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  • ICBMICBM Frets: 71950
    soma1975 said:
    There’s an episode of TPS where they demo a King of Tone and then the £70 Tone City clone and it sounds 1000% identical in the a/b and they just kinda go ‘well it sort of sounds alright for the money’ and dismiss it and move on. 

    Properly wound me up. 
    Considering the King Of Tone is essentially a copy of a £70 Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal (or strictly speaking two of them) that's not very surprising.

    What winds me up - and this is not aimed only at the King Of Tone - is when a pedal which sounds OK but nothing outstanding into a clean amp is justified by "yes, but you can't judge it like that - it sounds amazing into a cooking valve amp at gig volume." (Usually with the implication that if you don't appreciate that, you're a 'bedroom player'.) Well of course it does! ...the clue is in the cooking valve amp at gig volume bit :). *Any* pedal that adds a bit of dirt and level is going to sound pretty good going into an already good-sounding amp which is already overdriven and compressed - what you're hearing is mostly the amp, not the pedal.

    A £30 Chinese Tube Screamer copy sounds great into a cooking valve amp at gig volume...

    "Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski

    "Just because I don't care, doesn't mean I don't understand." - Homer Simpson

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  • breezytelebreezytele Frets: 273
    Well , variations in eq aside they all seem the same to me. 
    I should say,did  seem; 
    The new origin effects drive is very different. It behaves like an overdriven amp, sustain, sensitivity etc
    and apart from sounding glorious, it can achieve this into an amp at modest volume
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  • TeetonetalTeetonetal Frets: 7801
    Well , variations in eq aside they all seem the same to me. 
    I should say,did  seem; 
    The new origin effects drive is very different. It behaves like an overdriven amp, sustain, sensitivity etc
    and apart from sounding glorious, it can achieve this into an amp at modest volume
    This is the maddening thing. There are pedals that are glorious. Genuine innovation.
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  • Dave_McDave_Mc Frets: 2324
    edited July 2018
    This is one of the hardest things for me to understand about pedals and demos - quite why someone can't just say what something is without 25 minutes of fluff is ridicolours.

    This is a modification of a TS, this is a modification of a Big Muff, etc. etc.
    I could be wrong, but there seems to be some kind of (misplaced, IMO) loyalty to the manufacturers, rather than the players (or maybe they're just scared of being sued). They used to use similar logic for why reviews all got 4 stars in the guitar magazines (and they never pointed out when something was a clone there, either).

    One of the reasons why I stopped buying and reading the magazines...

    ICBM said:
    soma1975 said:
    There’s an episode of TPS where they demo a King of Tone and then the £70 Tone City clone and it sounds 1000% identical in the a/b and they just kinda go ‘well it sort of sounds alright for the money’ and dismiss it and move on. 

    Properly wound me up. 
    Considering the King Of Tone is essentially a copy of a £70 Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal (or strictly speaking two of them) that's not very surprising.

    What winds me up - and this is not aimed only at the King Of Tone - is when a pedal which sounds OK but nothing outstanding into a clean amp is justified by "yes, but you can't judge it like that - it sounds amazing into a cooking valve amp at gig volume." (Usually with the implication that if you don't appreciate that, you're a 'bedroom player'.) Well of course it does! ...the clue is in the cooking valve amp at gig volume bit :). *Any* pedal that adds a bit of dirt and level is going to sound pretty good going into an already good-sounding amp which is already overdriven and compressed - what you're hearing is mostly the amp, not the pedal.

    A £30 Chinese Tube Screamer copy sounds great into a cooking valve amp at gig volume...
    Agreed. I remember the guy in the shop said something similar to me when I tried the klon centaur...

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  • impmannimpmann Frets: 12641
    ICBM said:
    soma1975 said:
    There’s an episode of TPS where they demo a King of Tone and then the £70 Tone City clone and it sounds 1000% identical in the a/b and they just kinda go ‘well it sort of sounds alright for the money’ and dismiss it and move on. 

    Properly wound me up. 
    Considering the King Of Tone is essentially a copy of a £70 Marshall Bluesbreaker pedal (or strictly speaking two of them) that's not very surprising.

    What winds me up - and this is not aimed only at the King Of Tone - is when a pedal which sounds OK but nothing outstanding into a clean amp is justified by "yes, but you can't judge it like that - it sounds amazing into a cooking valve amp at gig volume." (Usually with the implication that if you don't appreciate that, you're a 'bedroom player'.) Well of course it does! ...the clue is in the cooking valve amp at gig volume bit :). *Any* pedal that adds a bit of dirt and level is going to sound pretty good going into an already good-sounding amp which is already overdriven and compressed - what you're hearing is mostly the amp, not the pedal.

    A £30 Chinese Tube Screamer copy sounds great into a cooking valve amp at gig volume...
    Like the absolute dog-shit sounding Boss DS-1, you mean? Each time I've played one its sounded the same to my ears... dog shit. I say that, and I get lots of folk telling me that I "don't know how to dial it in" or I need to "hear it through a cooking amp".

    The first of those statements is incredibly condescending, and I've seen it a few times from a few people. It makes the assumption that the other party is incapable of turning knobs and using their ears... in this case just three of them. Nope, no matter how I turn those three controls it does not enhance the sound of my guitar... far from it.

    The second of those, as you rightly say makes the implication of being a bedroom player - as though that is some kind of negative. A distortion pedal shouldn't "need" an already distorted amp to sound good - indeed there are many examples of them that don't and some of them share similar electronic architecture. As you rightly say, any already overdriven amp will compress more and that compression/gain squash will remove any nasty fizzy scratchiness from the output of the pedal.

    A lot of these things are subjective and dependant on your own technique - I detest the DS-1, yet I know folks that love it. Steve Rothery manages to make it sound epic, for example. Likewise, I think TS-9s are the spawn of satan (muddly, middly things) but then - I don't need to add mids, an awful lot of folks do for their solo sound.

    The booteek vs factory thing drives me potty - there was a TPS where Dan "needed" a new Flanger and they spent over an hour blathering about how nothing quite sounds like the battered Mistress he has used for years. They compared it to the Mooer Elec Lady and said it lacked the top end of the EH... erm... maybe not, but its a £40 pedal that is 98% of the sound of a £400-500 unit without the shit noise artifacts, stupid power requirements issue AND the volume drop. They then mention that the EH sits in a volume boosted loop... the Mooer doesn't... And for the record... the Mooer sounds flippin amazing.



    Never Ever Bloody Anything Ever.

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  • UnclePsychosisUnclePsychosis Frets: 12879
    I certainly agree that there's a lot of total bullshit out there - the vertex / freakish blues stuff for example just reinforces my opinion that a lot of people hear with their eyes and their wallets.

    I think that's probably why my two favourite manufacturers are Boss and EQD. Boss do the simple stuff really well, in a great form factor and at a sensible price. EQD do lots of mad stuff that others don't. I'm fucked if I'm spending hundreds on a tweaked tubescreamer. 

    That's not to say that there aren't other companies out there doing genuinely innovative, worthwhile stuff. If *nobody* was doing anything new then the whole industry would die. 
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