Pedal terminology

In reading posts in this forum, I've come across some interesting-sounding terms. Could someone help clarify these:

1. asymmetrical distortion
2. mid-range hump
3. power sag
4. true bypass

I have some ideas about what these mean, but since the concepts are new to me, it would help to have experts discuss these a little.

maybe i can help with your questions

asymmetrical dist there are 2 clipping or dist styles this is one of two hopefully some one can dwell on the better that i can

mid range hump the orignal tube sceamers had this some didnt like it
they were very mid rangey many of the tube
screamers the hump has been taken out that make
the pedal more like your clean amp tone just kicked up
to overdrive level

power sag if you ever used a older pedal when the battery
was not at full power you may have noticed its
tone was different maybe better
some power supplies offer a feature to drop voltage
to achieve that effect wah wah pedals and fuzz
like this way best another way to explain this
is a tweed amp when naturally driven gives a sag
and a blackface with ss rectafier doesnt more in your
face so to speak

true bypass many pedals with out true bypass kill your tone or suck
up tone when there turned off
wahs are known for this true bypassing takes the
signal out of the pedal
so the cable is direct so to speak some pedals need
true bypass and some do not true bypass really
makes a huge difference if the pedal sucks tone

hope this helps



marc

Asymmetrical clipping circuit has different clipping threshold on positive and negative side of the signal. Since one side is clipped differently than the other, this method is supposed to create more complex harmonics in the distorted signal.

Mid-hump, or rather a band pass filtering, on TS gets created by high-pass filtering happening in the clipping stage at 720Hz center frequency (6 dB/octave), and post clipping stage low pass filtering also centered at 720Hz.