Pete Cornish - His case against true bypass.

If you don't know who Pete Cornish is, he's basically the British version of Bob Bradshaw, except he started long before Bradshaw. I read this a couple years ago, but rediscovered it last night. It's a very interesting and educational read.

http://petecornish.co.uk/case_against_true_bypass.html

Here is his client list, just to give you an idea as to his credibility: http://petecornish.co.uk/client.html

Cheers!

Good post, interesting reading. Thanks.

ifailedshapes said:

If you don't know who Pete Cornish is, he's basically the British version of Bob Bradshaw, except he started long before Bradshaw. I read this a couple years ago, but rediscovered it last night. It's a very interesting and educational read.

http://petecornish.co.uk/case_against_true_bypass.html

Here is his client list, just to give you an idea as to his credibility: http://petecornish.co.uk/client.html

Cheers!

Click to expand...

Yeah - I've read that one a few times in the past coupla years. Pete Cornish makes great pro quality top end gear and is highly respected and all but I really think he lost the plot on this one. The premise of his argument is that if you run more than 60 ft of cable from guitars thru pedals thru amps etc then you'll have significant signal loss and he's right. Where it all falls into silliness IMO is that almost no-one has even 30% of that length of cable.

Most players run a standard 10ft cable from guitar to pedal board & from pedal board to amp. Plus they use like 2-3 inch patch cables between pedals. Cornish is talking 30 ft cables and 2 footers between pedals. No-one does that. He's also talking low output vintage guitar PUP's. I'm running a total of 23ft for 10 pedals so my signal loss is insignficant. I know cause I can't hear any audible diffference in volume or tone. I also don't have any low output vintage guitars.

Some big time pros might run more than 60 ft of cable on huge stages but then they'd also use DI boxes and most nowadays use wireless systems.

The conventional wisdom I've been using for a couple of years with success is to have a mixture of good quality bufferred pedals and true bypass one's. You run the bufferred pedals first and last in the chain and in between a mixture of true bypass and bufferred pedals (or all true bypass in my case). The buffered pedals boost the signal if required but the key is to have good quality buffer parts in each that don't also clip off high & low freqs. It's the poor quality bufferred pedals (like most Boss & Line 6 pedals ) that tone suck bad.

Plus keeping your pedals to a minimum reduces your potential for tone suck. The more pedals you have the greater the chance of signal loss, tone suck, volume dips and all round reliability issues.

So can't agree with Cornish on this one at all :mrgreen:

Pete Cornish is amazing, the systems he has built for the biggest names is just amazing, he's the best there is. If you use EMG's no amount of lead length makes any difference but with passive pickups it doesn't take much to chance the sound with ever foot of lead.