I wish I had a camera to show my pedalboard, but thirteen pedals on one pedalboard is kind of ridiculous where I come from…either way, I don’t care because tone comes at the ultimate price!  Currently, I am running (in order): LPB-1, Black Finger Tube Compressor, Qtron+ (with a Boss Space Echo in the effects loop), Signal Pad, Hardwire Metal Dist., Hardwire Valve Distr., Graphic/Fuzz, MXR Black Label Chorus, MXR Carbon Copy, EH Dlx. Mem. Boy, Holy Grail, Line6 Delay Modeler(used mostly for looping), BBE Sonic Maximizer (Sonic Stomp) into my Solid-State Fender Jazz King (with a Digitech Hardwire Reverb in the effects loop)

As far as I know, all of these pedals are true-bypass (unless someone can tell me which ones aren’t). What I don’t understand is that even when my distortion pedals are off (and I set both of them with hi-gain) there’s a slight hum in the background…If anyone can help me to find out where it’s coming from, I’d greatly appreciate it.

Also, should I invest in a noise-suppressor/gate of some sort, just to be safe?

Well, 13 pedals, 5 or more of them are gain pedals, plus you have a compressor, the signal pad, a line booster, the sonic maximizer, and a combination of analog and digital pedals. Your noise is coming from having too much stuff. True bypass ceases to be a benefit when there’s that much cable going on. Oh yeah, the cables themselves are probably contributing as well. Don’t add a noisegate, which will just compromise the guitar tone even more. Too too too much processing. Also, I don’t get having the lpb-1 before the compressor as the first two pedals. You’re boosting the signal then squashing it down immediately.

It’s probably your power supply.  IF you’ve got all that stuff daisy chained, that’s a problem. 

Having a long chain of TB pedals pretty means that the entire distance of cable is being driven by your guitars pickups, and you would lose tone, but it generally doesn’t create noise unless one of your cables is bad/picking up noise.  It’s a good idea to have a non-TB buffered bypass pedal at the beginning and end of your chain.  The buffer pedal at the beginning of your chain will drive the whole chain, and the buffer at the end will drive the cable that goes to your amp.  This will improve your signal quality a lot.  Though having a true bypass box that bypasses your whole board would work nice too. 

Please tell me about how you’re powering everything.  What’s daisy chained, what isn’t.

the Boss RE-20 is not true bypass, and if it’s daisy chained, it can make some noise along the ground paths [mine does anyways, until I started running it on a different power supply].
Also do you have any pedals you leave on *all* the time? that effectively ends the non-true bypass chain.

and +1 to the don’t buy a noisegate crowd.

Cryabetes - 22 August 2010 04:35 PM

and +1 to the don’t buy a noisegate crowd.

HELL YA!!!

also just a quick note- the hardwire pedals are not technically true bypass- they are relay bypass, so in the event of power failure (or dead battery), they will go into bypass mode automatically.

yes i also agree with everything that they are saying. also you are putting all these pedals into a solid state which is know to cause unwanted sound

Thanks for all the feedback…I wish I had a tube-amp, but I’m not gonna buy one online because s/h is just rubbish out here in the Pacific (I live on Guam)

the pedals that are always on are the sonic maximizer, the boost, reverb…and eq (althought I switched it out for a rack dbx 215 graphic eq)

have you tried having your high gain pedals on a separate power adapters [each one gets its own]?

i’d try that and also maybe having anything with an LFO or a clock [modulations/delays] on its own supplies.

play around with it, also. it’s probably one pedal that doesn’t have good ground noise filtering that’s mucking everything up for you.

I’ve been meaning to try the whole separate power supply thing. Thanks for the tip

yourmother - 03 September 2010 08:59 PM

yes i also agree with everything that they are saying. also you are putting all these pedals into a solid state which is know to cause unwanted sound

Solis State amplification is no noisier than Valve amplification and can often be much quieter, I don’t understand what you are saying here.

I wouldn’t know…only owned solid-state amps. I’ve tried a few tube amps, but I would have to own one to really notice the difference