Take a simple guitar signal chain. With no other gubbins in the way you've got Guitar --> Amp simple as you like. Put a pedal or two in the way and here we may well discover the issue of tonal sapping. The signal from your pickups is sent through all the electrics on your guitar, out the jack and down a cable. Now on many pedals we have what's called a bypass (in other words the pedal isn't on) - for the purpose of this exercise we don't even need to switch a pedal on to experience the problem. The signal comes out the cable and into your pedal and then through all the circuit board (PCB) in your pedal. A small amount of physics here so bare with me. Throughout all the components on your PCB you will experience resistance and without going into any more detail, that results in a loss of your sound! BAD TIMES!
So how serious can this be? Well all non-true bypass (we'll come back to this in a minute) will sap some of your tone, that's just the laws of physics I'm afraid. However so are certainly worse than others. Take wah pedals, they appear to be a real issue pedal. CryBabys and in particular Vox base range wahs (V845) eat a whole lot of tone for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Worse than this though are multi FX units. The PCBs in these are quite simply enormous and you lose a tremendous amount of tone. I actually sold a BOSS ME-50 because of this issue. Note here, it is particularly bad with single coil pick ups from what I have found.
Can you get around this issue? Yes! There are two ways. First is extremely simple - buy only True Bypass products. True Bypass simply means that instead of going through the PCB when your signal hits the pedal, it goes in and straight out again without losing any tone! This isn't ideal though because the day is going to come when you want a pedal that isn't true bypass and there is nothing you can do about it. Or is there? Ah! Well the second way is a little more complicated. It is possible to make a pedal True Bypass. The aforementioned Vox wah series can be modded pretty easily see - here! And there are Youtube videos on how to mod other products - especially CryBabys - these are a popular mod.
It must also be said I suppose that this problem isn't always THAT bad. I run several pedals in my board that aren't true bypass (all BOSS's compact range are non-true bypass) and they function just fine. So don't simply discard buying non-true bypass and definitely don't aim your non-true bypass for the nearest 5th story window! The best way of testing how bad a simply bypass pedal is plug your guitar into the pedal and play a bit. Then plug straight into the amp and check for the difference. Sometimes the difference is unattainable - sometimes it sounds like epicmeal time guy has bitten a chunk out your signal!
A couple of note worthy pedals -
- MXR (tend to have true bypass)
- BOSS (do not)
Final thing - even if you do have true bypass on a very long signal chain you may experience some tonal sapping - a preamp or a micro amp can sort this out
Peace, Linus
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