FluffChop
New member
I post this under amps because it really is the front end of a great tube amp.
Been loving this pedal, maybe got it down to a big liking by now having owned it for about 9 months. There are tales of the valves giving up the ghost at about a year etc., I'm prepared to replace those myself, got a few tech skills under the belt.
What I really like about it is that it is indeed a purely tube driven circuit. It responds as it is, a tube preamp section, and into a clean amp for home use it's entirely useable and sounds pretty tasty at lower level volumes.
I did have a Twin Tube Blue before this and I really was and wasn't impressed. The mild breakup, cleaner to slightly driven blues sounds were great, but the lead channel was very woolly and not suited to the sort of fairly saturated lead tones I often like to pursue. The Classic on the other hand is wide open and full of rich harmonic content, not all muffled and muddied at higher gain settings.
Personally if I was the designer I might have used full sized preamp tubes so one could easily swap them out for different sounds rather than needing to perform some soldering wizardry on the little legs of those sub-miniature valves that it has, but hey that's just how it is, and it makes it more compact.
I love how when compared to for example a Tube Screamer or Crunch Box it isn't all harsh and cold sounding on it's own into a dead clean amp. That's the tubes giving the right sort of tube breakup and any solid state silicon diode based pedal just sounds so harsh to me that I really can't use anything else but this pedal. I have a Diamond Compressor in front of it that I very rarely use to give some extra sustain to the rhythm channel for some more driven blues leads. Really the pedal on it's own is a perfect unit for grabbing a wide range of gain tones especially if you like to work the guitar volume and tone controls.
I highly recommend this pedal for those with a one channel amp like I have. In my case it's a Vox Night Train 15H with the matching cab using a Tone Tubby Alnico Red. I have modified my NT slightly to remove the treble peaking and also give the 2nd gain stage an octave shift lower in the bass response. With this pedal and my Les Paul Traditional I'm pretty happy with the tones I get.
Been loving this pedal, maybe got it down to a big liking by now having owned it for about 9 months. There are tales of the valves giving up the ghost at about a year etc., I'm prepared to replace those myself, got a few tech skills under the belt.
What I really like about it is that it is indeed a purely tube driven circuit. It responds as it is, a tube preamp section, and into a clean amp for home use it's entirely useable and sounds pretty tasty at lower level volumes.
I did have a Twin Tube Blue before this and I really was and wasn't impressed. The mild breakup, cleaner to slightly driven blues sounds were great, but the lead channel was very woolly and not suited to the sort of fairly saturated lead tones I often like to pursue. The Classic on the other hand is wide open and full of rich harmonic content, not all muffled and muddied at higher gain settings.
Personally if I was the designer I might have used full sized preamp tubes so one could easily swap them out for different sounds rather than needing to perform some soldering wizardry on the little legs of those sub-miniature valves that it has, but hey that's just how it is, and it makes it more compact.
I love how when compared to for example a Tube Screamer or Crunch Box it isn't all harsh and cold sounding on it's own into a dead clean amp. That's the tubes giving the right sort of tube breakup and any solid state silicon diode based pedal just sounds so harsh to me that I really can't use anything else but this pedal. I have a Diamond Compressor in front of it that I very rarely use to give some extra sustain to the rhythm channel for some more driven blues leads. Really the pedal on it's own is a perfect unit for grabbing a wide range of gain tones especially if you like to work the guitar volume and tone controls.
I highly recommend this pedal for those with a one channel amp like I have. In my case it's a Vox Night Train 15H with the matching cab using a Tone Tubby Alnico Red. I have modified my NT slightly to remove the treble peaking and also give the 2nd gain stage an octave shift lower in the bass response. With this pedal and my Les Paul Traditional I'm pretty happy with the tones I get.
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