Hi everyone
I have an interesting (to me at least) conundrum
Someone has asked me about making a special 2-in-1 pedal, one is a Super Hard on Boost, the other is a Silicon Tone Bender mk2 style fuzz. At the end would be a pair of filters (HP, LP)
In series it should be SHO > TB
In parallel, the TB at least should "see" the guitar input - meaning not buffered before
My first idea of course was to do a simple buffered splitter for the parallel part. The series/parallel switching is then pretty straightforward. However, the non-buffer is the problem with that.
Is it possible to just ignore buffers altogether and just split the signal to both effect inputs (when in parallel) ?
Thanks
Ian
I wish we could tag people... aleph null did something similar in his Peacock Parallel Fuzz, only with a harmonic percolator instead of a SHO. He could at least answer the parallel buffer part.
https://www.madbeanpedals.com/forum/index.php?topic=35062.0
Thanks for sharing that, its not exactly what I need though as its parallel only.
Also it has a buffer up front, which I probably need to avoid with the Tone Bender, right?
Im thinking this, with a fuzz thats not fussy about buffers rather than the TB MKII
(https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0956/3019/7077/files/sp.png?v=1758579855)
A buffer is usually the most elegant solution to impedance mismatches, but it's not the only one. You can just passively split a signal, but it tends to cause problems. In the case of a ToneBender that wants to see the pickups, the extra loading might actually be a good thing. You may find that you have to tweak values in the input stage of the ToneBender to get it sounding right with the SHO in parallel.
You could also try using a simple BJT boost with low fixed gain, (maybe 6dB?) followed by series resistance. This would isolate the pickup so that it would see a consistent input impedance. The series resistor will bring the gain back down to unity and also raise the impedance that the TB is seeing back to passive pickup levels (if you get the values dialed in right).
You could also get even more fancy and use an inductor-based pickup simulator (https://www.muzique.com/lab/pickups.htm).