Amps That Won't Take Pedals - Clarification

[Stewart Ward]

As a designer of guitar amps and stuff, I often see the comment that particular amps don't take pedals too well. Now, I'm NOT looking for amp recommendations, but what I do want to know is, what is the effect on the pedal's tone that you don't like?

Too bassy, squashy, trebly, fizzy, lacks body... or whatever? I'd like to hear fellow musicians' explanations of why these amps don't work with pedals well. Mention makes/models that don't work, IYO, but please keep it concise! Lol!

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

[uriah1]

You have to tweak pedal too much to get in the zone. And then, maybe ok
for bridge overdrive, but loses clarity on neck..or in boost mode loses everything
and can get boxy...or worst case muddy..hard to put in words....diff for everyone
I suppose..
just imho

 

[Nick Fanis]

In my experience there are no "Amps That Won't Take Pedals",every tube amp w/ a decent CLEAN channel takes all pedals well and the vast majority of the amps in the market DO have a decent clean channel.

Of course the "big 3" that most amp makers copy (Plexi Marshall,VOX AC30 & bf/sf Fenders) all take pedals very well

 

[Six T. Six]

What Uriah said. As for specific pedals/amps/etc, my RW 50's Tele or my LP through my Blackstone Appliances Mosfet Overdrive pedal sounds horrible through my friends Marshall JCM900 Dual Reverb. The pedal loses it's best qualities, turns flat, no longer dynamic and i'm unable to tame the feedback when I get close to the desired sound. Turn it off, the amp sounds great, but it does not seem to agree with the BAMO.

Through my Budda SuperDrive II 18, or Peavey Classic 20, or even my early 90's Fender Ultimate Chorus solid state, the combination sounds incredible and the pedal does what it's supposed to do. I've run the same setup through a different Marshall and it's been a little extra gainy, but not bad like the dual reverb.

I've had issues with modulation going front end or loop because delay gets flabby but I think that is common.

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

I'm glad to see a pedal designer who's asking the question! Thanks for your work.

I think Nick's right in his observation.

Also, many of the anecdotes about "doesn't take pedals" I've heard seemed to originate from:

1. Tone sucking impedance mismatches from unbuffered devices, especially first-in-line pedals like wah wahs.
2. User ignorance - e.g. effect stacking by inexperienced users who connect pedal after pedal after pedal into an already ridiculously high gain amplifier, and then turn them all on and wonder why it sounds bad.
3. way too many feet of cheap, high capacitance cables connecting unbuffered pedals.
4. bad selection of the ORDER of the pedals relative to each other.

(I'm sure there are others...these are just four I've noticed over and over again.)



CBG

 

[StephaninMelb]

CoolBlueGlows comments are excellent points to consider when setting up an effect chain. On average not much thought goes into what individual pedals do to tone. People just think of effect as a tone feature and cable pedals together expecting it all to work. Any issues and they point to the amplifier.

Any wonder that there haven't been many amps designed that have a "bus architecture" that can accept effect modules (like the old Seymour Duncan Convertable with its modules). I imagine for such a design feature to take off amp manufactures would have to support an "open effect interface standard." It would solve most of the incompatibility issues if the effect electronics were more tightly integrated with amps. Given all the multitude of brands and types of pedals it is a wonder they work as well as they do.

People now have to learn to put certain pedals in a particular order. What results is that people to get it all working end up buying lots of effects.

In some ways the effects - guitar amp world is still in the stones ages as there is reluctance to try new innovations.

 

[Piotr]

This kind of reminds me the discussion about the pedals, which DO NOT clean up with volume rolled off.

But seriously, can we actually name an amp that is universally thought to NOT TAKE pedals well?

I can agree that a specific amp would not take specific pedals well, due to some quirks in frequency response (e.g. emphasizing the same frequencies as the pedal, thus overdoing a pleasant "character" effect to an unpleasant degree). I imagine this could be the case for preamp/overdrive/distortion/boost pedals mostly. In the remaining cases - I agree with CoolBlueGlow, effects chain issues.

 

[Webfoot]

Just my opinions/ideas...

Most effect type pedals (reverb, delay, chorus, tremelo etc) it's a non issue besides the true bypass and impedance stuff.

Its really the dirt pedals that are the problem. Many people are using Fender amps with scooped mids (and Jensen speakers) and want to sound a like a Marshall (all mids and celestion speakers in a sealed cab). They plug in a dirt pedal into a Fender and want to hear a marshall. And often its a Marshall in they imagine in their mind versus hearing a real one. What they hear is the fizz (from the scooped Fender mids and Jensen speaker) and no body (mids). Note that this is what made tube screamers popular is that they have mids that helped make up for the lack of mids in the Fender amp tone stack circuit.

The trick is having a dirt pedal with EQ (bass, mid, treble) that allows you to match to any amp (a very tall order) without taking away from the sound of the pedal. Typically eq circuits in pedals (just like amp) take away from the tone or tactile feel.

Other gotchas are...

- Pedals that sound good at home by yourself, don't sound good in a band context because they don't cut. Most buyers don't try pedals that loud or in a band mix. Not an issue in the studio when you can eq everything and virtually make anything work. I find in some amps.. the louder the amp is (more power tube saturation for sustain and compression) the less dirt I need from the pedal and need to turn the dirt pedal gain down. Also if the amp does not have a tight response (loose low end) some people want the pedal to make the amp have tighter low end.

- Pickups... single coils versus humbuckers have a huge impact on how a dirt pedal would sound. Weaker single coil pickups will sound pretty clean but may lack punch for a dirt pedal whereas humbuckers will have the mid range, high output and punch. Not to mention that some peopl may adjust their pickups way too low or way too high.

- People listening with a good set of ears. Many designers and companies just don't have the patience or people with really good ears to discern what sounds good.

So if I was a designer I would think about... will I 1) market the pedal as best for fender amps and guitar (scooped mids and single coils) or 2) good with everything?

To that end as a designer I would want a couple of guitar types (singles coil 25.5" scale and humbucker 24 3/4" gibson scale). Also amp types from deluxe reverb to marshall.

I think the other trick I have read about is a boutique dirt pedal that had two separate distortion circuits... the signal is first split into higher frequencies and lower frequencies. Then there are two separate distortion circuits (one for high frequencies and one for low frequencies) where the distortion response could be tailored for each frequency spectrum and then combined for the output signal. I have played a lot for a lot of years and have built kit pedals and find this area the most intriguing.

Hmmm what else... comparing solid state/op amp/diode distortion against a tube pedal. Not so much for gain structure but how a tube pedal can roll off the high end and make it smoother.

 

[Stewart Ward]

Wow, that's great so far and digesting!! Please keep it all coming!

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

Webfoot makes some excellent observations, especially about Fender vs. Marshall camps.

A Strat through a Twin simply isn't ever going to sound like a LP through a Marshall 4x12, and all the pedals in China won't change that.

"what sounds good alone often sounds bad in the mix" Wow! I wish I could print that on a button and hand it out to folks during mixdown! It happens in the studio too...all the time.

cheers,

CBG

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

Oh, BTW, I once did take a Danelectro Daddy-O, gut it and build it into what is essentially a tube screamer with 3 band e.q. I tuned the e.q.'s to work with my Strat. (Daddy-O has the three band e.q. setup, so the holes and controls were already there)

It works pretty good. I made the mid control fairly aggressive in the 900-2k range

 

[celeste]

anything with a grid leak biased input does not much like boost in front of it, they do not clip (positive going, ie grid current) gracefully and it takes a bit to stabilize the bias once you have removed the offending signal.

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

yes, that nasty blocking! Sounds bad.

 

[tlimbert65]

I've only had one amp that really didn't "take pedals well". It was a 1990s Fender M-80 Chorus, a SS 120W 2x12 Combo with a clean and lead channel, and built in chorus and reverb. It was really a pretty good sounding amp on its own, but plug pretty much any pedal into it (not that I tried them all), and it would sound very harsh and brittle. Dirt pedals were particularly bad, creating ear-splitting harshness and uncontrollable feedback that you could not make better by tweaking knobs. This may have been an extreme example, but I'm sure there are other amps out there that are the same way.

And, I suspect when people use the term "takes (or doesn't take) pedals well", they are generally talking about solid state amps. People expect tube amps to respond well to pedals, and they expect solid state amps to sound bad alone, and worse with pedals. So, when a SS amp sounds good with pedals, people go out of their way to point that out. When a SS amp sounds bad with pedals, they're kind of saying, "that amp is fine, but don't try to use pedals with it." (I've heard that said about the JC-120) Only my take on this, probably way off.

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

Right with you tlimbert on the JC120.

I too thought my JC120 sounded absolutely hideous with any kind of OD or clipper pedal on the front end. The built in distortion was equally hideous, IMO.
Interesting slant of the SS thing. Personally, I never owned any other SS amps, so I'm not an expert on them. I sold the JC120 years ago. (Great Jazz amp, though - just not my cup of tea)

CBG

 

[gwjensen]

Agree with everything Webfoot said. I would add that an EQ pedal, which I think is essential to any board (GE-7 in my case), can go a very long way in dialing in your tone or correcting various tonal deficiencies in a pedal. This is especially true if your amps only have one tone control, like mine. For example, the Boss SD-1 is way too thin and middy, IMO, so I slid up the low end on GE-7 and dial out some of the mids. Makes the pedal a lot more usable for me.

 

[greggorypeccary]

Pretty much every thing here illustrates that the problem isn't really the amp, but with some pedals into some amps. But those pedals sound great with other amps and vice versa. You have to match up all your gear to get the best sounds.

(well, most ss amps sound like a tin can full of bees with an od pedal, but those pedals are intended to push a tube front end, so that's really no suprise.)

Agree with everything Webfoot said. I would add that an EQ pedal, which I think is essential to any board (GE-7 in my case), can go a very long way in dialing in your tone or correcting various tonal deficiencies in a pedal. This is especially true if your amps only have one tone control, like mine. For example, the Boss SD-1 is way too thin and middy, IMO, so I slid up the low end on GE-7 and dial out some of the mids. Makes the pedal a lot more usable for me.

I'm sure an eq pedal can be useful, but IMO if you are using it to make another pedal sound good then you need to try some other OD pedals into that amp.

 

[Piotr]

I too thought my JC120 sounded absolutely hideous with any kind of OD or clipper pedal on the front end.

This is pretty funny, I've just read other posts at a different thread, like some guy loved the JC-120 with OD pedals...

Anyway, I guess that hard clipping of the preamp stage of an SS amp which was not designed to be clipped could be responsible for nasty tone. But that's probably a rare case... I wonder how my Acoustic Image Clarus would sound if I ran a maxed-out Tubescreamer in front of its preamp (It does have amazing headroom, though)

Stewart - I guess that any EQ curve mismatch between amps and pedals could be solved by a graphic EQ unit or a parametric EQ (and I mean: Freq, Q, Gain) on the amp. On the other hand, the user smart enough to use this EQ for countering the incompatibility of his OD pedal, would just choose the correct pedal in the first place. Oh, well...

(BTW, one band fully parametric EQ is really useful for many other applications, too...)

 

[CoolBlueGlow]

Yeah, funny.

Of course, I was A/B comparing my JC-120 with a tube screamer to my 1966 Pro Reverb with a tube screamer.

Not much of a contest there, once I compared them back to back.

In my experience, A/B tests can reveal so much about tone...especially as opposed to rosy memories of long ago experiences or those free standing "yeah, that sounds good to me" moments with only one amp in the room.

 

[tjalla]

To my ears, it's usually a fixed bright cap ala DRRI or my Tone Comet 40B. The very thing that gives up nice cleans turns OD pedals into raspy buzz boxes. I've found in these scenarios a pedal that has both tone and cut knobs very handy. My Menatone red snapper, TBIAC and Fish Factory to be specific.