Re: Plexitone from the inside.
but I wish you'd give us your opinions on some of the lesser known Carl Martin pedals, like the Crunchdrive, Rockdrive, Heavydrive, and the differences between the Hot Drive'n'Boost 1,2,&3. Thanks!
Well the old 9v line is not my fave stuff for sure, I like the Boostkick best of them, but the three 9v drives I think that the rockdrive is the most useful for most people, the differences are too small to really justify the two others, but I am not the one who decides what goes and stays, but I would kill off the whole line if it was me.
And make a whole new od and stuff it into one of the new pedal boxes, and I am actually just doing that along with another guy at work.
The HDB's, hehe yeah the first and original one is quite a good overdrive, very British in style, quite transperant a typical 90's overdrive sound, delicate and crispy, does not have alot of lowend to it, it has lots of drive compared to a TS-style od and the cleanbooster as well, through a good amp this is my fave of them all.
The MKII has more bottomend and a harder more American tubby sound to it, Mesa like to me, my least favorite HDB, it also likes an good amp.
The MK3 I made with Thomas, so that one I like alot on vintage fat amps, gives a good warm drive and has the same amount of bottom end as the MKII, it just sounds better to me, it uses 4 3mm LED's instead of the usual IN4448 diodes we use.
But the whole line is about to get revamped, perhaps down to only two types of overdrive.
Got a few very good designs in the works there, primary thing was to make them more fat and lively, they will blend in a very different way from what they do now, I use the big Hiwatt set on a very clean sound for this, that ensures that they can drive a big amp and still produce lots of harmonic fun stuff without playing loud, I set out to make them useful with both singlecoils and humbuckers, make them less dependant on a good amp, in other words they colour the sound a great deal more than their ancestors
Transparent drives are only useful for a very few amps!
On the rest they simply become buzzy and raspy because the amp is not up and working the tubes, or simply is to thinsounding in its nature.
The times are changing back to pedals having a life on their own, and I think it is a good thing, that is why I like effect pedals so much, they ought to colour sound in my opinion.
