buffered in their bypassed state can also have a ‘tone-sucking’ effect because the buffers themselves colour the tone, especially if you use a lot of them. Even worse can be pedals that are neither true bypass, nor buffered bypass, such as some vintage wah-wahs, fuzzes and the like. Tone-sucking is only an issue when the pedal is switched off, so using a true-bypass loop or loop switcher, such as TheGigRig’s G2, keeps it out of your signal chain when you’re not using it. Using high quality, true bypass pedals and shorter cable runs also minimises tone-sucking