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Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Aside from a low volume quick play when I first buy a drive pedal, they never get a look in since the drive channels on my amps have been "my sound" for over 20 years.
More variety of flavours of drive.
Easier control and if like me you've had to use a lot of borrowed amps, a more predictable, consistent sound. I also find amp drive is very often too compressed.
For classic rock, big dirty "All Right Now" type chords and Van Halen type chords with major, minor thirds pure valve amp dirt is generally the winner, you can hear the notes in the chords where as diode clipping pedal dirt tends to mush up with anything other than a root with a fifth
For blues, indie rock and a lot of other stuff pedal dirt is fine and for single note solo's pedals can give some epic tones
"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 are mostly use pedals, my AC30 is clean or at best on a louder than usual gig just gritting up slightly. A good clean valve amp plus your preferred flavour of pedal is just so good sounding an so easy. I tend to use a Dano TOD (mk1 so basically a Timmy clone) or occasionally a Boss OD-3...and I cascade that with another OD pedal for solos....which at the moment is the Caline Pure Sky (another Timmy clone). Or i'll kick in my Wampler Pinnacle Deluxe on top of the 1st OD pedal. I have great feedback on tap, I use the guitars volume a lot to control the sound and it always makes me smile the sounds I get out of my rig during gigs.
Now, that all said....the other guitarist in my band uses a TSL601 for all his dirt needs, and whilst I'm fully aware this isn't considered a great amp - it still sounds good to me from the opposite side of the stage when I hear his guitar in the bands mix. And same with my DSL50 when I use that for its drive sound (occasionally but as I said usually pedals > clean amp) I always notice the drive you get from a valve amp is thicker than any pedal. There also seems there's a rawness to it that sounds great in a band mix And I mean 100% of the time....it seems valve preamp dirt just adds some thickness/harmonics that no transistor pedal ever does. Just it seems less fluid than a pedal unless your really cooking at high volume. So ideally I'd want both at the same time...that's where the old OD in front of a dirty amp comes in. One thing I notice is with pedals stacked getting nice controllable feedback is a really easy thing to do....the other guitarist in my band - well, I've never heard him get any feedback at all yet.....I don't think he can do it quite as easily without something hitting the front of his amp a bit more than just his guitars signal. Course its definitely possible with enough volume and perhaps facing towards the amp but with stacked pedals you don't need to do any of that at all its just always there when you want it wherever onstage you are..
I also freely admit I seem to have cloth ears and probably could not tell the difference in a blind test.
I got two out of six...
"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 got 4 out of 6. I thought it was :-
#1 pedal
#2 amp
#3 pedal
#4 amp
#5 amp
#6 pedal
I almost never use my drive pedals these days, only really for playing in the house quietly at night, If I can play loud the the amps just sound much better
In general I find dirt pedals sound fine on recordings and can be difficult to distinguish from amp dirt—whereas playing through them, there’s usually a clear difference versus amps.
There are very few pedals I can tolerate.
But there are far too many moving targets. The amps can all be set in different ways, they all react differently to input signals, same with the pedals, and as guitarists it's a dereliction of duty if we don't react to the sound we're hearing and modulate out playing to adjust the sound coming out the speaker in real time.
I think in general amp distortion feels more dynamic and reactive to how you play, and as such a single good setting on an amp will cover more ground through different songs, with different guitars and with different playing styles. A pedal will typically be more fussy - it might be great for one song or one guitar but then you end up fighting it for a different song.
Part of it is just where the distortion is occuring in the signal chain. If you think of an amp as a half dozen or so seperate stages which shape the tone, compress or remove certain frequencies and generate harmonics, a pedal generating the distortion that then has to feed through all those stages in the amp is going to give a different result than if you feed a clean signal in and then gradually generate distortion across those amp stages. For one thing, if your amp filters out low end in the early stages then you'll never get a tone as big as if you crank the amp up and get your distortion *after* those early stages.
Likewise, if your amp has a bright cap on the first gain knob, whether you're generating your distortion before or after the bright cap will have a fundamental effect on the range of sounds you can achieve.
So a lot of the difference between amps and pedals are just down to the practicalities of where they sit in the chain - it's impossible to compare them like-for-like.
Personally, I like pedals. They're more compressed, generally have more focused midrange, and they can kick the amp they're plugged into in fun ways. But that's just for the kind of music I play, and where I want the guitar to sit in the mix. It's also through an AC30, which has relatively few gain stages and quite an open tone, and I mod them so the bright cap works for me rather than against me in terms of not generating fizzies. The periods where I've used more modern amps with more gain stages or more tone shaping, I've preferred amp gain because the pedal tone gets squashed and mangled by the amp too much by the time it's coming out the speakers.
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