buffered bypass. To keep costs down, Boss
implemented buffers as a standard in all
of its pedals, activated when the pedal
was bypassed. The average guitarist didn’t
mind (or didn’t know enough to care at the
time) but tonal purists found that these
Boss pedals made their temperamental
fuzzes react in strange ways that weren’t
necessarily happy accidents. The buffered
bypass, as they put it, “colored tone” in
ways they didn’t much care for. When
the boutique boom happened in the
mid-to-late ‘90s, many of these builders
Impedance