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now I have my own amps and there is allot more variation that can be achieved in the drive tones by changing the design, I tend to only use pedals to boost or to stick a little bit of grit onto a clean channel if needed, totally depends on the amp though.
regardless of method, the louder the better.......
I just find it easier and more versatile this way.
I often used to have to play through borrowed amps, not all of which sounded good cranked.
I don't see it like that at all. It's not a £XXXX amp vs a £XX pedal where you'd be crazy to spend so much on an amp and get your "tone" with the pedal.
It's a piece of string which cost £0.50 vibrating. That signal's being picked up by a magnet with coils round it. Coils of plain old wire. The wire is connected to a cheap pot in the guitar. That's connected to a jack socket. Then you're using a length of instrument cable which cost anything from a few quid to tens of pounds to get the signal to the first thing you plug into.
Regardless of price, remove any one of these components and you get no signal at all.
A pedal is made up of little caps, resistors, IC chips etc, which individually cost pennies. They don't cost pennies because they're no good for making music or guitar tones, they cost pennies because that's what they cost to make.
An amp is made up of little caps, resistors, sometimes IC chips, sometimes vacuum tubes, transformers. Individually, some of those components cost pennies, some of them cost pounds. They don't cost what they cost because they're better or worse at making guitar tones. They cost what they cost to make. And most of them aren't there because they're good for guitar sounds, they're all in the amp because that's what the circuit requires in order to function - sure, you can pick a silver mica cap because you think it sounds better than a ceramic one, or you can use carbon comp resistors over metal film, or you can spend the extra £15 to get an output transformer that saturates in a specific way that you like... but a; those components are all only there in the first place to make the amp work *at all* and b; you can do the same with the components in a pedal.
So if someone uses a pedal that's integral to their sound, they're *not* getting their tone from a cheap pedal at the expense of using their fancy amp. Rather, they've got a few hundred electrical components which make up a circuit, and they've decided to add a few dozen more to get the sound they want.
I've been on both sides of this - using amp and pedal distortion - and yeah, they're different. But one's not better than the other. It's always got to be about what sounds good on that day with that music and those people present to hear it happen. The less you leave to rote and assumption, the better.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
Don't talk politics and don't throw stones. Your royal highnesses.
What I'm talking about is using drive and distortion pedals to create the distorted signal, then simply amplifying the distorted signal using a clean amp. You can plug that pedal into any clean amp, or even a PA and the tone would not sound drastically different, so it follows that in this scenario you ARE getting most of your tone from a cheap metal box.
Of course if you only have a clean amp then you've got no choice but to use a distortion pedal. My point is that given the choice between amp distortion and pedal distortion, I'd always choose amp. If you had an amp with a dirty channel It would be silly to bypass all of that built-in circuitry in favour of a pedal.
You could argue that the pedal into the clean channel sounds better than the dirty channel of the amp, but I would say in that case you've got the wrong amp.
Don't get me wrong I'm not saying there are no valid uses for drive pedals... If you were in a cover band and you need a lot of different tones then pedals through a clean amp would be the way to go.
All I'm saying is that if I had a good multi-channel amp with decent drive channels, I wouldn't be trying to get my drive tones from pedals going into the clean channel only.
(At least without any form of speaker emulation on the PA desk.)
I use both strictly clean amps with and without pedals, and mildly dirty amps with and without pedals. I don't like high-gain amp sounds by themselves usually - always a clean or crunchy amp with a pedal if I want a lot of gain. I actually prefer solid state for higher gain sounds.
I don't get the logic of 'not amplifying cheap transistors with an expensive amp' - firstly an expensive amp used to amplify a cheap transistor usually sounds better than an expensive amp on its own to me, and secondly why does it matter anyway? It's the final sound that counts. I'm quite happy using a cheap amp to amplify an expensive pedal if it gives the sound I want too.
I also never use a pedal to push an amp harder, or an overdrive pedal as a clean boost - only to add more dirt at roughly unity volume. That sounds better to me, and it means you can use the same pedal settings with a clean sound without a huge volume jump.
"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
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
An AC30 clean sounds nothing like a Fender Twin Clean. A JMP50 clean sounds nothing like a PA system.
Even clean, amps impart compression, a particular frequency response, phase shifts, dynamic response (particularly around the note attack, which is a quick burst of loud signal that drives at least the early gain stages into overdrive even if the bulk of the signal is clean). The cab and speaker radically shape how the low end sounds and feels.
There's no getting away from it - even clean, amps have radically different characters.
And all this isn't even considering that the vast majority of players who use drive pedals *are* pushing their clean amps into overdrive when they stamp on the pedal.
Bandcamp
Spotify, Apple et al
I don't own any kind of drive, boost or distortion pedal. I purely use my amp for gain, but it has built in power scaling, so amp drive as quiet as you like.
Rift Amplification
Brackley, Northamptonshire
www.riftamps.co.uk
I've also acknowledged that my views may seem over the top and elitest, but it's the way I think about the subject and how I like to do things. I believe I can always get a tone I like using the amp settings alone, and will always strive to avoid pedals if I can help it. It's worked well for me so far, and the purpose of my posts is purely to share the fact that this strategy can be employed to good effect.
If anything, it's an excuse for me to stay away from the Pandora's box of FX pedals. I've got enough holes to sink my money into as it is