Rediscovery of Distortion Pedals

If you've read my posts from late last year you'd know that I was working on converting my old tin shed into a studio & workshop.

Now I wasn't exactly flush with cash for this project and had to make do with what I had available to me. My studio is divided into two parts. 

A gear room and a recording booth.

The booth works fairly well. Nobody can hear my dodgy acoustic guitar playing or my lousy singing outside of the shed.

Even playing electric guitar I can get a decent tone to "tape" for clean sounds. But the problem I have is that if I want distortion from the output tubes (my favourite kind) I can only really do that during the day, even with my 5 watt amps.

I know for a fact that it can't be heard in my own home, which is just about the same distance as my closest neighbours to the recording room. So in theory I could play as loud as I want inside with the gear that I have, but I just don't feel comfortable with it.

The obvious thing to do of course, was use distortion pedals and turn the volume down. Sure, its obvious now, but I didn't even consider it until now.

I have several distortions and fuzzes, but I think maybe that I was a little prejudiced toward achieving my favourite tone.

So last night I had a hankering for a wee bit of grit and decided to fire up my pedal board.

I stuck to overdrive types for this session.

The ones that I had on hand are as follows:

• Digitech Bad Monkey
• Tech 21 Sansamp GT2
• Boss Combo Drive

The Bad Monkey has been in my collection from way back.

Its a nice simple pedal that is kind of a Tube Screamer clone.

The results were pleasant and ranged between a little grit to nice full overdrive, which is great for chunking out the power chords.

The Sansamp is one that I had never used with a guitar amp(only direct). I know, ridiculous right?

It was excellent.

Each setting was really usable and not at all fizzy.

Lots of versatility and had a great gentle overdrive, but was not quite the death metal machine that I thought it would be on the high gain settings. Not that it really matters. I haven't played that sort of stuff since 1996.

The Combo Drive is really quite effective at generating Vox-like tones and as I've stated in an earlier article, goes from clean to seriously metal. Its a great little pedal for those looking for a tone change, without the massive investment. They're quite cheap at the moment too.

I felt like a kid in a toy store. Rediscovering distortion was something that I needed to do. Hopefully I'll actually be proactive with making music.

2012 - Sansamp GT2 - First impression.

I scored a GT2 this week for a really good price. I'd been humming & hawing about getting one for ages, but since they're usually more than $200AUD for a second hand one, I was reluctant as I do have a few adequate amp & speaker modelers (Bad Monkey, Condor Cab Sim, Digiverb, VT Bass).

I got mine nice and cheap and have only had a little while to play with it so far, but already there are things I do and don't like.

Here are the basics:
3 amp settings (Tweed (Bassman), British (Marshall), California (Boogie).
3 "mod settings" Clean, Hi Gain & hotwired.
3 mic settings Classic (flat), Center (mids), off axis (lower mids)

First off the amp settings appear to have different gain and eq structures, the Tweed being the lowest gain and the California being the highest. The tweed has the lowest bottom end and the others are fairly similar in my first test.

The mod settings appear to be a little misleading, as the "clean" setting doesn't mean clean tone, but actually means "stock" or "unmodded". I have read on other websites that the Sansamp is not capable of a clean boost, this was not my experience. When set for Tweed, Clean & Classic, I was able to get a really nice Fenderesqe clean tone with my Goldtone PB-GRE. As mentioned in my previous blog article, this guitar has a fairly low output and is likely biasing my experience.

The tone of the settings I've described is sparkly top with a nice thick bottom. I did notice a bit of noise (hiss), but that might be due to a flat battery, or that I'd cranked the gain. After fiddling with the knobs (they're old and a bit crackly) I was able to tame the noise and stop my mixer from overloading.

Speaking of overloading, this and the VT bass have some serious power in the output department.
It can be tricky to track down the culprit when your mixer clip light isn't triggered and there's unwanted distortion somewhere. I'm not 100% on this, but I think that the Sansamp series might actually be able to clip their own output stage.

So far I'm not convinced that the high gain models are up to the job of direct recording without some intermediary speaker cab filter. They can be somewhat fizzy, but it's also possible that the low output pickup just doesn't play well with those settings and I need to use a guitar with a humbucker or at the least high output single coil, like a P90 or a Mosrite.

I'm pretty happy with the clean tone and look forward to spending more time with the unit.

Stay tuned.

2011 - Initial Pedal Reviews

I've got my hands on two pretty nifty pedals recently, I was a bit dubious of their claims, but it turns out they're quite pleasing to the ear.

The pedals I'm talking about are the Tech 21 VT Bass and the Boss BC-2 Combo Drive. I have been after a decent bass sound for years, but only play occasionally and have no desire for an amp. I've played around with a couple of VST plugins that emulate some well known bass amps, but have never really been satisfied with anything aside from the clean tones.

I'd been looking at a bunch of solutions for going direct, including the Digitech Bass Squeeze, as it has speaker modeling. Unfortunately I couldn't find one in store anywhere, so I never got it.

I'd been impressed by the Sansamp products in the past, so I decided to find out what was available these days. This is how I came across the VT Bass. Demos of the clean sound were scarce, but the reviews were glowing. I figured that if I found one at a reasonable price, it would be mine. I have to say, I wasn't disappointed. As soon as I plugged it in, I was greeted by a thick warm sounding bass. I fiddled about with the settings card and got some nice tones, though all were dirty.

The sound that I was after was the sound of an Ampeg SVT fridge setup. Low and clean and huge.
Tech 21's pedal really delivers in this regard. I get what I want, without spending $4000 on an amp.
Sure it's not a magic box, but it gets me the tone that I want without much fuss or an eviction notice.

Since I have to do most of my guitar playing with headphones I have been messing around with direct solutions for years. The Digitech Bad Monkey is consistently the last item in the signal chain before the mixer.
I like the tone of the built in cabinet simulator. The only down side is that the bad monkey doesn't do clean, even on the lowest setting. I'd seen that the Boss BC-2 had just been released in Oz and was pretty cheap.
The demo video below sounded pretty good so I picked it up on a whim. Got it home and was able to mess with it for about an hour. Combined with the Bad Monkey it's quite dark sounding compared tot he sound in the video and as such it doesn't exactly sound like the Beatles, but it does a nice clean boost on one side and really heavy distortion on the other. The EQ is nice and makes up for the lack of bottom end in my Surfcaster.

My favourite setting was with the Treble on max, Bass at 75% and the "sound" at 25%. This allows for some grit when picking really hard or nice thick clean when playing gently. I even plugged  it into my Fender Princeton and found that there was something missing when switched off.

I hope to get some demos recorded soon, but my computer is in need of a rebuild as it's spitting the dummy every time I try to get some sound on disc. Meanwhile, check out the videos from Youtube.