Current Affairs: Jargon Busting

In a return to my quest to inform, educate and entertain on this blog, I wanted to do the first of what might be a series of dispelling some myths behind the jargon used in the pedal industry –which, even in 2024, is used to try to dupe and confuse the consumer! So, without further ado, let’s get into this mess…

Headroom

I’m going to aim to not get too technical on this, but headroom refers to the amount of “space” a pedal has before it distorts.  This means that a clean boost is designed to have “high headroom”, as it’s designed to stay clean at a high volume, but a fuzz pedal is definitely low headroom. Headroom is different from volume or output that comes from the live and recording audio worlds respectively.

Impedance

This one always confuses people (and, to be honest, still catches me out a little). For a lack of a better way to describe it, impedance is resistance (and is funnily enough measured in ohms Ω,) that builds up over the length and impurities in your guitar’s cable. Although impedance and resistance are two completely different things, this example is merely what’s best for this simple analogy. Now, this is nothing to worry about if you plug your guitar straight into your amp in your house/small rehearsal space or small gig. But if you play on bigger stages this becomes an issue as it starts to affect the guitar’s signal by rolling off the high-end frequencies. What’s more, if you’ve got a pedalboard full of true bypass pedals, the wiring between the jacks, switches and patch cables extends this even further. To add insult to injury as well, some pedals such as wah pedals and some vintage style fuzzes (due to the way they’re designed) have particularly high impedance outputs. This brings me to my next point…

Wah pedals are renowned for having impedance issues when used alongside a Fuzz Face style circuit.

Buffers

A way around impedance problems in pedal circuits is a buffer. A buffer literally buffers the signal by converting it from high impedance to low impedance to help “buffer” the signal. You might not even realise it, but you probably have some buffers on your pedalboard already. Have you got a Boss pedal? Well, you’ve got a buffer!

I’m not going to dwell too much on this but if you’re interested, I urge to you go on and check my previous blog post on True vs Buffered Bypass.

Clipping

Now for guitar pedals, you probably know that clipping refers to the diodes that are being used to “clip” the signal. You’ve heard them all thrown around: silicon, germanium, LEDs, etc. but what does that actually mean? Well, it kind of plays into my other point about headroom and I’m going to try and explain it with an analogy.

In an average guitar pedal, you have a certain amount of voltage of “headroom” in which to amplify the signal. When this signal distorts, it’s clipped as the signal has reached as much of the headroom the circuit has. It’s the same with amplifiers and, as I alluded to earlier, mixing desks and microphone pre-amps. Clipping means the signal cannot be pushed any further.

Where the lines start to blur a little is when diodes are used. Without going into specifics of how and why diodes can be utilised to bring down this clipping threshold, making the signal distort more easily, and affecting the character of the distortion in the process. Basically, when the signal hits that particular voltage the diodes activate and then bring down the clipping threshold. I’ll cover hard and soft clipping at a later date.

As you can see a lot of these terms play into each other a little, and that’s what causes a lot of confusion. This all gets more confusing when you take into account that it can affect your amp’s pre-amp and is pretty much all individual to your own set-up. I hope I’ve not confused you too much with this one. As always, let me know in the comments if this has been helpful and if there are any more terms you’d like me to discuss in a future post.