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 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.