battery inside a daisy-chained pedal

Luther Blissett · #1 10-13-2009, 09:30 AM

I did a small search on the subject but found no answer.

I recently bought a couple of pedals which came with a battery inside the pedal (like a maxon overdrive, a fulltone bass-drive and a couple of EHX pedals). now I want to put them on my pedal board and daisy chain the power supply.

the small question I have: do I leave the battery inside when I put them in a chain?

common sense would say I would take them out, since the input jacks will always be occupied by a patch cable, and thus the battery would drain very quickly. Or does the presence of a daisy chain jack in the 9V input cut out the battery circuit?

thx!

Sawtooth · #2 10-13-2009, 09:34 AM

The latter part is correct. The battery is circumvented when the pedals are plugged in.

stflbn · #3 10-13-2009, 09:35 AM

Some pedals automatically bypass a battery when a cable is inserted. Others do not, in my experience.

I almost always yank of batteries if somethings going onto my pedalboard with provided power.

Gashaponcito · #4 10-13-2009, 09:52 AM

I guess it depends on the pedal but I would take them out just for good measure

**TheMutt** · #5 10-13-2009, 11:48 AM

Personally, I remove the batteries if the pedals are going to be stuck on a pedalboard and will be using a daisy chain. The last thing I need is to leave a battery in that I forgot to remove/replace for too long and have it start leaking all over my pedal's internals and messing up the circuitry.

Paranoid? Maybe. But, the way I look at it, even if I did leave batteries plugged in and had a power failure on the board, it wouldn't matter much at all if the pedals worked on batteries. My amp wouldn't. Even still, if the pedal power failed but the amp remained on, I wouldn't want to try and quickly unplug all the power cables to run off battery power (15 pedals means I'd miss quite a bit of the song). I'd just mute the amp, plug the bass in direct, and continue playing.

Wud · #6 10-13-2009, 11:58 AM

I dont think your being paranoid at all Mr(s) TheMutt.
Over the years I've had a few pedals included as parts of a trade or two, A few have had battery disasters.
It's quite rare (so I've been told) for a 9v battery to melt under normal circumstances, so the suggestion was that the unit was plugged into a psu with the battery still inside.