tone suck, does it really bother you? live sound

[varunkapahi]

at a gig i realized my fender tuner pedal sucks some highs when on bypass. but it was making the ear splitting popping highs softer on the pa so i thought what the heck and i kept it on. another gig my tuning was unstable so i kept it. now am thinking so what if it sucks tone, a dozen other things in the chain would be coloring it anyway

of course if am in a studio i'd not keep it in my chain anyway. but when live does it really bother you? unless it makes stuff really muddy and garbled. especially if you have half a dozen pedals in your chain where some pedals like a sansamp would be always on?

[kevteop]

Tone suck does bother me massively and I don't have any pedals like a sansamp that are always on. I like the sound of my basses and it's sad when they sound all flat and pathetic because of a cheap chip somewhere on my board.

When I'm not using my pedals only one of them is in the signal path and it's got a top-quality line driver in it to push my signal along to the amp, that's all.

[Nerotic]

Tone suck doesn't bother me that much. I've A/B'ed between my board and going straight to amp several times, and the slight loss of tone that does occur isn't significant enough for me to want to do anything about it.

That said, the loss of tone has a lot to do with the pedals and cables you're using. IME

[bassbrad]

I use a buffer/line driver to offset as much as possible and short good quality cables. It's a small price to pay for the fun if the pedal board.