Zoom MS-50G Bypass Fix: The Effects Chain Order Runs Right to Left

Greg, guitarist with the London band Glitter Kick, found the Line Selector on his Zoom MS-50G wasn’t bypassing his two chorus effects, and the reason was that the pedal runs its effects chain from right to left.

The Zoom MS-50G is a digital stomp box that can be switched to emulate lots of different guitar pedals, a nice little Swiss Army knife to have in your collection. He booked me with a question about his that had him puzzled. He wanted two Bend Chorus effects running at the same time, with a Line Selector in the chain so he could switch them both on and off together. The Line Selector wasn’t doing that, so he couldn’t get the bypass working.

Working it out on a video call

We spoke on a WhatsApp video call. I had the MS-50G manual open on my computer, and I talked him through getting to the settings on the pedal over the video.

Using a Line Selector to switch other effects in and out is documented elsewhere online, so the idea was sound. What I didn’t find documented was the order the MS-50G puts its effects in, and we had to work that out between us by deduction. We’d both been expecting the chain to run from left to right, the way you’d write a signal chain down in English.

On the MS-50G, the Line Selector has to sit on the right-hand side of the chain to bypass the effects after it.

Once he’d moved it there, it bypassed both of the chorus effects and his bypass worked the way he wanted.

Why right to left makes sense

It’s a small thing, and to be fair to Zoom there are good reasons for it. On the MS-50G the input jack is on the right-hand side of the pedal and the output is on the left, and the arrows on the jack icons show the signal coming in on the right and going out on the left. So a chain that runs right to left follows the signal through the pedal.

The order of effects catches people out in software too. I’ve written up another case where a click on a vocal in Logic Pro came down to the order of the plugins on the track.

If an effect on your MS-50G seems to be acting on the wrong part of the chain, read the chain from the input side, starting on the right.

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Working it out on a video call

Why right to left makes sense

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