Overdrive into a fat, but not filthy, tube amp (with no master volume control of course, turn the bleedin' amp up...). Distortion = compression, which is the enemy of my agression. And aggresion is the real rock sound that will nail people to the back wall, not that great pile of tizzy fuzzy distortion that people think sounds so huge in their bedrooms. Yeah, i'm a dinosaur and proud of it.
I use the same old Boss overdrive pedal i have for over 20 years. I've tweaked it along the way. It ain't about the pedals. If ya wanna sound mean, play mean. I remember back in the eighties, all the little girly-boy, big-haired, pointy-guitar wielding sissies waving their puny little fists at me in video clips and music magazine advertising. I used to want to step in to those scenes and tear their girly heads right off their spandex-clad little bodies. Around that time, i saw a clip of the reformed Johhny Kidd and The Pirates, featuring Mick Green on guitar. They were an old English rock institution, and were probably well into their forties then. Mick Green was a huge influence on many of the older British guitar legends. Now....these guys were truly frightening.....just huuuuge raw sounding rock....i met a guy who played drums for them once and told him how i found them truly intimidating, and he told me that, yeah, they were....in rreal life, when they weren't playing, they would be house-breaking (English term for robbing people's homes). In other words, they were the real deal. No pretending, no hiding.
So i learnt along the way, through playing and from doing live FOH sound engineering.....the more distorted someone sounds on stage, the less it projects out the front, it just compresses and sucks back and can't get forward in the mix no matter how many thousands of watts of PA reinforcement they are given.
Basically, ya gotta play with yer balls hanging out. Tear the stinking frets off yer guitar until yer fingers bleed. If i see one more fairy-fingered tw@ trying to be aggressive but tickling the fretboard with the lowest action known to man and a doctorate in distortion devices snarling in my direction, i will pull either their, or my own, skull clean out of their/my head and play soccer with it in the street.
Byaaaarrgh, ! **** the pansies !!! Ya gotta feel the veins in yer teeth, son !!!
edit : i'm not advocating becoming a criminal to get a more ballsy sound, hehe.
