Hey guys,
I am running an am. std. strat into my pedalboard:
boss tu-3, Keeley katana, (keeley mod) bd-2, (keeley mod) ts808, eventide timefactor

i hook everything up by george l's and am experiencing some treble loss. I am hoping you guys can suggest a solution to this tone sucking situation. thanks guys.

So when did you notice the treble loss?

Was it the first time you used all those pedals together? (bad pedal, main suspect)

Or was it a sudden thing. I.e it was ok one minute, next it's gone bad? (bad cable main suspect)

There could be a million causes, the mods being one of them. Bad sockets are usually a unlikely culprit, but can go bad when folks have had the insides of the pedal out the box.
Go through your chain, remove one pedal and patch lead, check, replace, remove the next in the chain. Till you find the culprit.

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No no and no

You could check the load on your line by testing it with a multimeter set R to 1k and check one of your guitar's pickups via a low noise patch cable by using the two probes to the end of the 1/4" plug. This will give you the total output of the guitar's pickup with the tone and volume maxed out on the guitar. Next plug guitar into the cable you normally use and through the effects, turn the effects power supply on and turn off all the effects. Then, at the end of the 1/4" plug that goes into your guitar, do the same test you did to check the guitar's output. This should give you a general idea of how much load is on your line from the guitar to the amp. If you have less output there could be some tone sucking. If you have more output you have some kind of buffer in one of your pedals that boost the signal. If you have tone sucking, try this method via each effect to find the culprit. It could be a cable or an effect.

Can't think of much more than what's already been said. Go thru each pedal one by one as Nikininja said. There's a lot on the Net these days about using buffers early in the signal chain to counter tone loss, capacitance, etc. Getting a buffer in-line is probably the ultimate solution to your problem. You can buy buffers for as little as $25, or you can make one.

Personally, I've been through the treble-loss thing myself with running effects, and I've just learned to live with it. You should be able to EQ a lot of the treble leakage back into your rig from your amp, unless there's truly something mechanically wrong somewhere. Two things to keep in mind: First, you are always going to pay way more attention to that stuff than your audience ever will (i.e. your listeners will never know you're suffering from treble loss lol), and secondly, most of what we hear when playing around on our own gets lost when playing live (any treble loss probably isn't noticeable at all with a full band behind you). I don't know if that helps any, just FWIW.


- C

Make sure when your testing to actually remove each pedal since all may not be true bypass (doesn't the timefactor have a true bypass mode?).

Check your cable run to your amp. If it's long, that could be a contributer. The true bypass thing can bite you here because it's good to have at least one good buffer in your pedalboard to drive long cable runs.