pedal stack revelation and a question

relic245

The dirt on my board is wired as follows.

TS909 (clone) -> Blackstar Dist -> SHO (clone) -> SHO (clone) 

I use the TS for low drive tones, the BS for medium high gain then the 2 boosts are set at different levels, one to give enough boost for solos on either gain setting and the other to give just a little lift for when the drummer goes mental in some songs.

I've been getting very bored with the ts sound and have been thinking about changing it. Tthis morning I've found that the BS on low gain is exactly the sound I've been wanting to get - then I hit the ts and with a bit of tweaking it gave me the higher gain sound I was looking for too -  so win. 

But, when I hit the ts I don't really get any volume lift and not sure if the higher gain will cut through as I used to have it quite a bit louder than the low gain one, I'm not sure if this is because the ts is a clone and i've always thought it doesn't have as much volume on tap as I would have expected or just that I'm not going to get any more volume this way.

One solution is to use one of the boosts for my higher gain sound in conjunction with the ts, as it comes after the BS then I'm getting the volume lift without any extra dirt. I don't know much about loopers so is there such a thing that will switch in 2 pedals, one after and one before the BS or is that just overkill? it's going to be quite a pain if I want to hit both pedals each time that I go to higher gain.

Cirrus

A couple of points

- Firstly, not surprised you weren't really feeling the TS as low gain sound method. It works for some, but to my ears TS type overdrive is midrangey and compressed, which to me is a character that doesn't make sense when the amp it's going into isn't overdriving - it ends up sounding smaller than the clean sound. To me it typically only makes sense as a tone shaper into something else that's distorting.

That's why I like my low gain overdrives to be full range. Presumably, that's more what you're getting from the Blackstar.

- The relative volume of your different sounds is a very hard thing to get right. I find it best just to keep things as simple as possible - Adjust clean tone to desired volume, then go through each pedal in turn setting it to get the relative volume you desire. If you've got two boosts, I'd personally set the TS and Blackstar to a reasonable volume relative to the cleans, and just use the two boosts after to give you three basic volume levels.

steamabacus

You could definitely do that with one of the more advanced loopers like the GigRig ones. You can set up 'patches' for each footswitch and decide with pedals are active (as each pedal is in it's own separate loop).

The GigRigs are pricey, but you may be able to find something similar but cheaper, maybe from Mooer or JoYo?

ICBM

Try it with the band before you assume that the TS>HT sound won't cut through. You might be surprised - the midrange kick from the TS tends to focus the sound and make it sound louder in a mix even when the 'amp' (HT pedal in your case) is fairly overdriven... or at least it does with my Mesa.

You could build a simple dual-looper like you want though, if it proves not to be. You don't really need to worry about true bypass switching since the TS buffer will have a very high input impedance and the SHO is even higher and is being driven by the buffered output of the HT. If the TS is an unbuffered clone you might want to do that true-bypass, but you can do that with a 3PDt footswitch and still have one pole left over for switching the output of the SHO.

relic245

Well it certainly did cut through. In fact it was even better than I'd hoped and everything interacted differently through my artisan than it did through my ht5 at home. The ts easily gave enough volume and more.

Before I used a slightly overdriven sound on the amp so that the ts wasn't going into a clean amp but last night I set the amp clean so for the first time I had really nice dynamic cleans. The HT seems to like a clean amp much better which I guess makes sense so that cut through nicely and as ICBM suggested kicking in the ts still cut through nicely it's the best higher gain sound I've had through this rig so lots of wins. The only slight downside is that to go from clean to high gain takes 2 pedals and a bit of tap dancing. Its not too much of a problem I think I only do that twice in the set.

So this went from a few weeks ago wanting to get rid of the ht and ts because they weren't doing what I wanted to feeling like I have a  completely new board and sound. Maybe there's a moral here - before I rush in and sell gear see if there is another way I could be using it.

ICBM

You probably won't like me saying this but what you need is an HT-Dual .

It's actually quite like having an HT-Dist and a TS in the same box*, and you can switch from any sound to either of the others with one footswitch press. You do get a bit less control though, it's got a separate gain and volume control for the higher gain sound but no tone control like the TS does.

Both the HT-Dist and the HT-Dual do like a clean amp much better, yes - even if you're not using the emulated out, the pedal is much more like a full preamp than an overdrive/distortion pedal.

(*The circuit is almost literally like this, there's a main valve overdrive part which operates on both channels and a sort of 'TS-like' boost section which is switched in on channel 2. It wouldn't be quite the same sound as you have now though since the HT-Dist is like channel 2 - ie with the 'TS' switched in - not like channel 1.)

ThePrettyDamned

If the ts is before the ht pedal, the volume on the ts won't work properly - or rather, it will, but will be affected by the volume setting on the ht pedal. Think of boosting a signal from the ts pedal, then it hits the ht which you've set to balance the volume with the clean channel - it'll be a bit quieter than the ts on its own.

That said, icbm has the right of it. You night find that, even though switching the ts on doesn't give the volume boost, it will boost the mid range enough to cut through. If it doesn't, and you need a little extra volume, a sho or other clean boost after the ht will do this, taking the smaller signal and making it bigger. That's my simple logic.

On my set up, I like to use a maxed out ts going into a Marshall guvnor, then use the volume on the guvnor to balance the output... If that makes sense.

relic245

ah yes an ht dual

That is what I originally wanted but the dist came up in a trade so I went with that. I'm not going to change it at the moment, other financial commitments mean I'm on a no spend on music gear period.

That said I'm pretty sure I can learn the required tap dance easy enough, in one of our other songs I used to switch on a ts and a phaser for a very short passage then off again and they were at opposite ends of the board. At least the ts and the ht are next to each other.

steamabacus

You could put both the TS and the HT-Dist in a simple true-bypass looper (cheap, or even pretty easy to make yourself). That way, you could switch them both in via the looper and go from clean to high gain in a single stomp.

Moltisanti

i ran my Splawn last week with a crunch tone, then hit it with the Bad Monkey to get some more gain, then a BOSS GE7 and holy fuck it was the filthiest high gain metal sound i've ever heard, but still totally dynamic and clear, just aggressive and punchy as hell