Gr8Scott
Wookieologist
For the past four years I've owned a DOD Bifet and I've never found a use for this clean boost. I've never needed more signal to get my guitar's sound to go through long cable runs and I find the sound running direct through the Edana to be just "louder" and not any better or richer in terms of distortion etc. In fact, the sound is not as pleasing when running direct as it is when I turn the thing off to be honest. It's just louder and with a touch more treble if I don't dial back the tone knob a tad. Neat, but hardly useful to me (the livingroom player that I am).
(skip this paragraph if you don't want the backstory and only want the "meat" of the post)
Fast forward to this Friday when my Nephew comes over to play. As some of you may remember, I've been a bit of a mentor in helping this nice fellow to have good gear and good tone to encourage his playing guitar. He brought his strat with a modified David Gilmour EMG set in it (it now has an EMG 81 in the bridge for teh metalz) plus his Metal Zone II pedal. When he plugged into my Edana with his Metal Zone II, he started playing his metal stuff and then I see him reach for his two booster knobs and crank them both to get a slightly more distorted and compressed tone out of his rig. The problem with this is that he not only screwed his EQ up by using both knobs, but he also sent his noise floor through the roof with those two somewhat noisy knobs working in concert. The tone went from metalz to "walkie talkie garbled mess" with the twist of those two knobs. I asked him to stop using the two knobs because it sounded terrible when he did and I couldn't hear his playing. He then went on to express his great desire to get "more and heavier" out of the Metal Zone II and asked if I had a "gain boost" pedal. I used to have a "gain boost" pedal a while back when I had a SFX-03, but I no longer have that pedal. I asked if a clean boost would do and he decided to give it a shot. We plugged the venerable Bifet in between his guitar and the Metal Zone II and suddenly he got his "more and heavier" with a minimal increase in the noise floor and all the clarity that he had without using the active EQ knobs.
It seems that I've been using this pedal wrong all these years. It seems that it's good at kicking PEDALS in the butt and giving them more signal and oomph but not necessarily the front end of the amp itself like I've been trying all these years. Maybe if you're running a JCM-800 or JCM-900 the front end could be well-goosed by such a pedal, but older style amps like my Edana don't seem to sound as good with this pedal smashing the front end to bits. It also didn't seem to help the Marshall Studio 15 either. It really gave my nephew's metal zone II a massive kick and turned it into an instant "randall warhead in a box" with decent clarity.
(skip this paragraph if you don't want the backstory and only want the "meat" of the post)
Fast forward to this Friday when my Nephew comes over to play. As some of you may remember, I've been a bit of a mentor in helping this nice fellow to have good gear and good tone to encourage his playing guitar. He brought his strat with a modified David Gilmour EMG set in it (it now has an EMG 81 in the bridge for teh metalz) plus his Metal Zone II pedal. When he plugged into my Edana with his Metal Zone II, he started playing his metal stuff and then I see him reach for his two booster knobs and crank them both to get a slightly more distorted and compressed tone out of his rig. The problem with this is that he not only screwed his EQ up by using both knobs, but he also sent his noise floor through the roof with those two somewhat noisy knobs working in concert. The tone went from metalz to "walkie talkie garbled mess" with the twist of those two knobs. I asked him to stop using the two knobs because it sounded terrible when he did and I couldn't hear his playing. He then went on to express his great desire to get "more and heavier" out of the Metal Zone II and asked if I had a "gain boost" pedal. I used to have a "gain boost" pedal a while back when I had a SFX-03, but I no longer have that pedal. I asked if a clean boost would do and he decided to give it a shot. We plugged the venerable Bifet in between his guitar and the Metal Zone II and suddenly he got his "more and heavier" with a minimal increase in the noise floor and all the clarity that he had without using the active EQ knobs.
It seems that I've been using this pedal wrong all these years. It seems that it's good at kicking PEDALS in the butt and giving them more signal and oomph but not necessarily the front end of the amp itself like I've been trying all these years. Maybe if you're running a JCM-800 or JCM-900 the front end could be well-goosed by such a pedal, but older style amps like my Edana don't seem to sound as good with this pedal smashing the front end to bits. It also didn't seem to help the Marshall Studio 15 either. It really gave my nephew's metal zone II a massive kick and turned it into an instant "randall warhead in a box" with decent clarity.
