# Leprechaun - Can hear faint sound of effect when in bypass



## ThePodsInterrobang (Sep 29, 2019)

Hi this is my first post here. I built a Leprechaun PCB and it works very well except for one problem: I can still faintly hear the effect sound when the pedal is in bypass mode. This is only really obvious when the magic/regeneration foot switch is on. The wires from the bypass switch to the input and output jacks were the longest so I guessed using shielded wire might stop this. I used some guitar cable I had and grounded the shielding of the braids, but this still didn't help the issue. Is this standard behaviour for this pedal or is there some other way to prevent it?
Thanks. Besides this the pedal works well and I've actually used it already on a new recording my psychedelic band is making.


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## Nostradoomus (Sep 29, 2019)

Is there a jumper here on your footswitch?


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## ThePodsInterrobang (Oct 1, 2019)

Nostradoomus said:


> Is there a jumper here on your footswitch?


Thanks for the reply.
I checked and the footswitch was all wired up correctly. The switch also seems to connect where it should when I check with a multi meter.
I also tried checking for things shorting and changing the position of the output wire inside the pedal but it didn't help the problem

Is this kind of thing likely to be caused by something shorting I haven't found? Or is there some special building practices I should use for digital pedals that I may not have known about? This was my first digital pedal build.


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## phi1 (Oct 1, 2019)

I know you checked your wiring but you could verify something with your multimeter. The link the Nostradoomus is asking about serves to ground the pcb input wire when the pedal is in bypass. If the pcb input is grounded, there shouldn’t be any effect sound bleed because it has no input to work with. So, please verify that the pcb input is connected to ground when in bypass mode.


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## ThePodsInterrobang (Oct 2, 2019)

phi1 said:


> I know you checked your wiring but you could verify something with your multimeter. The link the Nostradoomus is asking about serves to ground the pcb input wire when the pedal is in bypass. If the pcb input is grounded, there shouldn’t be any effect sound bleed because it has no input to work with. So, please verify that the pcb input is connected to ground when in bypass mode.


Thanks for the suggestion. I checked and the input of the pedal was grounded. However, with this pedal at extreme settings it produces its own oscillating sound regardless of having any input signal, and its these settings where I'm hearing the pedal bleed through when bypassed. However, I followed this logic and tried grounding the output of the pedal in bypass instead of the input. Once I did that, the problem is much better, but still present (bleed through is about 1/3 the volume of before). At this point I can live with it, but if there is a way to fix it I'd still do it. Basically, when the pedal is set where it would be extremely loud and oscillating (like with everything on max) I can hear it faintly bypassed.

While trouble shooting, out of interest I removed my shielded input wire and replaced it with a non-shielded one. I found then that moving the wire around to different positions in the box increased or decreased the bleed (more bleed putting it close to the Spin FV-1). I put the shielded wire back in, but I'm wondering whether this last bit of noise would be fixed by using shielded wires for all the other connections in the box. However that would get messy fast because this pedal has lots of wiring.

Any other suggestions are appreciated


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## ThePodsInterrobang (Oct 13, 2019)

I further improved the amount of noise by carefully making the wiring neater. The issue is still present but very faint and no longer a real problem.


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