Prompt questions:
What do you do for work, or what are you studying towards
Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)
Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)
Best meal you’ve had
Best place you’ve visited
Prompt questions:
What do you do for work, or what are you studying towards
Musical recommendations (bonus points for metal)
Useless tidbit you know (bonus points for citing sources)
Best meal you’ve had
Best place you’ve visited
That’s wild about the tube screamer, given the chubbies pedal heads get over them.
I haven’t had a pedal with a tube yet, but I’ve got a Wampler Pinnacle deluxe that covers some ground that my Supersonic 22 can’t do.
That second recommendation is outstanding. First one is good, too but more prog than I usually go for. I like prog, but I’m so far down the atmospheric black metal rabbit hole it’s dizzying.
Fuck I love me some atmoblack. It’s honestly my biggest inspiration as a musician. But I’ve been jamming tech death lately because it helps me study. I gotta recommend Mare Cognitum for a heavier atmoblack sound, and Trna for an instrumental post-black metal expanse.
I keep a Tube Screamer clone in my arsenal precisely because it’s not a very “tube-like” sound. It is midsy and crisp. Like 95% of all metal recordings are done with a Tube Screamer, 5150, and Vintage 30s, or digital clones thereof. It’s a dream to play, but that’s kinda why I’m trying to move away from it as a guitarist. But as a producer, it’s a really nice tool for the toolkit. Also if I was playing tech death or something where I’m at the limit of my skill level, I’d probably rock a Tube Screamer so stuff is easier to play.
Also though, I believe that historically it was marketed as “tube sound without the tubes” early in its life. Which, compared to some of the alternatives available at the time, did come a little closer to tube amps’ softer clipping.
But IMO as a metal player and electrical engineer, I think that whether or not your distortion is generated by tube, transistor, or simulation isn’t that important [1] compared to properly tailored filters at every stage, especially the “tone stack”, at least not for metal players or people who play with “fully saturated” distortion. For this reason, I’m absolutely not afraid to use solid state amps if they sound good, and for metal they absolutely can sound better in the mix.
And even though tube distortion pedals do literally have a tube in the signal chain, they are probably not being run at a high enough voltage to actually be the source of distortion. You’d have to check the schematic to be sure. So there’s no benefit to getting a tube distortion pedal in general, and tubes have microphonics and just electrically kinda suck. Tube amps are great, but again, it’s more because of the various filters and the fact that the saturating nonlinearity exists at all rather than that the nonlinearity is generated by a specific device, so long as you use fresh tubes because old tubes do deteriorate an amplifier’s performance. But also, tube amps are “warm” without any further filtering, and I typically find that “warm” amps have trouble standing out in a metal mix. Hence why when I (and other metal players) pick tube amps, I pretty much exclusively use amplifiers (and their simulations) that filter out that warmness, which shows up in metal as muddy garbage.
[1] Assuming you’re using monotonic distortion characteristics like soft and hard clipping, power laws, exponential. Non-monotonic distortion characteristics (like a sine or Chebyshev polynomial) sound whack and I really wish that more metal guitarists would check them out.
Holy cow.
That was more signal chain theory that I’ve ever read in one sitting. Really cool. Hard to follow a bit, but I get the gist.
Source of distortion doesn’t really matter, it’s filters
TS808 cleans shit up, no tubes. Tubes not necessary and probably dont do much in a pedal anyway
What are you running now for amps and such got get away from the 5150/TS808 combo?
As an aside, I had a Blues Jr. Mark II (2006ish?) that was god awful before I got the supersonic. That thing was so shrill it fired laser beams at my head. SS22 is a brilliant amp IMO. Gets a bit fizzy (thin, fuzzy distortion) at the top end of the gain, but overall rock solid, and the second gain stage is great for fattening up a single coil or for making it sound like you’re murdering a Tweed 57.
Mare is an amazing atmo band!
Sorry 😂. Digital signal processing is one of my special interests so I typically go overboard with it.
Yep that’s it.
In the “before times”, I used a TBX150 solid state amp alone, and a Peavey 6505, mostly for recording. The TBX150 is a great amp for modern death metal, but it has a parametric EQ. For me, that’s great, but a lot of guitarists don’t like the metal zone because it has a parametric EQ. For both, I plugged them into a cheap birch Seismic cabinet with a Vintage 30 speaker harvested from a Recto cab. Honestly, the biggest factor in the quality of my guitar recordings was switching to that speaker.
At this very moment, since my grandmother moved in, I’ve had to forgo amps altogether for simulators. I actually use either a 6505 simulator (Nick Crowe 8505) or a Fender Frontman (yes, that amp, specifically the AXP Softamp plugin) with the mids cranked up and the cabinet impulse thrown out and replaced with a set of impulses I recorded myself from the previously mentioned cabinet.
The best results I’ve gotten have been with using an EQ before a Boss HM-2 (Buzz Helvetes) set to… however much “HM-2-ness” you want in the EQ depending on what you’re playing, and the smallest possible offset from zero distortion. The pre-EQ is typically a bandpass so I can get more “grinding” and as a cheat for not changing my strings. But, it doesn’t really change the “overall” frequency response of the output of the HM-2, just how the HM-2 “sees” your guitar, so you still get its nastyness. Then the majority of the gain comes from the amp.
If an HM-2 or Metal Zone is too much, I’ve gotten really “smooth” results with using the ProCo Rat as an overdrive. Note that on a ProCo Rat, the Filter (tone) knob “is backwards”; all the way to the left = minimal filtering.
My inspiration for this is really the fact that old school death metal was recorded on shitty gear compared to what is available today, and that some of the magic lies in the fact that it sucks in just the right way. Besides At the Gates who used two shitty pedals, Chuck Schuldinger from Death used a shitty Valvestate and got great results. Most of the old school death metal bands were using Valvestates.
In the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with using the RS-MET tool chain plugin to generate nasty sounding distortion with odd-order Chebyshev polynomials. It initially sounds like a more unhinged Boss HM-2 with no pre or post eq, but since the plugin lets you input the math you want to do, it’s much more controllable. If you use this plugin, you gotta make sure to set the built-in filters to cut off high frequencies that will be aliased, or turn on oversampling, or both. This is included within the plugin, but you have to actually set it. Otherwise, everything just sounds like aliasing, although that’s pretty gnarly too.
So the short answer is: switch out a tube screamer for some garbage piece of gear, preferably something with a frequency response (loosely “tone”) you like and a “bold” distortion. Then, set the pedal so it is giving the least amount of gain while still exhibiting its nonlinearity (minimum possible distortion), then set the amplifier to give you the rest of your gain and cut through the mix. I cannot stress enough that for metal guitars, particularly recording guitars, you gotta set your knobs so that it sounds good in the mix. If it sounds perfect in the room without the rest of the band, I guarantee you it will sound muddy in the mix.
I love how into this stuff you are. It’s like me cornering people and talking about soil science, geomorphology, or anything environmentally related.
I bet your setup sounds amazing since you know your shit cold. Your comments must be like nuclear bombs dropping on scrubs in persnickety guitar forums.
T O A N W O O D Z…
Mildly related, but I want to throw a creamback or something similar into my SS22, if I get time. I actually took about a 5 year hiatus from guitar because of kids. I’m starting to get back into it now though and I forgot how healthy of a habit it is for me.