Blackstar LT pedals demo - Sound pretty sweet!

ICBM

My issue with these demos is that the sound is simply not balanced - there's no top-end at all. Even if you like "smooth" sounds I can't see how it's a useful way of demonstrating what the pedals sound like. It's like trying to compare guitar pickups with the tone control turned right down.

monquixote

I don't think it's that bad. You can usually level that criticism at Chappers demos as he has everything dark to the point of being muffled. 

I prefer it to the Blackstar demo because it's a bit more rough and ready. There could be any amount of tinkering done on that one. 

I thought all the pedals sounded absolutely shocking on the Nevada music demo that's also on YT. 

daveyh

I really liked the previous Blackstar demos, but didn't like this at all apart from the Drive.

ICBM

monquixote said:

You can usually level that criticism at Chappers demos as he has everything dark to the point of being muffled. 

Apart from his personality. Putting his head in an airtight bag would be best.

I actually don't know why I bother watching any of their demos, they're always useless and always make me want to kill him .

monquixote said:

I thought all the pedals sounded absolutely shocking on the Nevada music demo that's also on YT. 

I just went and listened to that, given your recommendation .

Easily the best demo so far - not necessarily because they all sound exactly to my taste, but because there's enough frequency content in the clip that you can actually have some confidence that what you're hearing is what they sound like... you can clearly how different they sound, and roughly what the controls do - turning them while playing is good. To me, that's how to do a demo. They need a bit more of the reference clean sound - you only hear it very briefly, but it does at least sound fairly neutral.

I'd take a bet that the pedals sound far more in reality like they do in the Nevada clip than either the Andertons one or the Crazy Train one... which may not be what you want to hear .

digitalscream

Seems to me that the chief problem with these pedals is the lack of headroom in terms of volume/boost. What's the point of a distortion pedal - particularly a two-channel one - if you can't get levels significantly above the clean sound of the amp you're running into? Unity is no good, that far round the dial...

Dave_Mc

They sounded alright. Suspect a couple of those are boss clones, but then again they claim the clipping circuit is PAF, so

I'm more concerned about hearing on the news tomorrow about some dude in Scotland going on a murderous rampage, though. )

ICBM

digitalscream said:

Seems to me that the chief problem with these pedals is the lack of headroom in terms of volume/boost. What's the point of a distortion pedal - particularly a two-channel one - if you can't get levels significantly above the clean sound of the amp you're running into? Unity is no good, that far round the dial...

I assume because they're intended as stand-alone distortion pedals into a clean amp, and then you usually don't want too much level boost - not none though, distortion generally sounds quieter in a band mix than in isolation even when you're not using it to push an overdriven amp.

I agree though, since you almost never want your distortion sound quieter than your clean - maybe just a little, if you want a tight crunch rhythm sound - there's no sense in making most of the volume range something that you'll never use. I usually find a unity setting of about 10 o'clock is the most useful - it's far enough up that the pot isn't overly touchy if you are trying to zero in on an exact balance with the clean sound, but still leaves a lot of range for pushing the amp harder if you want to.

digitalscream

ICBM said:

I assume because they're intended as stand-alone distortion pedals into a clean amp, and then you usually don't want too much level boost - not none though, distortion generally sounds quieter in a band mix than in isolation even when you're not using it to push an overdriven amp.

I agree though, since you almost never want your distortion sound quieter than your clean - maybe just a little, if you want a tight crunch rhythm sound - there's no sense in making most of the volume range something that you'll never use. I usually find a unity setting of about 10 o'clock is the most useful - it's far enough up that the pot isn't overly touchy if you are trying to zero in on an exact balance with the clean sound, but still leaves a lot of range for pushing the amp harder if you want to.

Yeah...what might have helped this is if (on the Dual, at least) they provided a bypass level. The Dual is supposed to allow for clean (in bypass), rhythm and lead tones; as it is, you can't get a lead tone that's particularly high above the clean, which is bloody useless. If you could reduce the level of the clean/bypass signal, then you'd at least be able to get the balance right.

monquixote

ICBM said:

I agree though, since you almost never want your distortion sound quieter than your clean - maybe just a little, if you want a tight crunch rhythm sound - there's no sense in making most of the volume range something that you'll never use. I usually find a unity setting of about 10 o'clock is the most useful - it's far enough up that the pot isn't overly touchy if you are trying to zero in on an exact balance with the clean sound, but still leaves a lot of range for pushing the amp harder if you want to.

I agree with this. 

Some modern pedals that are internally 18V like the Super Crunchbox are at unity at 8-9 o'clock which makes then super touchy.

The Shredmaster I got the other day is unity at about 2-3 o clock which really shows what old school pedals were like!

ICBM

It does also depend a lot on the power of the guitar pickups, of course - with a weedy singe coil, the unity setting will be a lot lower than with a hot humbucker. Even so, I do think some pedals have it badly wrong.

monquixote

That's why I don't get on with heavily compressed dirt boxes. 

You switch to a guitar with hot pickups and all of a sudden your drive sound is really quiet. Had the that problem with the You Dirty RAT which was otherwise ace. 

Dave_Mc

ICBM said:

I usually find a unity setting of about 10 o'clock is the most useful - it's far enough up that the pot isn't overly touchy if you are trying to zero in on an exact balance with the clean sound, but still leaves a lot of range for pushing the amp harder if you want to.

Also agreed.

The Joyo Crunchbox clone I have has unity around 9 o'clock IIRC (EDIT: just had a look at my pedalboard and it looks more like 8 o'clock... and that's probably a little bit above unity ) ) and it's a bit touchy. But I also have other pedals where I wish there were more scope for boosting.

Ironically an awful lot of the time (not always) the pedals which actually do have tons of level boost available are the ones which you wouldn't really use as a boost (e.g. the crunchbox), while very obviously boost-style pedals don't always have that much (tubescreamers, bluesbreakers and the like).

Paulo

I think the guys in the video are quite funny. Not tried the pedals