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I have read many discussions and articles on pedal placement in the signal chain and I understand that putting a boost at the beginning or end of a chain generally doesn't work well. Given that all of the effects on my pedal board will all be some type of time based effect essentially, so given that I just bought a Walrus Audio Defcon4 which is a boost and an EQ, it makes logical sense for me to place it at the end. I have heard this can make things "fuzzy", as in less clarity. Now given that I will likely never be running more than three effects pedals outside of it at one given moment, it seems to make sense to me. And obviously I am going to continue to experiment which is taking me way longer than I ever imagined, moving effects around and swapping placements to see what works best. Just wanted to hear some more opinions. Since I am not going to run a traditional type board at all, reading articles and forum discussions hasn't really helped me and experimentation seems endless. Would love to hear opinions, does anyone here by chance also run a strictly time based board?

depends if your pedals have dry thru and stuff. if you have any digital pedals that is all digital signal path putting the bosst before may clip the converters and it will sound like crap likely. i would still try putting it first to begin with. Since you have only time fx its really just a matter of first or last unless you have something like a dmm where you might wanna hit the preamp hard

If you’re running it in the FX loop of an amp you may be able to push things a little further before getting any sort of power tube distortion but running a boost into the front of an amp will only go so far before it runs into the limitations of clean volume within the preamp stage.

At least that’s my limited understanding.

odontophobia wrote:If you’re running it in the FX loop of an amp you may be able to push things a little further before getting any sort of power tube distortion but running a boost into the front of an amp will only go so far before it runs into the limitations of clean volume within the preamp stage.

At least that’s my limited understanding.

Yeah I guess that's another reason figuring out order is tough, most of my pedals are not true analog as several are dsp based, some are stereo, some are not. If I wish to run stereo pedals in stereo they have to go through the effects loop and have to be at the end of the signal chain which right now is only o e pedal at the moment, might be two by the time I am done, but that means putting the boost before stereo pedals. Is there a good viable option for splitting those signals or do I just avoid running the stereo pedals in stereo so I can place them wherever? What is the benefit of using the effects loop versus not if not using stereo outside of splitting signals which I am unsure if I want to do unless I am running two amps I am not sure in the end it makes sense. And if I run through the effects loop with the stereo pedals and put the rest of my chain through the amp direct that still puts those first in the signal chain so my understanding of that is that there would be no reason to have one chain of pedals going through the amp direct and another through the effects loop would be essentially no different than putting them all through the effects loop since it wouldn't change the order at all correct? Or is there a piece of this configuration puzzle I am failing to understand?

I run 4cm because I’m using a high gain amp. I have an overdrive out front and then a boost/eq in the loop for an actual volume boost. It’s also cool to throw reverb and delay in there if you’re using tons of gain. I still keep a delay out front of the amp too so I can get the delay into dirt thing.

BoatRich wrote:I run 4cm because I’m using a high gain amp. I have an overdrive out front and then a boost/eq in the loop for an actual volume boost. It’s also cool to throw reverb and delay in there if you’re using tons of gain. I still keep a delay out front of the amp too so I can get the delay into dirt thing.

Yeah this is the way to do it.

So I did a couple experiments with my signal chain today, the first was to move around the defcon4, placed anywhere in the chain with pedals following it I get a good amount of hiss or noise when engaging the 10db boost section of the pedal, at the end of the chain it seems to behave better. Next I tried doing the same in the effects loop, same results. Finally I ran all of my pedals through the effects loop without the defcon4 and ran that in front of the amp, this seemed the most pleasing to me so far, yet I am still undecided as to the rest of it. I assume from this trial and error though that the defcon4 either has to be last in the chain or last in whatever goes straight into the amp if I in fact end up deciding to do one signal chain through the front of the amp and one through the effects loop. I am still undecided as how to do this best as using so many time based effects things get pretty muddled pretty quickly when using more than two effects at a time. I am generally planning on likely only using three effects pedals at one time likely but now am thinking of trying to add some kind of mixer tool that will allow me on the fly order swapping, since placement seems to depend on which effects I am choosing to use at any given time. With all these multi-function pedals it's not always as simple as delay before or after reverb kind of thought process unless I am always going to use the same two or three pedals together. I am definitely starting to feel like I need to narrow down what maybe goes on the pedalboard and what either gets sold or left just for studio work.