I use my bass amp for guitar practice at home, because I’m primarily a bass player and it works well enough. I’m currently using a Harley Benton Drop Kick for distortion plus a 7-band EQ which gets me a decent enough sound, but I’m looking for more variety. Especially something high gainy for a modern-ish metal riff tone. My current setup is unsurprisingly pretty good at stoner/desert rock stuff, though the amp is not nearly as dark as you’d think.
My guitar is a Yamaha Pacifica with a bridge humbucker, currently tuned to C standard, amp is a Fender Rumble 25, older version.
Anyone have an idea what would work well here? Maybe a Boss MT-2 or clone thereof? I read it’s decent if you use the effects loop to skip the amp’s preamp section (my amp does have an effects loop), but I’m not quite sure if it’s the right pick for the kind of unconventional setup I have, or if it would even be a good choice for modern metal tone even if I did use a guitar amp. I’m trying to keep the budget reasonable, btw, so please no boutique pedals.
I could get a proper guitar amp, but space is a bit limited here and bedroom-sized combos don’t usually do a great high gain sound on their own, anyway.
I run my Peavey MH6505 extremely mild (considering what it’s capable of) because I play some twinkly emo stuff a lot but I have an Ibanez Tube Screamer in front and with compression and noise gate it’s honestly as close to production metal album tone I’ve ever heard in person. Tube screamer is pretty cheap, relatively speaking, too.
If you don’t have a lot of disposable income look at joyo clones. They’re cheap and sound fantastic, I’ve had high end hand made pedals that don’t hold a candle.
I’d say some high end pedals are extremely overrated. Don’t be scared of the affordable ones.
I’m the last person to scoff at pedal clones. But what pedal should I buy a clone of?
The JF 04 possibly, I have the crunch distortion which I think it’s JF 02. The crunch distortion is definitely more of a vintage vibe.
There are also far more clone pedals I think tone city is one of them ? in any case if you find a really nice sounding pedal online in a review there almost certainly is a clone.
Maybe the R-17 too
If space is limited more than budget, maybe something like an HX stomp? That would let you explore lots of sonic landscape in a very compact package. But otherwise I was gonna say maybe something like a green russian style muff, which you could use on either your bass or guitar.
I’m reminded of the Old Dirty Bastard that melvins guitarist Buzz Osborne used in the early 2000s
if you have any bass pedals don’t be shy about throwing them on your guitar and seeing what happens.
That being said I have one and I’m still on the lookout for something that doesn’t feel like it’s just a distinctly separate layer of fuzz/distortion on top of a clean signal because even though it distorts at 2 o’clock it’s supposed to be an overdrive.
I’m probably looking at a rat clone in all honesty.
I happen to have that exact pedal! It’s really good for bass, but it didn’t impress me on guitar; the sound is kind of harsh and lacking in mids when used for high gain, especially when you’re not blending in the clean signal (which rarely makes sense for guitar). Maybe worth trying again when I’m going for a more low gain, overdrive sound, but I prefer fuzz for that. I really like fuzz guitar, but I rarely play music where it actually makes sense to use it.
use it as a clean boost to drive the Drop Kick, along with the EQ. good chance you have more than enough gain lying around to overload that thing until it screams.
and at the end of the day you can always buy the sound you want, but do you really want to chase tone on a practice amp? any new pedals could be money towards a more appropriate amp.
In this case, I’m short on space, not money.
in that case the answer is in the question :)
you won’t regret picking up a Boss MT-2, and boss pedals hold their value.
I’ll also just add I have a Blackstar id core v4 and have never thought a bedroom sized amp couldn’t do high gain. Unless you need your ears to be bleeding to know it’s high …
… and being able to kick it into 1W mode to drop the volume but keep the gain is pretty freakin’ solid, I wouldn’t exactly call it a neutral pedal platform though, so there’s that trade off.
This may help, though the general consensus is that low volume (eg running whatever amp at low volume, not necessarily having a big loud amp) won’t give you very nice sounding/feeling distortion. The received wisdom seems to be, for low volumes a cheap amp sim/modeller is the best sounding option, which often comes with a bunch of drives/effects built in.
I’d assume that the volume issue doesn’t really come up when your amp is running completely clean (as clean as any amplifier and cab can run, anyway).
Preamp-style pedals might indeed be a better option than regular distortion pedals, but I haven’t had the greatest experience with the amp sims and distortion effects in cheap multieffects units. Granted, I got them for bass and only tested them with bass, but while most effects sounded fine to me the distortions and overdriven amp sims all sounded really bad. Maybe that’s just the Zoom brand, though.
So YouTube did the thing, and showed me this today - seems interesting, and cheap https://youtu.be/utzkwr6Scnk
I’ve really not enjoyed Zoom’s drive models, I played a Line 6 job a bit ago that impressed me, an HX One I think. All the models are the same as their flagship units iirc, and it was less than £200 second hand. That’s not stupidly cheap I know but it’s quite a lot for the money I think
If you hook them up to an oscilloscope and look at the waveforms there is not much to all of it. All distortion is just how badly messed up you want the sound. You can build the circuits. I’ve made several in the past. Germanium diodes create more tube like gradual clipping. LEDs and silicon diodes are fairly similar. The rest is pretty simple. A jfet buffer on the initial stage will help pick up more initial tone. The rest is just a couple of op amps for buffering and frequency filtering.
The easiest way to mess with the stuff is actually to get an old home theater powered sub and reverse engineer the active filter. Adding effects in place of the frequency filter is a great way to learn. Any sub is basically a guitar amp. There is no real difference in practice. In fact, the amplifier circuit and power is usually better than entry level guitar junk. Like I have a fender amp someone tossed that has a single TDA2030 chip on a 12 inch driver. That is a joke $0.80 chip. I have a cheesy junk RCA 5.1 channel computer surround sound system someone junked that is made of 6 of these TDA2030 chips, and that was junky as fuck. I’ve seen crap home theater sub amps with much much higher end chips.
