- I'm curious about buffers, preamp's and passive guitars/bass. But I doubt that I've pharased the question intelligently - hope you can make sense of the question?
Two scenario's :
1a. I've a old 70's Elk FS22 Solidstate guitar amp that sounds really "spikey" when you plug straight into it (passive strat). "Spikey" to me seems to have a non linear volume response to dynamics across bass and treble - the bass being generally boomy and the treble super sharp when picking hard.
When I use a pedal (been looking at a Ts style boost/light drive to accentuate the strat-y sound) in front - the dynamics seems to even out and the spikeyness is tamed.
I've tried a Voodoo Sparkle drive, A Klon Centaur clone, a couple of TS pedals and a homemade boost (TS opamp) and they all seem to have the same effect. I quite liked the Voodoo Sparkle drive, it worked really well on bass as well. The homemeade pedal sounded good too, with the gain set to 0, it was apparently operating as a 1:1 buffer.
From what I've read the buffer in these pedals is helping to address treble loss from long cable runs.
Though in my head, I'm thinking that the pedal is also acting like a off board preamp kinda a like a active bass?
1b. In a home recording scenario, aiming at -6db level while tracking passive guitar/bass for use as a DI to re-amp, would you want to rather use the preamp on the interface (E.g. focusrite Scarlett/roland quad capture) to boost volume or a DI/boost pedal?
And if you have a active guitar/bass would you just dial back the interface volume to get the desired level in the daw?
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Thanks for doing the AMA Alan, realllly looking forward to reading through all the questions and answers!