Guitar Gear

Late last night, I was lurking (and posting) on my favorite gear forum The Gear Page, when I ran across this thread: Stacking ODs? where a player was asking if anyone had stacked any overdrives. I’ve been doing this for years with different pedal combinations, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Through my experiments, I found that stacking works best on amps that have a much more open distortion character; that is, the power tubes don’t compress too much. For instance, I tried this on an Aracom Custom 45R that KT-66’s in it, and the compression was so intense that it sucked away all the tone. When Jeff swapped out the tubes with 6L6’s, it was a totally different story. However, I’ve gotten the best results with amps based on either 6V6’s or EL84’s. These tubes don’t compress the signal as much when they saturate as their bigger siblings and maintain a much more open distortion character.

To hear what stacked OD’s sound like, here’s a clip I took out of a song I’ve been working on. Here’s the signal path:

Strat -> Tube Screamer -> Holy Fire -> Mk.4.23 Booster -> Reason SM25

The TS overdrive is set at about 2pm, the Holy Fire’s overdrive is set a 12, with distortion just past 2pm, and the Mk.4.23 booster is dimed for an extra 24db of boost. 🙂  The SM25 is StackMode (both channels run in a series with an extra gain stage), with gain at about 12. Here’s what it sounds like:

This is the raw, unmastered track. It’s really aggressive, but as you can see, it’s not super-compressed.

Update

I’m probably going to buy a Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret in the next couple of days. This pedal was made for stacking, much like the Creation Audio Labs Holy Fire. It’ll be interesting to see what it’s like on my board.