A brief thought

timmysoft

Are there any pedals that are designed for pushing the front end of a solid state amp? It does seem like everything is geared towards clipping valves, so has anyone designed something that's specifically for the solid state market?

ThePrettyDamned

Prolly not...

But to be honest, I push the drive channel of my Bandit with the gain at 4 (ie just breaking up warm territory) with a tube screamer for funky solo tones, a fuzz pedal for insane solo and a Duncan Powergrid for heavy-as-balls rock.  The powergrid is *ace* at this because it has such a powerful eq.  You can tame the sound really well.

Tell you what, I'll see if I can record some samples for you tomorrow or Monday.  

spacecadet

I don't think it's so much they are designed to send valves into overdrive more that they give your guitar a level boost and the clipping is a by product of that. If you're looking for something that gives you that "sound" then look at a low gain OD. The Liquid Sunshine seems to be a favourite here. Never tried that one. For me I use an Xotic AC and an Analogman Prince of Tone for low gain stuff.

ICBM

timmysoft said:

Are there any pedals that are designed for pushing the front end of a solid state amp? It does seem like everything is geared towards clipping valves, so has anyone designed something that's specifically for the solid state market?

Yes, the Tube Screamer and its predecessor the Boss OD-1.

Seriously .

Although not "pushing the front end" as such, it was designed to emulate the sound of an overdriven valve amp when going into a clean solid-state amp.

The fact that it doesn't sound very good for that but does sound excellent pushing an overdriven valve amp is one of life's happy accidents…

I doubt there are any pedals designed specifically to push the front end of a solid-state amp, because almost no solid-state amp ever sounds good like that and can often sound very bad indeed. (And very rarely can be damaged.) There are quite a few pedals designed to sound good into a clean one though, mostly more "preamp" type pedals rather than Tube Screamer-types now.