Who gets a high gain sound using a pedal into a clean amp?

tone1

Palmer Solid Metal...it’s built like a tank and is the pedal I’ve had the longest...it does loads more than this demo and sounds ace with single coils...

https://youtu.be/VIwStD7aPL4

Kebabkid

Wampler Pinnacle works great.

OCD if pushed by something like an Xotic EP Booster or stacked with a Tubescreamer-type pedal also works.

Mad Professor One plus you have the added bonus of a reverb

Voxman

Marshall Jackhammer

Voxman

And this is an interesting vid - blind test between amp and pedal distortion

BintyTwanger77

I like a Rat stacked with a Klone.

ICBM

Voxman said:

And this is an interesting vid - blind test between amp and pedal distortion

Excellent .

I got two - the Death Metal and the Jet City, neither of which I liked. I thought the Mega Distortion and the Jackhammer were amps and the DSL and the Dark Terror were pedals . I liked the Mega Distortion and the Dark Terror best, surprisingly. Not really the sort of sound I would ever use though, to be honest.

Dopesick

Amptweaker Fat Metal w/ Digitech Bad Monkey in the fx loop to push it harder, into a Matamp GT1. Can't see me moving away from this set up for a while.

In the past I've also used an MXR Super Badass Distortion with a Pharaoh Fuzz pushing it. Sounded very nice.

gearaddict

tone1 said:

Palmer Solid Metal...it’s built like a tank and is the pedal I’ve had the longest...it does loads more than this demo and sounds ace with single coils...

That looks very much like a EHX Metal Muff...is it a similar circuit?

gearaddict

ICBM said:

Voxman said:

And this is an interesting vid - blind test between amp and pedal distortion

Excellent .

I got two - the Death Metal and the Jet City, neither of which I liked. I thought the Mega Distortion and the Jackhammer were amps and the DSL and the Dark Terror were pedals . I liked the Mega Distortion and the Dark Terror best, surprisingly. Not really the sort of sound I would ever use though, to be honest.

I pretty much got them all right...which is unusual for me with these blind tests! I was a little but unsure between the Jackhammer and the dark terror as to which was pedal and which was amp.

I used to have a Jackhammer and I remember preferring the OD to the Dist but both modes sounded pretty good.

andy1839

Friedman BE-OD set low-ish stacked into a Jrad Archer set for mainly clean boost.
Massive tone into Fender and Marshall type amps. 

Cirrus

gearaddict said:

...and what pedal do you use? Just wondering.

I've always felt that pedals sound like pedals. Overdriving an already crunchy amp sounds great but getting a higher gain sound using just a pedal never seems to sound authentic...or maybe I've not used the right pedal!

Pedals sound like whatever amp circuit their tone is being mangled through. Sometimes they work together, sometimes they don't. My experience has been that vintage-style amps with few gain stages and relatively simple tone circuits work better with distortion pedals than more modern amps that shape the tone a lot more + are designed to generate overdrive across their gain stages. My heaviest sounds this year have been a Bogner Burnley into an AC30. I love that sound, very ballsy and heavy, with relatively tight palm mutes and a great midrange shape. Before that, I was using a Mesa Stiletto and its overdrive and clean sounds were fantastic while pedal distortion sounded a bit pokey/ plasticy and compressed in the mids with no balls. Because the circuit was designed with the expectation that it was going to be generating the distortion, so the early gain stages and filters shape the incoming sound accordingly and that means certain frequency ranges and balances just won't make it intact through the amp.

gearaddict

John_A said

Trude said:

Crunch Box (v1) works fine for me, into a variety of different amps

Great pedals my favourites in to a clean amp, better than a Riot, but not by much, they're great too

Yeah I used a crunch box for ages....can't remember why I moved it on. Probably in favour of a Suhr Riot which I thought sounded very pedal-like but I know people love them. Can't seem to get the crunch box any more, although there's the Mooer Crunched I guess.

juansolo

When I had the Princeton clone I ran a Dominator into it for high gain. For the 18w Marshall-a-like I used a Tight Metal.

Dungus

J Mascis.

Grangousier

DesVegas said:

A rat, pushed by a super fuzz into a clean bandit

I just want to repeat that, as I think it's the best sentence I've read for days. 

(It's like police jargon or something.)

samothy01

Weirdly enough, I’m using a Soul Food with the gain stacked high into a Furry Burrito and it sounds NUTS 

Exorcist

I used to run a modded russian muff into the clean channel of a 100w laney aor and it sounded immense, not how I expected it to sound, more thick distortion than bigmuff/fuzz. I miss that rig.. I boosted it with something, might have been a red lama on low gain. Probably the best gain sound I ever had. It was also insanely loud when it sounded that good.

TTBZ

Christian from Whores uses a variety of fuzz pedals into clean Plexis. Sounds absolutely brutal, I love it. This is all with a tele as well I believe.