Dr Scientist The Cleanness first & SHO last or vice versa?

[BintyTwanger77]

I've heard the merit of having clean boosts/buffers at the beginning and the end of your pedal chain. Aside from the Cleanness and the SHO, my pedal chain goes

Dr S Frazz Dazzler>JHS Kilt>Red Panda Panda Particle>Timeline>Eventide H9>Neunaber Stereo Wet+ExP.

Would you put the Cleanness first in the chain and SHO last before the amp, or the other way round, and why?

Thanks for your help!

 

[skunx]

I like the SHO first out set just over unity. Makes everything sound better that comes after it. Cleaness seems awesome and should take any signal that you can throw at it, never played one outside the clean setting on the elements, though.

Cool rig dude!

 

[BintyTwanger77]

@skunx Cheers! After a lot of messing around, buying & selling stompboxes, I'm finally settling with this. Loads of dirt and loads of ambient oddness to f*** around with.

How would the SHO work at the end of the chain? Simple volume boost or would I also get the sparkle?

 

[skunx]

The sparkle (the way I understand it) comes from the high input impedance on the sho interacting directly with the pickups. When placed at the end it's still a very good boost (and loud!) but maybe more pedestrian. I also think it would be better having the extra eq capabilities of the cleanness at the end but that's just me and I don't even use a boost right now and you might be trying to accomplish something different. I liked the sho at the front because it seemed to integrate my guitar with the signal chain in an interesting and useful way and allowed me to balance the output of different instruments (like my les Paul and my jaguar). I'm a huge fan of the sho. Great little pedal. I've been thinking about picking up a box of rock lately.

Cool post by Zachary vex on impedance

impedance is something like a spring. let's say you're a signal arriving at the input jack on the SHO (input impedance is 5M ohms)... if the pedal is turned on, you (you're a signal, remember) arrive inside the unit and make a gesture with your arm representing the waveform you're delivering. you do this while holding a lever that's connected to a spring attached to the floor. in the SHO, the spring is made of very fine material, so it's very easy to compress, so moving the lever is relatively effortless and every last little detail of your arm movement can be conveyed into the unit.

now let's say you're the same signal and you are headed into an amplifier. most amps have an input impedance of about 1 million ohms, which is only 1/5 as much as the SHO. here, you arrive and grab the lever. suddenly you realize you are doing 5 times as much work because the spring is much stiffer! hopefully you're stout enough to handle it... but the really sensitive nuances, the most delicate parts of the movement of your hand are somewhat restricted. in the amp, the wire that the spring is wound with is 5 times thicker than in the SHO. this has the effect of reducing noise by reducing sensitivity to things that might accidentally make the lever wiggle, but it also reduces your ability to convey very delicate nuances, usually in the higher-frequency range, because that's where you're using weaker fingertip-movement to make the lever move.

if you think about it, a pickup in a guitar is able to deliver lower-frequency information easier than higher-frequency information for exactly the same reason. the vibration of the strings is very delicate in the high-frequency range, and very stout in the low-frequency range. so the first thing that suffers when you go to lower and lower input impedances on your effects or amps is the treble part of your tone! making your guitar's pickup "work" harder against a "stiffer spring" causes more high-frequency loss.

this is a crude analogy, but helps to remind us of just what input impedance means.

so what's output impedance? the strength of the signal's "arm" and "fingers", of course. if you're too wimpy with thin tendrils for muscles, you can't even drive a tube amp's 1M ohm input impedance "spring" without losing noticable high frequency content... your "output impedance" is too high! remember, higher impedance means a spring made of thinner wire or weaker, wimpier arms.

what is the advantage of higher output impedance? well, it's usually the result of more windings on the pickup, so it's louder, but weaker in some ways. think of it as a tall skinny guy that can reach a lot further so he can really move that lever far, but he's not strong enough to do it unless the input impedance of the lever is high enough.

can you convert between a tall skinny guy and a short fireplug guy? sure! microphones are a perfect example of low-impedance output. the famous Shure SM58 delivers a very stout signal that can run hundreds of feet down a cable without loss, but it's so short that the voltage is in the millivolt range! often, the first thing the microphone is connected to inside a console is a transformer... this device converts the short stout signal into a tall skinny one that's easier for electronics to deal with, effectively transforming both impedance (stoutness) and voltage (height)! you trade one for the other, like switching gears on a bicycle to trade speed for hill-climbing ability.

over the history of electrified music we've grown accustomed to certain kinds of tones. increasing input impedance may or may not be "better" because it generally causes increased sensitivity to noise (stepping on your guitar cable might cause crackling noises, or there might be more high-frequency harmonics in the "buzz" from AC interference) and also, it tends to make a guitar more "glassy" sounding. but sometimes, it's just right to get a certain kind of tone.

 

[Black_Label]

I love The Cleanness. Great EQ. I'd put that last as an always on tone shaper. Then I'd use the SHO near the front as a dedicated boost.