Thursday, November 12, 2015

Knowing

Song writing mode ON (again). On days when I wish to be efficient with very little distractions, I have my single pickup guitars to go to. That's right, single pickup guitars prevent pickups selection so that I can focus on the task at hand. In this case, I always solo in the neck, so the bridge pickup is my riff focus reference. The Gibson MM above helped tremendously.

Also, having the right tools get the job done well. I need an intense distortion source & the pedals brought out & chained up did not fulfill this objective. I'm glad I have more than one amp to see things through & the Blackstar here did it with ease- if you need to get the right tones going, go to the tone source; it's the amp, not effects pedals.

On the subject of pedals, the ones left in the mix was an OD whose function was no more than to saturate the signals & one that kept irrelevant noises out of the way.

So my friends, knowing what to use & when to use it is rather crucial in this aspect.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Is the SD1 a better choice over the tubescreamer for boosting an amp? I have read about the differences regarding the clipping circuit (SD1's asymmetrical vs Tubescreamer's symmetrical clipping), and wonder if there's a big difference in tone?

subversion.sg said...

This one somehow escaped my attention...

Anyway, both the pedals you mentioned offer overdrive & the difference here is that of intensity. I'm from the 'there's no such thing as better' camp so in this light, the boss isn't better than the ibanez, vice-versa. In terms of application, if you wish for something more intense, then the SD-1 is the pedal to refer to. It offers a thicker voicing compared to the TS. The TS on the other hand has a midrange hump which makes it a little sharper sounding & helps clear up your signals in terms of clarity.

Coming to application, I own both pedals & had used them quite extensively to kick some amps into submission. The TS to me is a supplementary pedal, I rarely used it as a stand alone unit, it's often pushing the amp's pre-amp & also connected into the loop feature. The SD-1 on the other hand serves to be a good stand alone OD unit for some creamy drive tones however, I don't find it to be a preferred amp pusher in terms of clarity. The OD-3 does a better job at this. :-)