Fuzz with "clean thru" and other dual tone questions

thecolourbox

In my tiny little mind, a fuzz pedal with a clean through feature, such as the Bass Big Muff, could potentially sound very awesome on guitar when turning it on effectively adds fuzz alongside the existing overdriven tone. Current drive pedals in favour are Joyo Sweet Baby and a Tubescreamer. Does anybody have experience of this or other similar pedals? It would be Tele>OD>Fuzz with clean through>Hot Rod Deluxe clean channel. Does this give two distinct tones amplified, or does it all mush together and sound crap? Again in my tiny mind, to keep control of the volume levels between fuzz on and off, a compressor might seem useful to tame that in. That's possibly nonsense though

I do like dual tone sounds, had an LS2 before but unfortunately it was missing the option to switch from A to A+B. I like the dual amp thing but don't have the space for two amps simultaneously - might the above give the same sort of effect with two drive sounds which are switchable?

monquixote

I have a bass big muff

The clean blend doesn't sound that great on guitar unless you have a drive pedal before or after it in the chain in which case it's quite cool. 

If you want that mixed sound get a nova drive. You can do Half OD, half distortion or half clean, half OD, or even one third clean, one third distortion and one third OD if you are so inclined. 

thecolourbox

Thanks, yeah the idea would be that whichever overdrive would be the "always on" pedal, before the muff, which would then be kicked in for fuzzy riffs or solos. I'm a big fan of white stripes sound where its effectively either overdriven or fuzzed, but as they tended to dual amp on the recordings i like best, i think the fuzz maybe went into one more than the other as i still hear an overdrive type crunch amid the fuzz mayhem

Yeah ive read about the Nova, trouble is i get the impression its more OD and distortion, i like the Sweet Baby OD too much to swap it out, and more of a fuzz person than distortion. That said, the myriad of balances you describe sound like an interesting playground so I'll see if i can try one

monquixote

The nice thing about it is that you can change it between od into dist, dist into od or parallel processing and set them to switchable patches.

You can even MIDI control it.

thecolourbox

What flavours of OD and Distortion are they? Will try and youchoob it in a bit but would be interested what kind of existing sounds they are similar too. I like the Sweet Baby (considering getting the original it's based on) cos it feels like a nice subtley flavoured warm boost

thecolourbox

Just listened to the official demo of the Nova, the parallel sound is the concept i am after, but with different sounds mixed together than what sounds the nova makes! Is that what the Sweet Baby plus Bass Muff might do for me?

monquixote

Hmm 

The OD is vaguely mid humped TS/SD flavoured, but with a bit more bass that a TS. 

The distortion is a classic distortion (i.e. it's not trying to sound like an amp in a can) it's a while since I've had it, but it's probably less hairy than a Rat2 so maybe something slightly smoother like a Turbo RAT, probably quite similar to the Distortion side of the Fulltone GT500. 

It's quite a controlled sounding pedal it's not a kind of wild screaming feedback nutter pedal.

steamabacus

Would this do what you want?

thecolourbox

Potentially it might but I'd still need a muff as well i guess. I am presuming there's no easy mod of a nano muff od to have clean through

steamabacus

Bright Onion Blender Looper

You could conceivably do something similar internally, space permitting? Maybe ask one of the custom pedal builders on here if they could build something along those lines?

AbandonMute

The Way Huge Pork Loin is an overdrive with a clean blend (and a lovely OD it is too). You could try a Boss Line Selector to blend in a fuzz fuzz. I'd second the opinion that clean and fuzz doesn't sound that great by itself, though if you could add modulation or delay to one of them it might start to get interesting.

Would a multi fx with amp modelling do it? Not compact or fancy but a GT-10 would provide those options I think.

thecolourbox

Hmm, i am not really wanting to add any OD pedals really, though opinions heeded that the clean blend thing may not do it. Does it make any difference that the clean through would not be clean, it would be the overdrive going through the fuzz?

i did try the ls2 thing but as i say, it didn't let me switch between OD and OD+Fuzz so it never really took off for me.

AbandonMute

The whole biamping/dual tone sound doesn't really work for me personally, it's just not convenient when you want a large range of sounds. When I've experimented with it though, I found that it works best when the two sounds have fairly similar drive levels. Totally clean boost is quite hard to balance, particularly with humbuckers where the clean tends to sort of poke through in a not particularly useful way. If you blended an overdrive tone with a fuzz tone that could be good, but I'd imagine you'd want to keep them separate, not run the drive into the fuzz. I think by the time a blended signal comes out the other side of a muff you'll have lost any separation. It's an interesting area. Have you looked at the GigRig's WetBox?

xHymnal

check out the smallsound/bigsound team awesome fuzz machine. It has a clean thru blend and i found some very cool flavours of fuzz could be had with is. Plus won't sound like shit stock like and of the modern EHX BM's do

thecolourbox

Thanks all. The intention is to have essentially two tones only, don't need much variety for the stuff i play. Tone 1 is straight OD, tone 2 id like to be the mix of OD and Fuzz. In my tiny mind i was imagining the clean through on a fuzz would there give me OD and Fuzz from the output of the fuzz

i will look at the two suggested thingummies above as well, thanks!

ICBM

The clean blend thing seems to work really well for bass, but I can't stand it for guitar - at least not into the same amp. It just sounds like something is broken - you get a 'separated', not blended, sound where the distortion seems to sit on top of the clean sound and not relate to it. Into two amps - and particularly if the guitar has stereo outputs so the two signals are different - it can sound really great though, almost like a doubled guitar part but done live. I use my Rickenbacker like that sometimes.

AxeWieldingBastard

Might be worth checking out Infanem's The Driving Notion.

Cirrus

I'm going to weigh in on the general consensus here - clean blend doesn't do it for me on guitar. It sounds strange, like you're using a clean amp with a blown speaker or something. And because distorted sounds are so much more compressed, you either have clean transients punching miles above the relatively constant volume of the overdrive, or the clean sustain gets totally lost.

And I arrived at this experience from use of the bass big muff, sparkle drive, but mainly of having built a dual amp rack setup with totally independent signal paths. I thought it was going to sound huge kicking on fuzz on one amp while the other stayed on a dynamic overdrive of some kind, in practice it sounds totally strange as well as being vastly more complicated to dial in (and to troubleshoot on a darkened stage 30 seconds before your set is due to start!)