I recently ordered a Q-Tron Plus from my local Guitar Center. Haven’t had the opportunity to experiment with it yet since my bass is there getting new pickups installed, but meanwhile I’ve been trying to remap my effects chain to include my new pedals. My goal here is to be able to use the effects within the Q-Tron Plus’s loop with or without the unit’s effect engaged since when bypassed the Plus skips the effects loop entirely.

Without a creative solution to this problem, I’d have to rewire my chain every time I wanted to turn off the effect, this course being completely impractical if necessary in the middle of a song!

The effects that would be in the loop would be a Metal Muff, Steel Leather, and an AMT Slap Bass compressor/overdrive. These the first two pedals would normally be routed into a Behringer mixer, EQ’d, then combined into the compressor.

(skip the following if you’d rather just see the diagram)
The best hypothetical solution I’ve invented so far that uses the fewest components involves running my original signal into the Q-Tron as normal, and then sending the Q-Tron’s FX loop signal through the Steel Leather into my mixer, where it would be combined with the Metal Muff’s signal and outputted to the Slap Bass compressor similar to how I’d normally set it up. It’s after this that things have to get weird.
The signal coming out of the compressor would be split with a Y adapter, running alternately to the Q-Tron’s FX return jack and to an output of my EHX Switchblade (which I’m logically assuming can be inverted). The other ‘output’ from the switchblade would be fed by the output from the Q-Tron.
This way, in theory, as long as I left the Q-Tron Plus on, I could switch between the “un-Q’d” signal from the effect chain and the Q-Tron-modified signal from the same chain by using the Switchblade as an on/off switch.

Since I realized that’s a little complicated, here’s a hastily sketched MS Paint schematic of that side of my chain:

So my questions are:
#1. Will this work?
#2. Will it be safe for my Q-Tron Plus?
#3. If safe and functional, will this unduly affect my sound quality?

And finally, I had a technical question about the Q-Tron Plus, which might open up some further creative avenues and possibly simpler solutions to the above problem. Does the signal coming into the FX return necessarily have to have anything to do with the input signal? For example, could I have nothing coming out of the FX send, but have an incoming signal to the return that would then be modulated by the unit’s input, and would this be safe for the Q-Tron?

Cheers