Re: What is the 'best' distortion on minimum setting?
Yeah i understand the problem distortion and chord extensions. Most stompboxes have a certain frequency that they accentuate or clip heavily at. They tend to squash chords because all the complex overtones of each note get eaten when the diodes clip. If you play any pedal long enough they all seem to do this. This is fine for rock players because they dont often play chords with upper extensions, and very rarely play chord melody. The really modern sounding pedals that give you a huge, defined epic heavy drop tune sound work great for power chords, but not so well for half diminished. min (maj7) or 7b9 or 7#5 or #11. A nice, lightly overdriven tube amp can accomodate more complex voicings if the preamp tubes are not overdriven too heavily (think kenny burrell and his deluxe reverb). For some reason tubes seem to be able to handle more harmonic complexity when saturated than solid state gear (like clipping diodes) but this is not what you are asking i guess. You want to know which pedal is the most musical, in that it can reproduce complex harmonies. A simple tube screamer seems to work the best possibly because of two factors.
1. It does not offer a lot of gain so clipping is not too hard.
2. It tends to reproduce the mid frequencies rather than the top/bottom scooped sound like many pedals (eg boss ds1 etc). As a result the fundamental note is reproduced with less overtones. Less overtones = less clashing of harmonics = less complexity in each note = complex chord tones are reproduced more clearly.
So yeah - the lighter the drive and the less scopped sounding, the better chord extensions seem to work.
Best option: lightly overdriven all tube amp. Power amp saturation works better than preamp saturation.
Best option if you absolutely cant use a nice amp and have to use a pedal: Tube Screamer.
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