If you are working with multiple pedals and/or long cable runs, you’re also building capacitance that can suck the life right out of your tone. Luckily, this can be quickly remedied by placing a buffer device—like the 10 options here—in the correct spot in your signal chain.
SOS Buffer
The single knob on this buffer allows you to subtly dial in the highs to be exactly how you need them without getting unwanted interaction with fuzz and wah pedals.
C-1
For use at the front or end of your pedalboard and effective for lengthy cable runs, this buffering circuit in a box was designed to restore vitality to your signal.
BonaFide Buffer
Designed to combat treble-eating constraints put on tone from long cable runs, this buffer has a power-failure mode that automatically switches to true bypass if the power is cut.
Vitalizer WV
Wah and volume pedals tend to degrade and color a high-impedance signal’s tone, but players can minimize this degradation by sending these pedals a low-impedance signal via the Vitalizer.
Concord Utility Buffer
This handbuilt buffer can run at 9V or 18V and was designed to bring clarity and high-end sparkle to your input signal that may have been lost due to multiple pedals and cables.
Stowaway
This 100-percent discreet, class-A buffer provides a stable, consistent load to remedy such issues as impedance loading and mismatching that adversely affect a pickup’s character.
Buffer
This transparent signal buffer/line driver employs unity buffering to reverse the effects of capacitance without impacting your instrument’s tone or output level.
SB-15 Tailbone StageBug
Designed to drive multiple pedals and long cable runs without added noise, this buffer also allows a player to combine two 9V outputs from a power brick and convert them to 15V DC.
Buffer
Conceived to be the complete I/O interface for a pedalboard, this compact, all-analog buffer provides a separate tuner output to keep the tuner out of the audio path.
Little Black Buffer
Integrating this little box into a signal chain is intended to provide the perfect input impedance to your rig so it can deliver clear, natural tone—no matter how many pedals you’re using.
![Adrian Belew/BEAT Tour Rig Rundown [2024]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=53638946&width=600&height=600&quality=85&coordinates=192%2C0%2C368%2C0)
Keith Urban has spent decades traveling the world and topping global country-music charts, and on this episode of Wong Notes, the country-guitar hero tells host Cory Wong how he conquered the world—and what keeps him chasing new sounds on his 6-string via a new record, High, which releases on September 20.
Urban came up as guitarist and singer at the same time, and he details how his playing and singing have always worked as a duet in service of the song: “When I stop singing, [my guitar] wants to say something, and he says it in a different way.” Those traits served him well when he made his move into the American music industry, a story that begins in part with a fateful meeting with a 6-string banjo in a Nashville music store in 1995.
It’s a different world for working musicians now, and Urban weighs in on the state of radio, social media, and podcasts for modern guitarists, but he still believes in word-of-mouth over the algorithm when it comes to discovering exciting new players.
And in case you didn’t know, Keith Urban is a total gearhead. He shares his essential budget stomps and admits he’s a pedal hound, chasing new sounds week in and week out, but what role does new gear play in his routine? Urban puts it simply: “I’m not chasing tone, I’m pursuing inspiration.”
Wong Notes is presented by DistroKid.
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LR Baggs HiFi Duet High-fidelity Pickup and Microphone Mixing System
