Rambling question about pedals for stacking other pedals into

solar

Hi folks,

I'm looking for some advice or new ideas based on your experience please!

First: I play mostly jazzy/bluesy type stuff. I like fat, dark clean sounds and low-gain hairy overdrive. I also like small-tube-amp-on-fire fuzzy blues sounds a la early Black Keys, early Clapton and so on. Occasionally dabble in weird ambient noises.

I also have a (perhaps slightly odd) aversion to tube amps. I play mostly at home, at fairly low volumes. I used to have a Fender Pro Junior but I rarely turned it up past 1. I hated the unpredictability of how its sound changed when it was cranked up vs quiet. I want my sound to come entirely from my board, and the amp to behave, essentially, like a PA. To that end, my main amp at the moment is a Roland JC40. I don't use any of the effects on the amp, and I have the EQ completely flat. It sounds pretty much the same whisper quiet as it does turned all the way up.

My approach is to have an "always on" low-gain overdrive which I stack other overdrives or fuzzes into. Having been through quite a few options, I currently use a Lovepedal Amp 11 for this. It really fattens up cleans (I use its EQ to boost the bass slightly) and it makes fuzzes sound much better than when they're run directly into the front of the JC. Less fizz and more fuzz. It's the best thing I've had so far.

But the Amp 11 isn't perfect. I can't quite put my finger on it, but sometimes it takes on an unpleasant glassy/nails-on-a-chalkboard quality in the high end when it's being driven hard. Sounds "fake" somehow. I also don't really like its boost section, and don't like its form factor ("landscape" pedals are just antisocial).

So: I'm looking for a pedal that (a) fattens up clean sounds (adds some nice harmonic complexity as a tube amp would, I guess) but also (b) behaves like the front of an amp (overdrives and saturates nicely) when other pedals are fed into it. This is a surprisingly hard thing to Google, because almost all overdrives are sold as devices to "push the frontend of your amp". I don't want it to push the frontend of my amp at all, I want other pedals to push its frontend. I want the signal coming out of it to be at more-or-less the same level as what went in, but just "better"!

I hope that makes some kind of sense. I suspect I'm looking for something sold as an "amp-like" pedal, but again their marketing blurb doesn't seem to talk about how they behave when overdriven themselves. Does anyone have any experience with this? All the YouTube demos are done into a tube amp, so it's impossible to tell whether the sound is coming from the pedal or from overdriving the amp.

One more thing - not interested in any sort of modeller. I work in software for a living, the last thing I want is to play my guitar through a computer.

Well, that turned into quite a ramble. Thanks in advance!

ICBM

You probably won't like this suggestion because it's huge and does contain valves, but...

Mesa V-Twin.

The clean mode is like a darker, bolder Fender sound and the 'Blues' mode is like a pushed Tweed or early Marshall sound. You can set it to toggle between these two (there's a switch on the bottom to do that) and ignore the 'Solo' mode which is like a modern Marshall/Mesa.

It needs to be run into a purely clean amp - it can even go straight into a power amp, or a PA - and takes other pedals in front of it brilliantly, like a good valve amp.

Winny_Pooh

For fat cleans get a blackstone mosfet and run it in the low gain yellow channel.  Does a nice early jazz grit and it smooths the heck out of any drive pedal you put in front. The Nobels ODR-1 does a similar job but less organic if you are on a budget.

solar

Nice, thanks for the reply @ICBM. Hadn't considered anything like that - but the YouTube demos sound good. Love the direct recording aspect too. Looks like only the V2 has the switch to change what the channel footswitch toggles between. Relatively reasonable prices on eBay too... 

It's not that I'm against valves as such, by the way...

solar

@Winny_Pooh another one I hadn't heard of. Love the aesthetic, digging through YouTube now.. thanks

crunchman

Fulltone OCD on 18V is great for low gain sounds and very amp like.  Thorpy Peacekeeper may worth a look.

solar

Thanks @crunchman. I did consider a Fulltone Fat Boost but again, all the blurb is about how it boosts your amp.

Winny_Pooh

crunchman said:

Fulltone OCD on 18V is great for low gain sounds and very amp like.  Thorpy Peacekeeper may worth a look.

Never been impressed by these. Would be a bit fizzy if not used with a valve amp.

crunchman

Winny_Pooh said:

crunchman said:

Fulltone OCD on 18V is great for low gain sounds and very amp like.  Thorpy Peacekeeper may worth a look.

Never been impressed by these. Would be a bit fizzy if not used with a valve amp.

Have you used the OCD on 18V?  Very different from 9V.

ICBM

solar said:

Nice, thanks for the reply @ICBM. Hadn't considered anything like that - but the YouTube demos sound good. Love the direct recording aspect too. Looks like only the V2 has the switch to change what the channel footswitch toggles between.

Yes, true - but the V2 is much more common, they only made the first version for a short while. Easy to tell even in poor-quality photos of just the top - if it has knobs with a raised position-indicator ridge, it's a V2. If it has Telecaster-style knobs with a drilled dot marker it *could* be a V1 - but early V2s have them as well.

solar said:

Relatively reasonable prices on eBay too...

Interesting - they had got expensive not that long ago, but they seem to have gone down again a bit now.

I should also say that there's one noticeable issue with them, which is an annoying drop-out when switching from bypass to any of the 'on' modes or vice versa - bad enough to interrupt the flow of a song if you're playing over the change. But if you never use the bypass and only switch between Clean and Blues (or Solo) it doesn't do it.

bingefeller

The problem with running overdrives directly into a crystal clean SS amp, such as a JC40, is that most overdrives mix the overdriven signal with some clean signal and it doesn't sound good, especially when you are boosting it. 

@ICBM told me about hard clipping overdrives and soft clipping overdrives once and it seems that soft clipping ODs mix in clean signal with overdriven.  hard clipping just give you the complete overdriven signal.

You could try the Boss OD-3, which doesn't mix the clean signal with the distorted signal.  It's a smooth sounding OD.  You could also check out the Boss Overdrive / Distortion and just use it on the overdrive side. 

The Fender Yngwie Malmsteen signature OD doesn't mix in clean signal either, but it's noisy at higher gain levels so you may want to use a  noisegate.

Babones

Sounds like you want a "foundation" overdrive/pedal, as the likes of Catalinbread call it. You just need to decide which type.

ICBM

bingefeller said:

The problem with running overdrives directly into a crystal clean SS amp, such as a JC40, is that most overdrives mix the overdriven signal with some clean signal and it doesn't sound good, especially when you are boosting it. 

@ICBM told me about hard clipping overdrives and soft clipping overdrives once and it seems that soft clipping ODs mix in clean signal with overdriven.  hard clipping just give you the complete overdriven signal.

No, that isn’t how it works.

It seems to be a popular myth that TS-type overdrives mix clean signal in with the overdrive - they don’t. What they do is not clip the signal below unity gain, because the clipping is in a feedback loop - so what you’re really getting is a sort of brick-wall limiting rather than ‘clipping’.

Even on a hard-clipped signal, when the level falls below the clipping voltage of the diodes the sound will be clean.

Actually *mixing* clean signal with overdrive is what pedals like the Voodoo Lab Sparkle Drive do, and it certainly does sound terrible into a clean amp.

djspecialist

My current setup is:

H&K Puretone, set clean (I think it might well kill people before it breaks up).

Snouse BlackBox 2, almost always on, for edge-of-breakup to very light crunch depending on guitar volume and touch.  Adds some lovely harmonics while keeping the EQ fairly flat.  The Presence control allows some sparkle to be dialled in, although the Puretone is fairly bright so I keep this low.

In addition to harmonic richness, the BB2 adds a very natural compression.  Playing straight into the Puretone can be ever so slightly unforgiving, but the Snouse smooths everything out, while still allowing just the right amount of bite when you dig in.

ARC Soothsayer.  Low gain mode, classic RAT clipping, gain around 12 o'clock and volume set to slight boost.  Stacking that into the BB2 gives a slight mid boost (helps to cut through the band) and a nice gnarly rhythm tone.

The ARC can get seriously gainy and compressed in high gain mode, but that's not for me personally.

Dr Scientist The Cleanness at the end of the chain.  Volume boost and slight mid push for solos.  Alternatively, turn off the other two and run it after a compressor for clean funky parts.

I've had a fair few drive pedals, and still have a few more - but these three cover a good majority of what I want to do at the moment.

Matt_McG

I have a slightly similar setup, in that I use a fully clean amp sound. For home practice it's a THR10 on the 'Clean' model, and all of the drive comes from pedals. That's partly because I like the 'Clean' model a lot, and partly because I have a Ditto looper on the board, and want to be able to change the sounds pre-looper.

The closest I've come to an always-on sound is a clone of the BJFE/Bearfoot Honey Bee (very similar to the Mad Professor Sweet Honey). it's very responsive to picking dynamics and the guitar volume control, so I set it with the gain around 10 o'clock, which gives me a low-to-mid gain crunch if I hit it hard and will go completely clean, but with a warm edge, with just a slight shift in picking strength. I stack that either into a clone of Skreddy Lunar Module (basically a fuzz/overdrive hybrid, that can also do a big range of levels of gain), or I stack a Zendrive or clean boost into the Honey Bee.

Matt

Matt_McG

That Blackstone Mosfet mentioned above looks really interesting.

solar

Thanks everyone for the replies

timbuk02

I like fat, dark clean sounds and low-gain hairy overdrive. I also like small-tube-amp-on-fire fuzzy blues sounds a la early Black Keys

Have you tried a TC Electronic Mojo Mojo? They get flack for being dark, but are great for that Black Keys-ish kind of territory, where its not about zingy ice picking, more moody grumbling. They are also a bargain now, s/hand and even new.

True what you say about demo's pushing other pedals but not being pushed! To this end I dug out my Mojo Mojo and tried the Spark Booster in front of it, also Neo (germanium) Fuzz. Both worked really well into it, different characters of 'more'. 

Worth saying too - I was listening to it through a lowly Pocket Pod in Jazz Clean setting, and the Mojo Mojo sounded amp-y still, with volume knob clean up and pick dynamics. Whereas when I put my Jfet overdrive (which is normally sounds amazing through the valve amp) into the Pocket Pod it sounded harsh and fizzy. So makes me think the Mojo is potentially solid state friendly.

Not tried it, but another suggestion is DOD Looking Glass. Its got an input impedence control to dial back bright guitars. And this demo Henning describes it as warm round, rounditty, roundy roundness...

Alvin

Another vote for the mojomojo , every thread like this i mention them , most pedals are very amp dependent but the mojo seems to work with everything valve or ss no problem , it's got a good range of crunch - not fizzy .  I don't think it is a dark sounding pedal but what it isn't  is bright/treble , more a neutral balance.  It is the perfect pedal for stacking into , i use it quite often as a last pedal to lower the overall volume   but still get a good usable low sound .    I have never noticed any difference moving the small toggle switch and the bass is always knocked down for me , in fact they could do a simpler version with just the usual volume - gain and treble (call it tone) and it would be just as great .    Perhaps the people who knock them have tried them at a stage volume and don't like them , but for home use they are  perfect .  For £40.00 you really can't go wrong .
     The Mi Audio Blues pro is also very good but not so easy to get hold of .

markv

Have you tried any of the Tech 21 stuff? I'm thinking of the Sansamp in particular.

I have Tech 21 Double Drive which I like as a basic crunch tone into a clean amp. It does a decent range of sounds by itself but I like it in particular when run with a Soul Food in front of it, creating more drive and fattening it up very nicely.

I don't know the rest of the range but I believe that a lot of the Tech 21 gear -Sansamp/Tri-AC etc - is designed to do this. (edit - Tri-AC in the classifieds right now - not mine, just noticed it though)

JMP220478

Suggest a look at the Kingsley pedal range - depending on budget 

http://kingsleyamplifiers.com/products/pedals/