I have my noise gate at the end, and compressor/sustainer up front; in the middle, tube overdrive, distortion, reverb, and a couple other effects pedals. Depending on which guitar I'm using, sometimes I'll get unwanted noise, and that's when I have to play with the level/gain settings on one or more of the pedals in between- more often than not, the distortion pedal, but sometimes the tube overdrive pedal (at one time, I had both the Ibanez Tube Screamer chained to the Behringer TO800 Tube overdrive- think that's the model- not sure if that made any difference, so I took 1 of them out of the chain.) On very rare occasions, I'll have to lower the level/gain on the compressor. In any case, anytime I've had unwanted noise, I always have to lower something on one of the boxes.

Can someone tell me me what "true" bypass means? And "buffer"?