[elpescado]

One can say that stomp boxes follow UNIX philosophy. They do one thing and can be connected ("piped") to make complex sounds. For example, if you want distortion, with some modulation (say, some phaser) and a little bit of a delay, you could build a pedalboard ("pipeline") with those three units plugged one into another:

  guitar | distortion | phaser | delay | amp

BTW. in real life, as - by some weird convention - most of pedals have input in right side and output on the left, it looks like that:

  amp                                        guitar
   ^            .-- phaser <--.                 |
   |            |             |                 |
   `-- delay <--,             `-- distortion <--'

[jameshart]

Re the weird convention: When you're a right handed guitarist and you're facing towards your pedals, the lead comes out of your guitar going to the right.

That's irrelevant if your pedals are in an FX loop, but if they're actually between the guitar and the amp, it makes perfect sense to avoid having your guitar lead trail across or catch under your stompboxes.

[jdontillman]

That's exactly right.

Not a weird convention at all.

[eurasiantiger]

But is the UNIX philosophy true bypass?

[salmo]

I think “true bypass” is systemd. It sounds like it’s better, but isn’t always. And the kids love it in their “boutique” distros. :)

[ksaj]

This is a neat way to look at it.

Having said that, an effects loop is essentially the unix tee commmand in action, if you could manually enable/disable the tee command without breaking the pipe.

[rocketbop]

> One can say that stomp boxes follow UNIX philosophy.

I suppose it's the other way around as nix is much newer technology. :)