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Just curious if anyone has had much/any experience with any valve-driven pedals out there.

I guess this could go a few ways: Tube Preamp Pedals, Tube Overdrives, Tube Distortions, Tube Boosts.

Aware of:

Pres:
Verellen Meatsmoke
Verellen Skyhammer
Faustone Valve Clipper

Drives:
EBS Valve Drive
Fryette SAS

Misc:
Trogotronic 77 (noise-related)

Just wondering if anyone has tried any that aren't as astronomically expensive, and your thoughts about them?

Thinking about two possible uses if I was to investiage one: at the end of my chain to act as a second channel, or to treat it just like any sort of drive/fuzz/distortion and place it normally in the chain.

Any recommendations for semi-affordable tube pedals? It seems like most of the cheaper ones don't actually run on full voltage.

I'd like to have this discussion!

There used to be a line of pedals called Tube Works that offered several different flavors of tube-based overdrive. I'm looking on ebay and it looks like you can get them for under $200 pretty easily. No idea if they're any good.

oh also the Vox Cooltron series.

And I know Jero is all about the FLIP line of tube based pedals as well. I hope he chimes in!

Trogotronic 77.

Hahaha I miss that guy! Was hard to get a straight up drive tone out of it, but when I did, it was great!

EHX has the Tube Zipper and the English Muffn --

I have no experience with either, but that zipper looks like it could be pretty cool to mess around with for noise/drone. Jared rocked a muffn for like a hundred years, so maybe he can chime in.

I have a Mesa Bottlerocket.

It's pretty sweet. Sounds like amp gain to me.
I hated it at first, but over time I swapped tubes and learned how the tone controls work.

Goes from cleanish to heavy gain. has nice low end.......can be overpowering if not dialed in properly. Good natural mids too.......

Bonus is that it's really really great as a bass preamp for direct recording. just plain awesome.

I haven't tried too many others.......EH Tube Zipper....some shitty fake tube Vox pedal.

Would kill for a Mesa V-Twin preamp pedal.

Not cheap:
Metasonix (drive, fuzz, booster, filter, Ring Mod)
Effectrode (drive, fuzz, vibe, boost, phaser trem, etc.)
SIB! (Delay, drive, preamp)
VT amps (trem & drive)

Drives & preamps: Fischer amps, tubeman,Mesa v-twin, Amt, ebs, engl. etc.

spacelordmother wrote:EHX has the Tube Zipper and the English Muffn --

I have no experience with either, but that zipper looks like it could be pretty cool to mess around with for noise/drone. Jared rocked a muffn for like a hundred years, so maybe he can chime in.

I see these being flipped for super cheap all the time on CL.....

That's all I got.

I'd like to give that Flip Tube Echo a shot. Looks to be around $300 new.

All the Kingsley pedals are tube-based, and not the usual starved tube design of EHX, Fryette SAS, etc. They start around $250 but are well built and in my experience sound great. I had the Squire preamp and dug it quite a bit, but it sounds like you'd want more of an OD.

There is also this thing I found recently and have been considering buying but am gunshy for some reason: http://reverb.com/item/58419-bravo-audi ... boost-nice

I've been using a bad cat 2 tone tube preamp pedal with peavey 5150 in the past, and now a 6505+, its pretty much used as my rythym channel in both of those setups, if theres one negative i could think of with the high gain peaveys is that the clean channels are pretty sterile, although the 6505+ clean is definatly usable. For my purposes i run the pedal preamp in my effects loop with time based effects after the preamp pedal. Still run all my dirt and drive to the front of the head, outside of that i run an old boss ns2 in 4cm to tie it all together. I've also tried the soldano gto supercharger preamp pedal, which is basically the unit that sold me on the fact that "real" tube preamp pedals make a perfect crutch for a dual or tri channel amp, with a bunch of useless channels. I emphasize "real" because some of these tube pedals are just souped up leds running at small voltages.

I'm sure theres other uses for them, but I just ordered a correct sound model t preamp pedal, that will hopefully arrive soon, and I'm entertaining the idea of running my bad cat 2 tone preamp pedal, and the model t preamp pedal into a slave unit, an electric slave running 6550's would be ideal... now if i could only spring for one of those verellen meatsmoke tube pedals

DHA in England makes some decently priced ones. I had a custom 2 channel one at one point. A single channel one wouldn't be too expensive.

There's the Ibanez Tube King and Hughes and Kettner has a tube series (Tube Factor, Tubeman,...). Both seem to be pretty affordable on ebay (around 100-120 for the Ibanez, around 130-150 for H&K Tube Factor). Don't know if they are any good but I know Lee Ranaldo used both at certain points in Sonic Youth.

The Blackstar HT-Series Pedals (HT Drive, ...) are not that expensive and sound good, imo.