Poor man's FX loop?

Everything between your guitar and amp.

Moderators: VelvetGeorge, BUG

Post Reply
sickman82
Senior Member
Posts: 56
Joined: Mon Jan 09, 2012 12:19 pm
Just the numbers in order: 7

Poor man's FX loop?

Post by sickman82 » Thu Oct 06, 2016 8:40 am

I was reading about using reverb and delay in front of Marshalls the other night, and I stumbled across somebody recommending plugging direct in to the top left input, take a cable out from the bottom left to the input of your reverb pedal, then take the output of the reverb to the top right of the amp.

This sounds like it could be a pretty cool idea, anybody done this with good results? Could you add delay in that signal chain as well?

User avatar
herbvis
Senior Member
Posts: 1030
Joined: Thu Jan 21, 2010 3:58 pm
Just the numbers in order: 7

Re: Poor man's FX loop?

Post by herbvis » Sat Oct 08, 2016 11:36 am

Disclaimer. Someone correct me if I am incorrect please.

If you put a pedal in front of the amp, the effect signal also travels through your whole preamp and gets amplified by each gain stage it travels through. For instance, if you have 4 gain stages, that effect gets boosted pretty heavily. Time based effects tend to sound like ass when this happens. An fx loop allows the effect to be inserted after those gain stages and will work as intended producing a more natural result.
I assume your amp is a 4 hole superlead. If your signal chain goes guitar-pedal- then jumped channels, your delay is going through 3 stages of gain.
If you do it the way you are describing, I believe your "effected" signal is seeing one less gain stage.
I would assume the effect will sound better this way. And yes, a delay will work this way as well. Try both ways and let us know what you find.

Post Reply