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I have owned a Mesa Boogie Mark V-25 for about a year now, love the amp, brilliant cleans and lovely dirt sounds.
I have a few drives on my board at the minute, zenkkudo, klon, plextortion
but to be honest I feel like I can get close to those sounds with the amp.
Just wondered has anyone ditched the pedals and just went with amp sounds?
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But you're correct, can be done.
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Using pedals for gain tones seems to be more of a blues thing.
And a forum thing to an extent!
It feels a lot more flexible than the amp approach to me.
I just feel it offers me a lot more choice and versatility than amp drive which I've never really liked that much.
They still haven't invented a pedal that sounds nice playing chords that contain more than root and fifths IMHO so for covering classic rock gigs doing hair metal I prefer amp dirt still
The time's i gig and don't need a clean i set channel 1 to pushed and that gives me classic rock heaven.
For my whole playing 'career' until tail end of last year (30 odd years) I've been dirt from the amp.
Last year on a whim I tried the other way (pedals) and I love it, more flexible and less wires, means I have one wire into an amp, not the 'boost pedal -> amp -> delay pedal -> amp' chain.
And there are some lovely amps without loops
I love dirt boxes into a cleanish amp, there seems to be a common anchor point to the sound this way, rather than two disparate sounds, despite how many different gain stages you chuck at it.
I still have an OD on the board though which is a slightly annoying use of space but I play as much through other people's amps as my own so having a familiar pedal is a big help then.
One of my rigs is just amp gain- high gain style amp.
Another one is a cleanish amp with some pedals.
A third is just a pedalboard designed to work with a variety of amps.
They all do different jobs.
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I will at some point buy a much dirtier amp for some higher gain tones, just waiting on a Laney GH50L coming up for sale close enough to me that it's worth buying.
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Bit of trading feedback here.
That said, I find the opposite for higher gain - valve distortion tends to be too smooth and muddy, or oddly smooth and harsh - I prefer solid-state for the clearer more 'harmonic-y' sound it has. So a solid-state pedal into a low to medium-gain valve amp is the best of both worlds for me.
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But I don't use high-gain sounds and the band I'm in hardly play any covers, so I'm not trying to match any particular sound. If I was playing in a function band (or a session musician or something) I'd probably feel more inclined to use various different drive pedals into a clean amp.
The EQ is great, it feels like you can dial in any sound.
My thing with pedals is I almost never play clean so it feels wrong to use a pedal for all of it somehow. Probably more just me being snobby and thinking I need to do it "properly" though.
Then I got my head around attenuators and I am sold. My DSL on the red channel (yep not as gainy as it's made out to be) kicked with an SD-1, very very enjoyable. Dirt pedals sound flat to me now, like the difference between being at a gig then hearing a recording of it later.