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Those are covered, mostly in the first category - it's just the basic character of the sound, not whether it sounds like an amp.
The average listener can’t tell the difference between amp overdrive and a pedal anyway.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
"I don't think the (insert famous pedal name here) is the best sounding it can be, here are my reasons why and what I would like it to do instead"
Then they go off, design a new circuit from scratch, prototype, test, tweak, test, tweak, test, scrap it, start again from scratch, test, tweak, test, tweak, blind test, tweak, blind test, tweak, test etc etc etc
They keep going until they have a pedal that achieves the brief they set out and is a genuinely better pedal. A win for us all.
Those guys should be applauded.
Rift Amplification
Brackley, Northamptonshire
www.riftamps.co.uk
Yes - Stand up @ThorpyFX and take a bow!
Yes they are.
What you're being sold is the idea that you aren't the average listener. You my friend have golden ears and highly refined exquisite taste, and can discern the sound of true quality and awsum toan, unlike all those other cloth-eared twats.
That's why you bought the new Emperor Drive (New Clothes edition).
To be fair, I don't think it's done quite that cynically, or that deliberately, but it's being done.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
Okay, he did it that cynically and deliberately.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
I can see it from both sides - there's a big difference between the audience and the player, who is inside the 'feedback loop' of the equipment and so much more sensitive to nuances which change the tone relative to the technique, which are largely lost on the outside listener.
I've certainly been guilty of over-analysing my gear in the past, but these days I tend to find I sound like me through anything... out of laziness mostly .
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
The reason I posted was because I was listening to a guitar part (Mogwai although artist is irrelevant) and wondering what sort of distortion would give that sound so started to experiment with my pedals. First up I tried my Digitech Carcosa and found I could get pretty close, then I tried my Rat clone and found I could get equally as close. Of course up until this point I'd thought of them as being quite sonically different pedals, and it was only after considering them from a detached listening perspective, trying to emulate someone else's sound, did the thought strike me that there really is not much difference. Especially for this particular application.
I then watched one of these Reverb videos which claims to demonstrate how to emulate a particular artist's sound using pedals, but is really there to sell you some overly expensive boutique niceness. It was Sonic Youth in this case - they demoed lots of different pedal combinations, but in most cases some very basic pedals would get you there - bog standard overdrive, fuzz and basic modulation. It's the riffs, the layering of the parts, the guitar tunings and playing style that are much more important.
ETA: One of the pedals that Reverb were using for the Sonic Youth video was a Zvex '59 Sound. As far as I can see that's about 200 quids worth of pedal for some mild gain/clipping... wtf!
Properly wound me up.
Been uploading old tracks I recorded ages ago and hopefully some new noodles here.
The differences are real, but I'd absolutely agree that most of those differences aren't particularly worth caring about, and when they are audible they are explicable via simple component choices. The snake oil merchants are taking the piss when they sell their TS with a slightly different low end shelf, or a distortion pedal X with an extra clipping diode in series on one side.
I have found a few designs that genuinely seem to do something a bit different, in a way that I can clearly hear -- there are interesting designs out there -- but most of the time it's basically what @ICBM wrote above:
I remember that. As weak as it sounds when you say it in so many words, I do think that:
What you hear via their microphones and whatever jiggery-pokery Youtube applies to audio isn't necessarily what they heard in the room.
ICBM's point about being "inside the feedback loop" is valid- two pedals can sound identical but feel completely different.
But yeah, the two did sound identical on the video.
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
I used to buy every OD/Distortion I could, I reckon I've owned most in my life.
Then I switched to Fractal.
One of the things which worried me was the lack of models (especially compared to Line 6) in the OD department. But actually it's amazing, I only ever use three 'pedals' - clean boost ('Klone'), TS and occasionally a Fuzz. Nothing else
Of course this is somewhat artificial because I can change amps instead in the model, but even there - much as I enjoy programming different sounds - if forced I reckon I'd only ever need a maximum of four amps, and could get by on 2-3.
So realistically - in the real world, clean boost, TS boost, Fuzz, two channel amp - sorted! It's amazing to say aloud
I've built myself a few pedals. There are differences, but they aren't huge.
I've a TS style build that's a bit hybrid between a TS and the Fulltone FD/Boss SD1 circuit.
I did tweak the frequency where it starts to attenuate the low end. I wanted that TS mid hump that the FD2 didn't quite have, but not as pronounced as the TS, so I tweaked a couple of components to set that frequency about halfway between the two. It makes a minor difference, but it's not night and day. I'd quite happily use a TS or a Fulldrive if that was what was available. To be honest, if I'd had a Fulldrive in a smaller box without the boost side doubling the footprint, I'd have never bothered to build this pedal.
Likewise with the clipping. When I built it, I had all kinds of ideas about switchable diodes and symmetrical/asymmetrical clipping. Once I built it, I started out with the standard TS diodes and it sounded great. I then put an extra diode in one side to get asymmetrical clipping. I think I marginally prefer it, but I wouldn't be confident I could pick it out in a blind test. The differences are small. The pedal sounded great that way, so I just left it as it was and didn't bother with all the switchable diode stuff.
For me, the biggest difference between a lot of these pedals is the EQ voicing rather than the clipping. Something with a pronounced mid hump like a TS will sound a bit different from something flatter sounding like an OCD.
Some of them do respond differently to picking dynamics. Some pedals are very compressed and don't change much with how you pick, but others can be a lot more sensitive to dynamics. Set with the gain low, an OCD on 18V, can go from sounding clean when picked gently, to sounding quite driven when you pick hard.
Our 'market' is unique in that originally, YouTube videos had neutral videos giving good opinion. A huge industry has nice spawned, and naturally things have changed...
I really miss buying pedals, especially ODs, but the hype is not missed.