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Hey all, i need to pick the brains of the more experienced fuzz users. I have a problem where i have an old SS Laney amp which i can pretty well plug anything into the front end of (fuzz, distortion, OD) and use any guitar in any tuning and it sounds great. However i really struggle to replicate this with my modern valve amps (IRT studio and HT5). The clean channel always sounds nasal unless i crank it, then on low tuned guitars there is a small window before it turns into a horrible woofy overloaded mess. Using the gain channels with low gain it is better, but ends up with too much gain with pedal kicked in! Pedal are a 78 big muff, swollen pickle, tonebender clone plus various distortion pedals. I also have to keep the level on pedal really low? Thoughts or advice would be HUGELY appreciated!

My advice would be to find a cheap old valve head to your liking. I have a peavey 6505+ that for the life of me can not get to take nice to pedals. I gave up, you can polish a turd but in the end it's still a piece o shit.

If funds are an issue, maybe make friends with a peavey vtm.

If you got 5 hundo, find you an old traynor, cant go wrong.

Yeah, it's just that finding a good sounding tube amp that works good with all your peds can be sort of a trial and error thing. Though there's plenty of affordab options out there that work amazingly well with fuzz. I'be always been curious about the PV VTM. And I have a Traynor YBA-1 that handles fuzz like a boss. Even though it's not your typical super powerfull mega clean headroom kinda pedal platform.

I know a lot of amps can be pretty finicky, especially with dirt and boosts out front, but have you tried EQing the amp a little bit different? I was using my Laney AOR with pretty much all the controls and boosts and shit dimed (because it sounded huge) but it caused a million other problems, so I ended up turning everything down (except for the mids). I notice a few of your pedals are circuits with a known mid scoop; you might try cutting some bass and boosting some mids?

Also, I'm using a shitty old Line 6 Spider III at home for practice with pedals, and the clean channel also sounds a little thin and weird with the volume low, but once I hit a certain volume it sounds fine. Come to think of it, I'm not even using the actual clean channel, I took one of the dirt channels and set it clean, because I found the normal clean channel a little too sterile. Some of the issue may also be related to how loud you're playing. I've found with many amps (tube or not) that louder usually just sounds "better". More air is moving, things sound more responsive and open, etc.

I would try every major permutation of settings on the two amps in question before you decide to jump ship. You may well jump ship anyway later, but no reason to do it right away.






Unless you're just itching for a new amp. :P

I'm not familiar with the amps you have, but sometimes swapping your first 12AX7 tube(s) in the preamp to something like a 5751 or a 12AT7 will work wonders.
At home I use an Ampeg GVT5, which sounded ok with pedals with the stock preamp tube, but going to the 5751 allowed it to gain a bit of headroom and now it respond to pedals with massive output beautifully. The trade-off may be a little bit of volume loss.

Thanks guys, that some useful hints and suggestions. Gonna start with messing with eq first as i set the amps up to sound as I like for amp gain, but don't mess with it with the pedals so much so thats us good (and free) start point!

Yeah typically you want to avoid having any amp gain if you want it to sound good with pedals -- eventually it just gets too square wave-y and sounds like garbage.

Typically, eventually, and garbage all being subjective, of course.

cab and speakers makes a big difference here too.

Interestingly, I picked up a madebymike Dreambox in a trade today and that worked perfect through the IRT studio. So I think the solution is there. Using the 15w input seems to also help

Not really knowing your amps, but would also be worth trying certain combos of presence and resonance settings if the options are available.

braaandooon wrote:Not really knowing your amps, but would also be worth trying certain combos of presence and resonance settings if the options are available.

Tweaking the eq and increasing headroom with 15w setting has made big difference. Starting to feel the sounds are in there now!