Pedal arrangement.

I’d do: Tuner>Chorus>M81 and leave the amp’s EQ set flat.

Others might prefer to see: tuner>M81>Chorus

Basically the tuner will always come first if it’s in the chain and not being fed by a tuner out jack on the amp. After that it’s whatever arrangement sounds best to you. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try it both ways.

 

I personally can’t see the point of stacking two preamps and EQ stages (active bass and M81) on top of each other like that. Done that way and it becomes difficult to know which is doing precisely what to the sound. And putting anything in front of the tuner just makes it more difficult for the tuner most times.

 

Do you use DI output on MXR? In that case, I would go: tuner - chorus - preamp

If you don’t, I would go: preamp - tuner - chorus

 

If you are not using the DI out, then I think that the differences in pedal order in this case are going to be pretty much negligible. The placement of that chorus would be much more relevant if you had some dirt in there, but with an all-clean signal I doubt you'll hear any differences.

I tend to go tuner first, but I don't think it's going to affect its functionality if it goes later on the chain. I personally put chorus before clean preamps, but it's mostly because it's easier to place them like that on my pedalboard

 

My board is tuner-chorus-delay-preamp-amp/PA

 

No reason to put anything in front of the tuner (with maybe exception to a floor wah). If your tuner acts as a mute for your rig and your pre is acting as a DI out then you’ll send signal to the house even when you’re supposed to be muted.

 

I’d still put the tuner first.

The less in front of it the easier it is for the tuner to lock on to the note it’s checking.

Most tuners also act as transparent buffers. That allows them to negate any loading caused by the cable coming from the guitar. So you have a better quality signal for the pedals downstream to work with. ;

 

The Boss tuner has a buffer in it - that will do you some good no matter where it's located the cable coming out of your pedalboard won't load your bass. Typically I'd put it first, then the preamp, then the chorus. Chorus pedals are often noisy, so having that after the preamp means you can add some level with the preamp, and help the signal to noise of the whole signal chain by having more signal at the chorus pedal to "drown out" its noise a bit.

The one exception would be if the other pedals are noisy, it might make sense in some cases to put the tuner last, so you can mute yourself, and kill that noise.

 

The other reason to put tuner last would be to be able to mute the signal in case there was something wrong with the signal chain before it: broken patch cable between pedals, accidentally unplugged power source etc. However, chorus would need to be switched off for tuning...

 

Tuner 1st Amigo. You don't want anything that can even have the slightest effect of the signal, to inhibit your PROPER tuning. If you do, you are asking for possible trouble. Just my $0.02.

 

I remember the rhyme from college.

Chorus before tuner, disonnance sooner,
preamp into chorus, crowd can't ignore us.

Something like that. The trick is to rhyme the last part with chorus.

 

in that order right to left

 

^^^
These

 

Tuner first; it needs a clean signal from your bass to latch onto.

When I used a M81, it was the last thing on my board before the signal went to the amp.