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What I'm interested in learning is, what have you personally played that sounded good through a dirty amp? Any type of effect, but fuzzes/distortions are going to be most interesting to me. And just so we can have some benchmark, what kind of amp was it? BONUS QUESTION: What amps have you had that loved getting dirty with pedals?

My modded plexi LOVES all of my muff variant pedals(mostly the Pharaoh!).

BlindtoFaith wrote:My modded plexi LOVES all of my muff variant pedals(mostly the Pharaoh!).

Modded how? Links would be great

My clean Kalamazoo's Reverb 12 and Model II eat Fuzz like nomnoms...

Treble boosters all sound better into a dirty amp.
I prefer muffs into clean, but fuzz faces into dirty amps.
Stick a Red Rooster into a cranked AC30 and you don't need much else.

SUPER FUZZ!!!!

Treble boosters and full-range boosters. Overdrives are made to push an amp over the edge, and most are dandy pushing harder on something that's already falling. Earlier distortions tended to work well before they got all refined to provide a polished distortion sound when played through a pristine clean amp -- think MXR Distortion + and similar hard clipping things and stuff on that line between fuzz and distortion like the Bosstone or a Muff.

I'm guessing that a hell of a lot of classic hard rock and metal sounds that were guessed to be amp mods were the result of pedals pushing the amp that happened to work for the given player. Yes, a lot of mods were probably chasing the sounds of a 9v powered pedal with a primitive op-amp driving a metal-panel Super Lead.

EQD Tone Reaper loves dirty amps. Take an amp on the verge of breakup and bam, instant Bush tones.

^As far as hard rock/metal...just no. You want your distortion from the amp, nuff said. Use a boost pedal to tighten the bottom end or shift the mids, but if you need a distortion pedal you're doing it wrong.

The Singing Tree sounds best when pushing an already gritty amp. Not something thats blowing up, but just a nice little oomph when you hit a chords hard enough. Kick the ST into that thing... oh baby.

treble boosters and TS9. also the zvex machine since it adds distortion on the side of the waveform where there isn't any really. anything that boosts mids will give you interesting results. delay is good in the fx loop of the amp if your already getting distortion from the preamp.

Gone Fission wrote:Earlier distortions tended to work well before they got all refined to provide a polished distortion sound when played through a pristine clean amp -- think MXR Distortion + and similar hard clipping things and stuff on that line between fuzz and distortion like the Bosstone or a Muff.

This is exactly what I was thinking. This was the reason why most of the earlier overdrives where designed... Tubescreamer, OD-1, Distortion+, DOD 250, etc.

Green Jacket wrote:^As far as hard rock/metal...just no. You want your distortion from the amp, nuff said. Use a boost pedal to tighten the bottom end or shift the mids, but if you need a distortion pedal you're doing it wrong.

This isn't necessarily true. Hardly any of the original hard rock/metal guitar gods relied solely on amp distortion... Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, etc.

modernage wrote:

Green Jacket wrote:^As far as hard rock/metal...just no. You want your distortion from the amp, nuff said. Use a boost pedal to tighten the bottom end or shift the mids, but if you need a distortion pedal you're doing it wrong.

This isn't necessarily true. Hardly any of the original hard rock/metal guitar gods relied solely on amp distortion... Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, etc.

I tend to agree on the early hard rock/metal thing. The modern OD trick is to change the gain behavior in a high-gain amp with cascaded tube stages. Before the cascaded gain topologies came around, the pedal was often necessary to get to certain levels of gain and distortion

Gone Fission wrote:

modernage wrote:

Green Jacket wrote:^As far as hard rock/metal...just no. You want your distortion from the amp, nuff said. Use a boost pedal to tighten the bottom end or shift the mids, but if you need a distortion pedal you're doing it wrong.

This isn't necessarily true. Hardly any of the original hard rock/metal guitar gods relied solely on amp distortion... Tony Iommi, Ritchie Blackmore, Jimmy Page, etc.

I tend to agree on the early hard rock/metal thing. The modern OD trick is to change the gain behavior in a high-gain amp with cascaded tube stages. Before the cascaded gain topologies came around, the pedal was often necessary to get to certain levels of gain and distortion

I guess I should have specified. Early 80, moded JCM 800s were rampant every and got the job done just fine, of course with some mods here and there. Mesa basically brought everyone else around the bend with the Mark III IV. With all the modern high gain amps out, the only reason to not go this route is due to the a need of lesser volume.

When were talking about Iommi, Blackmore, Page, this was a totally different amp style. Pedals were need to get the sounds out of these amps.

JTM45 - totally dimed + Plum Crazy Fuzzy Lady = total sonic destruction

Any kind of boost (especially treble boost), fuzz faces, tonebenders all sound great into cranked amps. The TAFM into my Laney VC15 turned up just enough to start breaking up is ear sex.