THE ANSWERS
Having gone to the trouble of crafting a professional-grade pedalboard I can imagine you’re frustrated. All is not lost, though! First, we need to think about what a buffer is and why you need one…
01 Let’s imagine you can plug directly into your amplifier’s input with as short a cable as possible (1cm). In this case, your tone will be as pure, unadulterated and as intact as is possible to achieve. But your rig is super impractical and you’ll suffer from transformer splash, so it’s no good. Move to a three-metre cable and you’ll be much more useful performance-wise, but you’ll notice the high frequencies of your guitar have been attenuated by the capacitance that all cables have. Now, if you add a pedalboard with 10 pedals, nine 30cm patch cables and two five-metre guitar cables, you’ll have an effective cable length of around 15 metres including the internal pedal wiring. This is five times the amount of capacitance of plugging straight into your amp and it will attenuate the high frequencies a great amount. Most of us refer to this attenuation as ‘tone suck’ and, for most, large amounts of this is undesirable.
To overcome this capacitance it is possible to utilise a buffer in your chain, which is a piece of electronics that is either standalone or as part of a pedal’s design that offers no reduction or increase in signal strength and offers a flat frequency response. A good buffer should be totally transparent and not alter your tone – so why has your tone altered when you add your delay? The buffer in your delay negates the effect of the capacitance: namely, it restores the high-end you lose in your drive pedals, cables and patch leads.
02 To achieve a consistent tone with delay or not requires either a standalone buffer added in with your drive pedals, or in your case, you should utilise one of the best features of the G2: its Pre Gain option. Set to Unity, it will act as a unity gain buffer. When your drive pedals are joined by the delay pedal you should hear a much less stark increase in high-end of the patch. One side effect is that you’ll have to adjust the settings of your drive pedals to ensure they’re optimised for this return of clarity. Good luck!