Time for a new "main" OD/distortion

[Dandolin]

Never had a Shredmaster, though always wanting to try one. Distortron was just a great sounding workhorse for me live. When I played live. I mostly ended up sticking the subs in the "middle" position.

[frigid midget]

Srry, when browsing the forum for ideas for my personal overdrive search, I ended up in this thread. Had it opened in a different tab, and accidentally replied here instead of in my own thread, and than deleted my reply while you were posting your reply...

Aaaaanyway

The Shredmaster is way cool. But like in a lot of cases, with these rare popular old pedals...it's easy to get caught up in the hype, and expect more of the pedal than what it really is...A great overdrive for, maybe one of the better ones out there...in 1991

It actually says a lot about how today's pedal builders claim they reinvented the wheel or something. Aside from refining a couple things and maybe lowering the noise or improving power consumption, adding an extra switch or pot...Not a whole lot has changed in the overdrive world, people are still recording and touring with stock Rats and Big Muffs.

[goroth]

I'm not sure I agree about not a lot changing. I mean in a sense... it's clipping a signal. How many different ways can you do that. And many guitarists and builders aren't all that creative. But that said..

JFET emulation of tube amps has been a big thing the last 10 years or so, and lead to some really nice pedals. Pedals with more control over the variables, like soft or hard clipping, different clipping diode combos, controlling the bass content into the drive, voltage sag...

[frigid midget]

Yeah You'r probably right I guess. It's just that I got reminded of how easy something like a 30 year old Rat can still replace a lot of "modern" boutique distortion pedals. Countless people still rely on their HM-2 or HM-2 as a main source of filth, and most of the time the main focus of the zillions of tubescreamer and muff recreations is about getting as close as possible to the original circuit/tone.

For anyone who's after a medium gain np frills overdrive and is not bothered with clipping options or extra eq options, there doesn't seem a helluva lot of reasons to look further than a Rat/Hotcake/Boss

The BIG leap impo is in DSP stuff, with all types of delay/modulation and amp modulating that -at best- required pro rack gear back in the day. With overdrive and fuzz though, there's not much to improve on, the heart of a basic transistor/ic overdrive circuit still can't be replaced with digital technology imo. Or maybe it "can", there's just really no point to it I guess

[coldbrightsunlight]

Yeah I pretty much agree with that. While yeah people are making new and very cool fuzzes and overdrives and it's fun to try stuff and have different options, at the end of the day I could play all of the music I play and have tones in the same ballpark with gear from 40 years ago.

[goroth]

But even the DSP stuff, a lot of it is just going in to easier ways of creating what is essentially the same tone.

Like, yeah, I can't buy Dave Gilmour's hiwatt, but I can get a sweet emulation of it, and then with one button press I can change to a Mesa Mark IV with an echorec sim on it.
That's requiring crazy computing power, but the tones are still just basic stuff.

I realise I just argued for "things are actually different" and now I'm arguing the opposite, but I think on a micro level then there is some innovation, but on a macro level we're all just dumb guitarists and we want to clip a signal, put an echo on it. If we're feeling spicy then we might modulate it a wee bit.

[coldbrightsunlight]

^^^^^

[friendship]

TURBO TIME