Tag: boss

Intro to Pedals Part 4: Pedal boards

By now you’ve probably got a few pedals and have a fair idea of how to power them effectively. Let’s look at how to hook them all up together on a pedal board.

Why Should I Bother?

The point of mounting your pedals on a board is to keep them together in a manner that’s accessible for your feet, portable, doesn’t take up too much space on stage and is lightning fast to set up for a gig. There are a few different ways to do this, but the most common method involves a slotted pedal board specifically angled to keep your power supply and cable runs underneath and out of the way.

You can easily invest a lot of time and money getting it all perfect, but you need not do this to be a “pro”. Consider Eric Johnson’s pedal board for a moment. He has one of the most sought after guitar tones in the world and plays like a beast. When he takes his pedals on tour, they’re taped to a panel of particle board any-which-way, with cable runs all over the place. It’s a hot mess akin to Homer Simpson’s failed BBQ pit, and yet no one could possibly argue that it doesn’t do the job.

Clearly a tidy and efficient pedal board isn’t a pre-requisite for being a pro. Perhaps Eric Johnson is just so damn good that he can successfully work with a rig that looks like a pedal-eating monster threw up on the stage. The rest of us rookies need all the help we can get, so let’s look at how we can get things in order.

The Board

Oddly enough most pedal boards more closely resemble welded together frames than boards. The point of this is to enable you to poke your cable runs underneath and keep them out of the way.

You’ll see some that are raised at the back to angle the whole thing towards the player. This provides better access to the pedals at the back of the board if you have more than one row, and also allows you to secure your power supply underneath.

There are heaps of commercially available pedal boards on the market, catering to a wide range of budgets and rigs. Pedaltrain is one of the more expensive options, but would be considered the industry standard.

Before diving in and buying a pedal board, consider your needs. Lay all your pedals out as they would be on a board, and then measure to see what size board you should get. I’d advise you to go a bit bigger than your current requirements, as two things are almost certain:

  1. They won’t fit on like you think they will
  2. You’re going to get more pedals. Don’t bother arguing with me, we both know it’s going to happen.

If you’re on a tight budget, do a quick search on “Hejne pedalboard” or “Gorm pedalboard”. Ikea makes a shelving unit which used to be called Gorm, but has recently changed name to Hejne. The shelves themselves are sold separately at such a low cost they may as well be free, and there is a long standing tradition of DIY guitarists repurposing these for pedal boards.


Safety Tip:
The floor might seem like an obvious place to work on your pedal board, as that’s where it would normally live. Bear in mind though that assembling a pedal board takes time and requires the use of your hands, not your feet. Use a table or a bench while you’re putting it all together. Your knees and back will thank you for it.

Attaching The Pedals


Velcro/Hook & Loop Tape

You’ll need to attach your pedals to the board somehow, and the most common way is with Velcro. It’s worth noting that when you choose a roll of Velcro to buy, if you see words like “heavy duty” or “extra strength”, this refers to the strength of the adhesive backing. The bond between hook and loop will be pretty much the same no matter what you buy.

The convention here is to put the loop side (the soft, fuzzy side) on your board and the hook side (with the stiff, spikey bits) on the bottom of your pedals. The world won’t end if you do it the other way around, but there are a few good reasons to do this.

  • If you use your pedals off the board, the hook side will provide more traction on carpet
  • Most of the pedal-using community do it this way. If you swap or buy second hand pedals and have the hook side on your board, your newly acquired pedals (also with hook side already on them) won’t stick to your board.
  • Doing it the same way every time means not having to stop and think about which bit goes on the bottom of the pedal every time you buy a new one.

It’s good practice to cover your whole board in Velcro instead of putting little pedal shaped patches down here and there. This gives you the freedom to move your pedals around on the board wherever you want. Also, if you only use a little bit of loop on the board, when you remove the pedal you’ll likely unstick the loop side with it.

You want as much of your board to be covered in Velcro as possible, so cut your strip a bit longer than you need, then trim it back once it’s on your board. This will prevent you from coming up short.

When you put the loop side on your board, peel back only a little bit of the backing paper, stick the small patch of exposed Velcro down and then slowly peel more back, sticking a little bit down at a time. You’ll have a better chance of keeping it straight and not bunching it up or getting bubbles than if you peel all the backing off to begin with and stick the whole thing down in one hit.

When you put the hook side on your pedals you might notice there’s not much room for Velcro. Don’t worry if you can’t cover the whole base of the pedal, a little bit of hook tape will do.

If your pedal has feet or risers preventing it from sitting flat on your board, you can unscrew them and keep them in a safe place. I’ve discovered that the feet of a Cry Baby wah will fit between the slats of a Hejne shelf, so if you use one of those for a pedal board, you don’t have to unscrew the feet off your wah.

Most Boss pedals (and pedals like them) have symmetrical base plates. This means you can take them off and put them back on inside out. The Velcro then goes on a flat surface and the label gets preserved inside the pedal.


Alternatives

If you want something to hold onto your pedals a bit better than Velcro, there are a few other options. The first thing I’d recommend is psychiatric help. Seriously, Velcro is fine. Your pedals won’t fall off, and you can easily swap them out or reposition them without fuss. If you insist on being inconvenienced every time you move a pedal, here are a few other things to look into:


3M Dual Lock

Dual Lock is a lot like Velcro, except instead of a hook side and a loop side, both sides are identical. It’s a network of interlocking mushroom shaped knobs, which when stuck together are almost impossible to separate. Almost. I’ve heard a regular butter knife and an up-to-date lexicon of curse words can help to separate board from pedal when you use this stuff.

I haven’t tested this myself, but apparently if you get a pedal that already has hook side Velcro on it, this will stick to the dual lock on your board as though there was dual lock on the pedal as well. Yet another reason to put the hook side on your pedal and not on your board.


Cable Ties

While using dual lock might seem a bit over the top, it’s something you’ll find professional international touring musicians doing. One of the more ghetto over-the-top solutions is the use of cable ties.

There’s a real art to getting the cable ties on without them getting in the way of jacks or knobs. If it turns out you’ve put your pedal in the wrong spot, you’ll have to cut the ties off, bin them, and start again with new ones. This approach is as neat as it is fun and practical.


Bike Chain

The side of a bike chain link forms a figure 8. One hole of this figure 8 gets screwed up into the base plate of your pedal. The other sticks out to the side so you can screw it down onto your board.

This method brings with it all the joy of disassembling a bike chain and needing to reach for a screw driver and a drill any time you want to move a pedal. On the plus side, those pedals aren’t going to move or fall off your board any time soon, and it can look fairly neat.

Connecting your pedals

Next you’ll need to connect your pedals up to each other. I’d recommend using patch cables instead of solid couplers.


What’s Wrong With Solid Couplers?

For starters, most pedals have their jack sockets in different positions. Those which do actually line up will also tend to have their sides slope in on an angle (the top of pedal is slightly smaller than the base of the pedal). This means that a jack plug is going to extend out of the socket at not-quite-90-degrees. Pedals joined with solid couplers won’t be able to sit flat next to each other. If you make them do so by adhering them to a pedal board, you’ll be applying upwards force on both jack sockets which could lead to them being damaged. A whole lot more force is added every time you step on a pedal to use it.

Connect enough pedals together with solid couplers and they’ll form a circle

Replacing a damaged socket might not be that big of a deal, but if those sockets are mounted directly onto the circuit board, that could get damaged as well. In that case, good-bye pedal.

Even if the sockets line up exactly (they won’t) and you mounted your pedal super securely to the pedal board, stepping on it will still introduce a small amount of movement. It might take longer for damage to happen, but it will happen.

Then there’s these bastards:

These offset or “Z” couplers might seem like a decent work-around. The trouble is that when you apply that downward force, they tend to want to rotate, which is even worse for your pedals.

Using a patch cable instead means the connection between pedals remains flexible, and any movement is isolated to the pedal you’re stepping on.

Some people will tell you they’ve used solid couplers for years and never had a problem. That’s fantastic news for them, but it doesn’t negate everything I’ve said so far. Imagine if your neighbour said they haven’t locked their front door in years and yet they’ve never been robbed. That doesn’t mean it can’t or won’t happen, that it hasn’t happened to other people, or that you should follow their naïve example.


Soldered vs Solderless Patch Cables

You’ll find much debate online about whether you should go for soldered or solderless patch cables. The argument in favour of soldered cables is that a soldered connection is about as secure as it gets, and any solderless solution is going to be a compromise. The argument in favour of solderless cables is that if you’re inexperienced with a soldering iron, your joins are likely to be bad, and a good solderless connection is better than a bad soldered one.

Both points are equally valid, and the decision to buy one over the other comes down to how well you can solder. That’s for you to figure out.

Whichever one you go with, cut your cable a bit longer than you need to make sure there’s enough length to bend around the slats of your board and actually make a connection without being pulled tight. A little bit of slack is good. Besides, you can cut down a cable that’s too long, but if it’s too short it’s useless.

Personally I buy pre-manufactured patch cables. The length might not be 100% what I’m after for every pedal placement, but I can get close enough without having to assemble cables myself. If you take this path, once again just make sure you’ve got enough length.

A quick word on braided cables: These things are great for long cables like the one that you plug into your guitar, or from your pedal board to your amp. They prevent kinks and tangles, and keep your cable relatively straight. With short patch cables though, you want as much flexibility as possible. Getting around the slats on your board and connecting to your pedals requires sharp turns that can’t be made with stiff cables. I’m not sure why short, braided patch cables exist, but they’re not much good for pedal boards.


Cable Direction

Its good practice to have your power cables running 90 degrees to your audio cables, or keep them separated as much as you can. There’s a possibility you’ll encounter noise and interference if you bundle them all up together in the same direction.


Do I Need a Loop Switcher?

The longer the path between your guitar and amp, the more top end you’re likely to lose from your tone. If you have a lot of pedals on your board, even when they’re turned off, the signal path to your amp is considerably longer than if you plugged straight into the amp.

You can get around this by using buffers. Most Boss pedals have buffered bypass, so chances are you already have some buffering in your signal path and don’t need to worry about this.

The other work around is to use a true bypass loop switcher. This will get every pedal completely out of your signal path until you select them on the switcher. If you have more than five or six pedals in your chain, and your signal seems to have lost a noticeable amount of top end, a loop switcher might be worth trying.

The other thing switchers are good for is enabling access. You could have all your pedals routed through the switcher, and then access them from a single neat row of buttons at the front of your board. This greatly cuts down on having to step over a row of pedals to get at the one you want.

Another access benefit of switchers is cutting down on “tap-dancing”. Say you want to change from one sound to another mid song, but doing so requires turning three pedals on at the same time. If those three pedals are in the same loop of your switcher, you need only step on one button to activate all three pedals.

There’s not a lot to consider when buying a loop switcher. Cheaper ones will have cheaper parts, so in theory the switches you step on every time you play could wear sooner than higher quality ones.

A simple switcher could in theory be entirely passive. It’s a mechanical device that re-routes your signal without the need for electricity. You will of course need some small amount of power if you want an indicator LED for each switch. More complicated switchers have digital controls which enable you to program different combinations of pedals to each switch.

One thing few people consider when buying a switcher is how far apart the sockets are on each loop. If your jack plugs are wide, they might not fit side-by-side in a looper with closely positioned sockets. You could fix that by getting patch cables with narrower jack plugs, but it’s something to think about.

That’s all for now

We’ve covered choosing a board, securing your pedals to that board, dealing with patch cables, and looked at whether or not you might benefit from a loop switcher. Next time we’ll look at your signal chain. Deciding what order to hook your pedals up in is a big deal which will have a huge impact on the sound that comes out.

Intro to Pedals Part 2: Choosing Pedals

So you’ve decided that you want more from your guitar sound than what you get when you plug straight into your amp. It’s time to get a pedal or two, but which ones should you be checking out to begin with?

Multi Effects Units

A fairly common way to get an idea of what’s what, is to get hold of a multi effects unit which supposedly has everything in it. It’s significantly cheaper than buying one of every kind of pedal in existence, and side steps having to deal with mounting them to a board, hooking up lots of patch cables and worrying about power requirements.

If you have access to one of these, maybe on loan from someone else or acquired second hand for some freakishly negligible cost, it might be helpful to play with. You can scroll through all the effects while making an awful racket and taking note of which ones you find interesting.

I’ll stop short of recommending you spend significant money on one of these units, or spend a significant amount of time trying to sculpt a usable combination of sounds with one. I would strongly discourage buying a new one at full retail price.

What will inevitably happen is, over time you’ll discover at least 60% of the sounds in that unit are of no interest to you, and those that are happen to be important enough to you that you want a decent quality version of that effect in an individual pedal. I can’t think of a single guitar player who started out with a multi effects unit and went on to use it exclusively throughout their professional career.

Resale value on these things can be punishingly low, so selling it on once you’re done with it seems hardly worth it. This is not where you want to invest the bulk of your gear budget.

Having said all that, many professional musicians do occasionally gig with top quality modelling gear when they’re travelling light or they don’t want to take their expensive vintage equipment to a particular gig. Worthy of note among these are the Line 6 Helix range, and Neural DSP Quad Cortex.

Those aren’t cheap though, and for the same or less money you could buy one of the actual amps or some of the effects that they’re trying to sound like. Why not have the real thing? When you buy modelling equipment you’re paying for access to a vast range of sounds, most of which you’ll never use.

This brings us to the most important question you need to keep in mind when shopping for pedals: “What are the effects I need in order to generate the guitar sounds I want to play?”

Knowing What to Use

Put together a playlist of the kind of music that you’re likely to play on guitar. Listen to what effects the guitarists in those recordings are using. This will be your starting point. I’m going to make a few suggestions here but you don’t necessarily need these pedals to play that music.

Get a Tuner

OK forget what I just said about not needing the pedals I suggest here. Every guitarist needs a tuner, and that means you, too. Pedal tuners are about the most practical on the market. When you consider the alternatives are either rack mounted, headstock/clip on tuners, or a pitch pipe, this just makes sense.

Important things to look for in a tuner are:

  • Accuracy
  • Tracking speed (when you pluck a note, you don’t want to have to wait for the tuner to “find” it)
  • Visibility in different lighting situations (consider dark/low light in a club versus bright sunlight at an outdoor gig)

The TC Electronic Polytune is hugely popular, and for what it’s worth I’m a big fan of the Korg Pitchblack Custom. While the visibility isn’t quite as impressive as the Custom version, the standard Korg Pitchblack performs much the same and costs a fair bit less.

You don’t have to spend a fortune on a multitude of features here, but you only want to have to make this purchase once and be done with it. This isn’t a fun or exciting pedal, and if you cheap out on something that’s a massive compromise, you might find yourself going through the banality of shopping for another one in the not-too-distant future. There’s no such thing as a “beginners tuner” so you might as well make the investment in a proper one straight away.

Your Average Rock Band

Straight away you’re going to need some sort of overdrive, and it’s quite likely you’ll only need one. If you’re going to play the odd lead break, you may want to also invest in a lead boost. That would sort most rock guitarists out, and this is reflected in the amount of “dual overdrives” on the market (essentially an overdrive with a second switch to engage a boost).

It’s not all that uncommon to want to make use of several different gain stages:

  • a light, just-past-edge-of-break-up overdrive
  • a more aggressive, higher gain overdrive
  • a lead boost

Stacking all of those into each other could also approximate a decent full-fat distortion in a pinch.

Your Average Covers Band

Covers bands play a bit of everything, so surely you’re going to have to get the lot, right? Not necessarily.

Assuming your amp already has reverb, you’ll be surprised just how far you can get with a range of different gain stages (see above) and a delay pedal.

Depending on the material you’ll be covering, you may want to get some sort of modulation. Most commonly this will be chorus and tremolo, but occasionally you may need a flanger/phaser/vibrato etc.

If you’re doing 60s rock covers, you’ll want to get a wah pedal, a fuzz, and maybe a uni-vibe.

The Heavy Stuff

If you’re playing heavy music, some kind of distortion is a must. A lot of metal guitarists will achieve this via an amp with a high gain channel. If you take this route, it’s still worth looking at some kind of lead boost. Consider how loud it is when the rest of the band is pummelling out a down-tuned heavy riff at full volume. Your tiny little single note lines don’t stand a chance of being heard in that mix without some kind of assistance.

Stepping on a Tube Screamer or some kind of Tube Screamer derivative at this point would help a great deal. It would tighten up your bottom end, increase your mids, and in doing so raise your most audible frequencies so the audience can hear you. If you crank the level knob you’ll also enjoy a cheeky increase in overall volume. Most lead boosts will operate like this: they’ll likely lift your upper mids and increase your volume.

If you don’t have a high gain amp, you’re going to need a distortion pedal. There are so many types of distortion pedal on the market I could dedicate an entire series of posts just on this topic. I’ll try to give you a quick over view to get you started on your search.

The good old fashioned Boss DS-1 was a go-to pedal in the 80s but is a bit too shrill and spikey sounding for some rigs. Dialling the tone knob all the way back on one of these might get you the exact sound you’re after without spending a whole lot. A Rat might be worth a look if you want something old school but a bit darker and thicker sounding. They’re kind of a cross between a DS-1 and a Fuzz Face.

If sludgy, doomy, fuzz-meets-distortion is what you’re after, check out the world of Big Muffs. There’s a lot of variation between the different Muffs available, so do your research and try a few out.

If you’re chasing a more modern, djenty sound, there’s quite a lot of options. Check out Deizel pedals for starters. This company is renowned for making epic sounding high gain amps, and they’ve done a decent job of capturing that distortion sound in their pedals.

James Brown (no, not that one, the guy responsible for the design of the Peavey 5150) now has a pedal company by the name of Amptweaker. His distortion pedals are next-level awesome. The MXR 5150 overdrive pedal is geared towards the distortion sound of that amp, and like the Amptweaker stuff, comes with a built in noise gate.

Music hasn’t sounded quite the same since either of these two guys came along.

If you’re looking to spend a little less, there’s the Hotone Djent. It looks like a toy but sounds like the business.

Conclusion

These are all just broad suggestions on where to start if you’re not sure. Whatever you run with for your first pedals, get cheap ones to start with.

Yes, I would discourage spending good money on a multi effects unit to try it all out, on the basis that you’ll probably move on from it and not get your money back. I will however encourage you to take a similar approach with a handful of cheap pedals instead. You might experience a few less effects, but you lose less money and focus on the more relevant pedals to your playing style.

While you figure out what flavour of overdrive or fuzz or distortion etc you’re into, you’re going to swap out and trade your way through a whole bunch of pedals. Better to do that with cheap ones first of all. Even if you start with expensive pedals, you can still be almost certain you’ll end up moving them on at a loss once you refine your tonal tastes.

Here’s how I’d recommend the commencement of your pedal journey:

  • Listen closely to recordings of the genre of music you’d like to play
  • Take note of the effects involved
  • Buy some cheap versions of those effects
  • Once you know what sort of sounds you like, have a look at which pedals on the market do a top notch version of that sound within your budget

Just a word of warning: once you start experimenting with pedals, it’s a slippery slope towards full blown pedal addiction. You’ll quickly find all sorts of pathetic excuses to spend more than you should on just one more pedal. Always keep in mind what you’re trying to achieve with your tone before you browse for pedals, and likewise keep a close eye on your budget. You have been warned.

Once you’ve got a handful of pedals you’ll be wanting to hook them all up in a practical and portable manner. In my next post I’ll be exploring all the non-pedal parts of your floor based gear: pedal boards, patch leads, power requirements, and other stuff you could potentially lose a heap of money on through buying the wrong gear or cutting costs in the wrong area. This post will cover all the hidden expenses we forget about while lusting after the gear that makes cool sounds.

Know Your Dirt

In the world of high gain guitar sounds we have boost, overdrive, distortion, and fuzz.

Boost can add a little gain and EQ shaping with a bit of a kick in volume.

Overdrive was born from the sound of an amp literally being driven too hard. This term could cover anything from an almost clean edge-of-break-up sound, to a cranked Marshall sound.

Distortion is a bit like overdrive on steroids, with more aggressive clipping and more compression.

Fuzz is a different thing altogether. This is where we encounter some of the harshest “square wave” clipping available.

Then there’s the grey area where these overlap. When these sounds were initially discovered there were no clear distinctions between them. Some boosts creep into overdrive territory. Some overdrives could just as easily be described as distortion, or dialed back and used as a boost. There are at least a handful of pedals around where internet debates continue to rage over whether they’re distortion or fuzz.


Overdrive Pedal Types

The number of overdrive pedals on the market right now is staggering. If you took one of each model and piled them on top of each other, you could use it as a bridge to Mars and save Elon Musk a lot of bother.

Mercifully though, many of them fall into categories which help when you’re comparing them to decide what you’re after. Let’s take a look at a few.


Tube Screamers
Ibanez brought out the tube screamer as an overdrive pedal designed not so much to bring all the crunch on its own, but to push the front end of a tube amp into its own overdrive. It dumps your bottom end and cranks your mid range right up, with some mild clipping for good measure.

Some folks use these after their regular overdrive or distortion as a lead boost. Others use it before their distortion to clean up an otherwise boomy bottom end. You’ll often see these in front of a Peavey 5150/6505 or Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier in metal bands for this reason.

  • First there was the TS808 described above (and the small version, the Tube Screamer Mini).
  • Then the TS9, a bit brighter and harsher sounding, and arguably more aggressive.
  • The TS9DX which was a TS9 with more settings, including one which leaves the bottom end in tact.
  • The TS10, which by all accounts seems to be a cheaply made TS9, maybe with a smidge more gain on offer.


…then everyone copied it with their own little touches here and there:

  • Behringer has a dirt cheap clone with the exact same circuit as the TS808, but in a cheap plastic housing.
  • Also at the budget end of the spectrum is the Mooer Green Mile.
  • JHS have artfully captured every variation of the originals from TS808 to TS10 plus a few others in their “Bonsai” pedal.

Nearly every pedal manufacturer out there has their own version of a Tube Screamer, so if you need to tighten your bottom end and push your mids, you have a lot of options open to you.


Blues Breaker
In 1966 John Mayall and the Blues Breakers recorded what became known as “the Beano Album”. Eric Clapton’s guitar sound on that album was obtained by way of a Marshall 1962 combo amp (JTM45) with everything cranked up to 11. That album made blues history, and so did Clapton’s tone. The amp went on to be nick-named the “Blues Breaker” as a result.

A pivotal moment in blues guitar history

Skip forward to the early 90s and Marshall brings out an overdrive pedal based on that sound, this time officially called the Blues Breaker. It provided a mild, transparent overdrive, with a healthy amount of top end and just enough break-up to turn heads.

Two things drove the popularity of this pedal through the roof:

  1. It soon went out of production
  2. It was spotted on John Mayer’s pedal board around the time he started to become a household name

Since then, many pedal manufacturers have produced “Blues Breaker style” pedals. These pedals typically use the original as a starting point but then add their own subtle spin on it.

The first and most notorious was Analogue Man’s “King of Tone“. It brings a little bit more gain than the original and is essentially two of the same overdrive pedals in the one enclosure. This allows you to experiment with gain stacking and boosting one with the other. The single pedal version is called the Prince of Tone. If you don’t want to join the 2-3 year waiting list for a new King of Tone, and don’t want to pay collector’s prices for a second hand one, there’s always budget clones to consider.

Other Blues Breaker style pedals include the JHS Morning Glory, Pantheon by Wampler, and 1962 by Keeley.


Klon Centaur
Between 1990 and 1994 around 8000 hand built Klon Centaurs were sold. They were so highly sought after that since being discontinued, some have been selling for thousands of dollars.

The Klon is one of the most versatile drives around. It gives a slight upper mid boost, but for the most part just adds gain without touching your tone. At low gain settings it can act as a clean boost. Wind up the treble knob and we’re heading towards treble booster territory. Of course, wind the gain up and magic happens.

Klons differ from Tube Screamers in that they don’t roll off your bottom end, have higher headroom, and don’t compress as much. Their mid boost is a higher mid frequency than the one that Tube Screamers boost.

Another run of these pedals was released in 2014 under the name “KTR”. Printed on the front of these are the words “Kindly remember: the ridiculous hype that offends so many is not of my making”.

There are more clones of this pedal (or Klones as they’re affectionately known) than any other.

At the budget end of the spectrum we have:
Mosky Golden Horse
Caline Pegasus
Joyo Tauren

Electro-Harmonix Soul Food is at the pricier end of the budget list, but quite popular.

J Rocket Archer and Wampler Tumnus are among the most respected Klon style pedals. Wampler also has the Tumnus Deluxe which includes bass, mid, and treble controls.

The Ryra “Klone” is considered an almost immaculate part-for-part clone of the original.


So now if you hear someone talking about a Tube Screamer type, Blues Breaker type, or Klon type overdrive, you know what they’re talking about.


A few other worthy mentions:

The Boss BD-2 Blues Driver is a simple, decent sounding, full frequency overdrive that stacks well with others. It’s inexpensive and doesn’t attract a lot of hype, but is well respected and gets the job done.

The Fulltone OCD has become a bit of an institution. While most pedals will have a few useful sounds at different points along the sweep of their gain knob, the OCD sounds great across its whole range. It can go from a subtle dirty boost all the way through to aggressive distortion. Version 1 of these had a somewhat mid-pushed sound; the versions that came after it are a little mid-scooped.


Classic Distortion Pedals

The Boss DS-1 was one of the first widely adopted distortion pedals on the market. It’s pretty much remained a staple on pedal boards since then. Like the BD-2, it’s inexpensive, well regarded, and gets the job done. The top end is a bit harsh for some rigs, so you might need to turn the tone down to get a good sound out of it.

The Boss HM-2, dubbed “The Swedish Chainsaw”, was a key part of the guitar sound for bands like Entombed and At the Gates. The way it handles bottom end makes it perfect for low tunings. The odd thing about this pedal is that it has a massive dead spot on the gain knob between 3 and 8 o’clock. That didn’t seem to matter to those on the Swedish metal scene, as they only used one classic setting: every knob all the way up.

They’re out of production now* and fetch a somewhat elevated price second hand, as their appeal has never died off. Luckily there are a few decent modern adaptions available like the Walrus Audio “Red” and the Lone Wolf Audio “Left Hand Wrath”. Of course, where there’s an old Boss pedal there’s usually a cheap Behringer clone of it. Not to disappoint, Behringer has the HM300 with a more pronounced mid range.

*Update: Boss has just released a “Waza Craft” version of this pedal. Well worth checking out.

No discussion of distortion pedals would be complete without mentioning the fabled Metal Zone. The Boss MT-2 is probably the most mocked and maligned pedal ever to hit the market. It features

  1. Such a high noise floor it’s practically unusable
  2. A gain knob that goes from “gee that’s a lot of gain” at zero to “no one could possibly use this much gain” at around the half way point.
  3. A ridiculously broad range of overly sensitive EQ controls that make it incredibly easy to dial in a terrible tone, and a major project to find a good one (which the slightest bump will change back to a crap one)
  4. As an added bonus at no extra charge, the social stigma of being spotted with one on your pedal board.
Visual representation of the sound of the Boss MT-2

Still, whether for irony, comedy, or perhaps *cough* different *cough* tastes, some folks still go after these. Apparently they don’t sound as bad if you put them through your effects loop. I’m not convinced.

In the confusing cross-over department:
There’s the Pro Co Rat, which sounds like a really aggressive distortion pedal, but is actually a fuzz circuit.

The Big Muff, which gets used interchangeably as a fuzz or distortion but is in fact neither. Accurately speaking, a Big Muff can only truly be classified as a Big Muff. Probably the most accurate description I’ve ever heard was “think of it as the noisiest compressor you’ve ever heard and go from there.”

Just like they’ve done with Tube Screamer sounds in the Bonsai, JHS have collected just about every variation on the Big Muff there ever was and crammed it into one pedal: The Muffuletta.

Fuzz

In the world of classic fuzz there is the Tone Bender and the Fuzz Face, with both spawning endless clones, tributes and adaptations. The Tone Bender has more pronounced mids and treble (great for cutting through the mix), while the Fuzz Face is known for its earth-shattering fat bottom end, amply demonstrated by Jimi Hendrix.

There are almost as many varieties of fuzz pedals on the market as there are overdrives. Combining fuzz with octave is a fairly classic one. For reference, check out the MXR Octave Fuzz.

JHS have released their version of re-issues of 4 classic fuzz pedals with their “Legends of Fuzz” line. Check out the Fuzz Face inspired Smiley, the Tone Bender inspired Bender, the Big Muff inspired Crimson, and the Univox Octave Fuzz inspired Supreme.

A quick word about transistors in fuzz pedals:
Fuzz circuits that utilise germanium transistors can sound like a million bucks, until you expose them to hot conditions which make them sound like rubbish. Silicon transistors are more consistent and aren’t affected by heat, but aren’t held in as high regard by tone purists. Honestly though, if you plug into a silicon Fuzz Face and don’t get a killer tone, I wouldn’t go blaming the silicon.

Enough for now!

That’s probably way too much information for a single blog post, but hopefully it’ll provide a good starting point for anyone trying to make sense of high gain pedals.