Do you experience when your guitar is plugged directly into your amp that the tone sounds great, only to find when you put your pedals and effects in line that it sounds dull and looses its brilliance? You may be experiencing dirty jack syndrome, its a condition that I see regularly in guitar rigs and pedalboards.
There are 2 types of cleaner that you want to use on a regular basis.
-Contact cleaner, one that leaves no residue and is safe on plastic. This is for use on switches and jacks.
-DeoxIT cleaner, cleans and lubricates. Use this on potentiometers.
First clean your pedalboard. (I find it handy to keep a small paintbrush in my tool kit to regularly brush the dust off of the pedals.) Remove each pedal and clean all the bar sludge off of them. Check and make sure the input and output jacks are tight, as well as the pots. Spray the non-residue contact cleaner on a 1/4” plug and insert and remove it from each jack 5 or 6 times to clean the contacts. Repeat this on each pedal. Clean all of the 1/4” plugs with this same contact cleaner. You may also want to do this on the DC power cables and jacks.
Use a cable tester and test each cable. I use the Behringer CT100, you can get these for around $30 from Sweetwater. Replace or repair any questionable cables.
Re-assemble the pedalboard and test. While playing, wiggle each plug and pedal and listen for any crackle or pop. If everything sounds clean then you are good to go. You should hear an audible difference in your overall tone.
Next lets look at your guitar. Do you have scratchy volume and tone pots? This is what the Deoxit is for. If you are comfortable opening the electronics cavity, get in there and spray some Deoxit into each pot. Work the pot back and forth a number of times and this will dissolve any corrosion in the pot. If it doesn’t clean up, then the pot may need to be replaced. Check to make sure the pots and jack are tight on the guitar. Use the non-residue contact cleaner to clean the switch and guitar jack in the same way you cleaned the pedals.
The next culprit in tone sucking is bypass switching. If you are using a stock wah pedal, I recommend having a True Bypass switch installed. Even when the pedal is “off” it is still sucking some tone and replacing that switch makes a big difference. This goes for all of your pedals, tuner pedals included. Many of the higher quality boutique pedals come with true bypass switching. For the ones that don’t you can either have the switch replaced, or get an external “loop pedal” to switch the effect in and out of line.
Following these maintenance tips will combat many of the tone sucking issues that I commonly see in guitar rigs.
Happy Giggings!