But we can simplify this.

I'm not putting finished effects into standalone metal #boxes at this point; I'm #experimenting, not producing a product. So I have a simple #modular system I cooked up to connect arbitrary effects #experiments together. One of the things it does is handle the power-supply stuff, so each effect board doesn't need to do any of that. It just receives a nice 0V and buffered #Vcc (9V) it can rely on, along with a buffered 4.5V to use as a #bias voltage when AC coupling #signals, since this is a single-supply system.

So we can chop out all the power stuff from the schematic, which fills basically a ninth of the image - divide it into 3 rows and 3 columns, like the Brady Bunch intro, and the left-middle square is basically the power section.

But there's a bigger chunk we can strip out. Boss (and many other) pedals of the era frequently used "soft switching" to enable / disable the effect while playing. If you go back in time, real physical #switches were used, so the signal was actually totally disconnected from the effects circuitry when in the "off" position. This is called "true #bypass", as opposed to the soft switching.

#Soft #switching involves having two signal paths through the effect. One applies the characteristic effect, and the other basically just buffers the signal and bypasses the rest of the effect stuff. This is implemented with transistors and latches.

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