Have you ever plugged your guitar into your pedal board, through a long cable and into your amp and felt like you lost some high-end from your tone? If so, your tone might benefit from the addition of a buffer pedal to your signal chain. Plugging directly into the amp through a short guitar cable gives the “purest” tone you can get. But once you add longer cables and patch cables and pedals to your signal chain that’s when you start losing high-end clarity.

Why A Buffer Pedal?
Nearly every guitarist that uses long cables or lots of pedals can benefit from the addition of a buffer pedal. But a buffer is often overlooked or just misunderstood by many guitarists. In short, all guitar cables and patch cords have capacitance. When you add this to your signal chain it’s like rolling down the tone knob on your guitar. We’re not too good on the science behind this (I switched from Electrical Engineer to liberal Arts for a reason) but we can still hear it with ours ears. Basically a buffer pedal can help you get your sound back to the “pure” tone when using just one short cable.

Where Do To Use A Buffer?
Anywhere you have long cables and/or lots of patch cables. The 2 most obvious choices are before and after your pedal board. A buffer in each of those locations will minimize your signal and tone loss at those 2 locations in your signal chain.

Why We Like the Dr Armor Buffer
The Armor Buffer has 2 buffer circuits: one designed to use in front of your pedal board and one designed to be used after. The Dr J Armor Buffer will buffer your signal while in the pedal board and again while it’s going to your amp. You can use both buffer circuits or just one or the other. Plus, even though the Armor Buffer looks big in this picture, it actually has a nice small foot print. It’s not as small as a micro pedal but it is smaller than a standard Boss or MXR pedal.  Dimensions are (H x W x D) 38 x 96 x 88mm or 1.5 x 3.75 x 3.5 inches to be exact.

Another Reason to Like the Dr J Armor Buffer
The Armor Buffer also has a Boost circuit built into it. This is good for boosting your signal through your chain and hitting the front end of your amp a bit harder. If you have vintage pickups with low output you can use the boost circuit to emulate a higher output pickup or you can use the boost to give your clean tone a bit more bite. Remember, the boost circuit doesn’t color your tone, it just adds up to 20dB to your signal or you just get the sound of hitting the front end of your amp a bit harder.

The Dr J Armor Buffer is designed to preserve your tone.

Click here to learn more about the Dr J Armor Buffer.