Isolating Noisy Pedal

[punchy712]

I've recently finished building a few pedals (8) and for the most part individually they work well with each putting out the expected amount of extra noise. Some though don't seem to play well together and I still need to figure which combination is giving problems. One in particular though, the Super Heterodyne Receiver, is putting out ticking noise even when bypassed.

I'll leave that issue for a different thread in the Troubleshooting section, but I just had a general question regarding isolating noisy pedals even when bypassed. I read that getting a looper can help with this since the pedal would be completely isolated in its own loop. I'd like to understand how a basic looper like the Joyo PXL, which seems to be true bypass, can help with this. What is it about the looper that can eliminate the noise that the pedal is putting out when bypassed, especially when the pedal is true bypass, and the looper is true bypass. I'm not familiar with how the loopers are built so there may be an obvious answer here.

Thanks and apologies if this has been covered in the past. It seems like a basic question, but doing a quick search didn't yield any results.

 

[giovanni]

How are you powering the pedals? In my experience isolated power is the key to getting low noise overall. If you use daisy chain, it’s very likely that you’ll get ground loops which will cause noise to bleed into your signal.

 

[punchy712]

How are you powering the pedals? In my experience isolated power is the key to getting low noise overall. If you use daisy chain, it’s very likely that you’ll get ground loops which will cause noise to bleed into your signal.

I'm using a Voodoo Lab Pedal Power 2+. It has 8 isolated outputs so that's enough for me not to have to use any daisy chaining. I'll definitely need to inspect all the pedals I built to make sure there's no errors in my grounding or the way I routed my wires.

The Super Heterodyne Receiver though even on it's own and bypassed produced a noticeable ticking sound. I'm not saying it's not my fault in how I built it and I still have some debugging to do there, but I'm just wondering if it's possible to isolate pedals like this to eliminate that kind of noise to bleed into my signal when they're bypassed. The pedal actually sounds just fine when playing through it, the ticking isn't noticeable, so if I could isolate it I could just keep it in my chain to play around with it rather than having to put it in the chain whenever I want to use it.

 

[giovanni]

Interesting, if you exclude power issues then there something odd with the pedal. I built the heterodyne and I don’t notice any ticking. As far as isolated loops, I honestly have no idea if there is a good solution. I wonder if just having the switch in a different enclosure than the pedal would minimize the noise?