Soft switching fell out of favour after this period, too, because it could cause "tone suck". That's a real description; basically, guitarists complained that when their guitar was routed through the pedal to their amplifier, but the effect was disabled via soft switching, it would sound worse - its tone would #suck - than when they plugged their instrument directly into the amplifier.

With well-designed and manufactured effects circuits, and with reasonable #electronics in the guitar and the #amplifier, this shouldn't be much of an issue, if at all. But there were (and are!) lots of badly-designed or badly-manufactured effects pedals out there, and plenty of guitars and amplifiers with stupidly-designed electronics. So it's entirely possible for tone suck to be a real thing - but as with anything audio-related, you would need a double-blind #study to determine how much of the effect was real, and how much of it was purely #psychological.

So effects generally went back to "true bypass", with physical "stomp switches".

There is a bunch of stuff in the schematic that exists only to implement the soft switching. We can strip all of that out, too.

And if you remove both of those sections, you get this.

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#tone #suck #ToneSuck #bypass #TrueBypass #StompSwitch