Orange TH-30 clean channel and pedals.

gearaddict

Mostly I never touch the clean channel of my TH-30 but recently I have been trying to use it to get a different flavour of distortion, using pedals...and it seems like every pedal I try sounds awful through this channel. Thin and weedy and nasal. Just not nice.

Anyone else found dirt pedals that sound good into this channel? It's a bit of a waste of space tbh...unless you want thunderously loud pristine cleans. I think I read it was based on the Rockerverb, revoiced for EL84s, but I don't know how true that is.

timmysoft

I toured with the clean channel and an unmodded Boss ds-1! Sounded fat! 

gearaddict

timmysoft said:

I toured with the clean channel and an unmodded Boss ds-1! Sounded fat! 

Really? Hmm...was that with the TH30 or the Rockerverb?

I remember this from a few years ago when I tried running pedals into the clean channel...it just sounds gash.

Travisthedog

I used a box of rock and fulltone fulldrive 2 with mine and it sounded epic

Beexter

I don't think this is unique to the TH30 - I used to use pedals into amps set completely clean which I thought sounded OK, until I tried setting the amps at edge of breakup and then running the pedals through that.
Going back to dirt pedals through a clean amp yields a lot of the harshness the OP mentioned.  It's particularly obvious with fuzz pedals IME

gearaddict

Still shite.

Just sharing.

Slartibartfarst42

I found the clean channel on mine to be awesome and responded very well to pedals. Conversely I found the drive channel to have limitations until I upgraded the valves.

gearaddict

Slartibartfarst42 said:

I found the clean channel on mine to be awesome and responded very well to pedals. Conversely I found the drive channel to have limitations until I upgraded the valves.

Do you remember which pedals you used?

Slartibartfarst42

For distortion I started by using a Bad Monkey, simply because it cost next to nothing and was convenient at the time. It surprised me by being better than I expected so after that I upgraded to Hardwire pedals in the form of a Hardwire Tube Overdrive and a Hardwire Metal Distortion. There was also a Hardwire Valve Distortion available in the range that was excellent but I never needed that one. It was a great shame that those pedals were discontinued. I think they suffered from the stigma of the Digitech name and I can understand why because with the exception of the Bad Monkey, I'd never found anything from them that was too impressive but those Hardwire pedals were some of the best pedals I've ever used. I also ended up with a Hardwire Chorus and Delay to go with the drive options. You might be able to find a used one on Ebay somewhere and you'd be well advised to give them a try as even if you didn't like them, you'd be able to get your money back by selling it on without any difficulty. Those who bothered to try the Hardwire pedals were rarely disappointed.

The appeal for me with the clean channel on the TH30 was that it was a complete surprise. When you buy an amp for distortion, the clean channel is often disappointing but I found the TH30 to be like owning two different amps rather than one amp with two channels. The cleans were superb and that meant it gave me a very clean palette for pedals but I suppose you need to actually like what the pedals do and they need to have their own character. While I found the clean channel to be excellent from the start, the drive channel gave me all kinds of problems initially as unless the gain was kept very low, it turned into a bees' nest. After a lot of research I ended up fitting a TAD RT010 into the V1 position and TAD RT001 valves in the other preamp positions. This absolutely transformed the amp and the drive channel became vastly superior so I ended up using the Hardwire pedals less. I ended up selling the Metal Distortion, though I did continue using the Tube Overdrive with the drive channel. One thing I did also use that I found of benefit with the TH30 was EQ pedals. I ended up buying a couple of Boss GE-7 pedals and used them to both sculpture the tone and add a volume boost for solos. I was just about to buy a third GE-7 to use in the chain when my circumstances changed and I needed to invest in an amp option that was much smaller and lighter but that TH30 ended up a really great amp for me and I was sorry to see it go.

My advice would be that if you use the clean channel with drive pedals, buy a decent EQ pedal to go with them. In fact, based on my experience I'd buy at least two of them. Again, you can pick up used GE-7 pedals for next to nothing and they're a great addition.

gearaddict

Cool - thanks for all the info!

I've never actually tried a hardwire pedal. I kept looking at them but they were always really expensive. I did used to have a bad monkey and liked it a lot. Although I don't think I've had one since I've had the TH30.

I do tend to live on the dirty channel on the TH30. I need to have at least a mild overdrive on the clean channel all the time...it's just so clean!!