Distortion pedal on the distortion channel

"Overkill" is the word that springs immediately to mind......

:D :D :D

Vic

Muddy's it up too much for me, I can't tell what's from the amp and what's from the stompbox. I'll stick to the clean input and then I know what's going on.

Best,

A :-)

Absolutely totally superbly disagree. I can see nothing wrong at all with using a pedal to boost an amp that's overdriving. Overkill has to do with the total ammount of gain applied, which can be done with the channel or pedal alone. Using a pedal on the clean channel means you must get all the drive from it (unless it's a tube amp that overdrives quickly and you just pump the output of the guitar with the pedal) which usually doesn't sound as good as a proper amp. But that's just me. :)

Maybe that sound can be achieved by doing nothing but simply blowing off the speaker and then playing through it :twisted:

No, that actually just sounds like crap, despite the myths around it. Which is why people these days just buy proper amps instead of slicing speakers.

When I play metal, I play with the paul stanley. It has high output pickups. I always play with my most treble setting on the guitar, which is the bridge. Then I put a Digitech Death Metal Distortion infront of my epi valve special, turn the level up on the digitech. I turn my master way down and my gain about 4 oclock, and I get all the crunch and harmonics I would ever want. The nice thing is Instead of mudding up it gets nice and crisp.

Back before fuzz boxes (what we called the first distortion pedals) many guitarists used to slit the speaker cone with a razor blade to get distortion, myself included. Many times it worked very well. You did what you could.

I have used distortion pedals into the distortion channel on my amp as a boost. I will turn gain way down on the pedal, so really it is a clean boost. But this will give you extra volume and sustain for a solo. Using distortion into the distortion channel usually does not sound so great, but heh, if you like it that's all that matters.

before i moved, i had a distortion pedal and a distortion wah pedal. on certain songs, i'd start with the gain on my amp turned up and play a nice riff on the guitar, then at certain points, turn on the distortion on one one pedal, then on the other and really wallop the guitar, making a really heavy wall of sound effect, which would usually make the singer scream his head off, as he'll react to basically anything, then i'd turn off the pedals as we'd get to the bridge or the next verse and go back to the simple riff. it really created kind of a nirvana-esque dynamic change, plus it was fun as hell to do.
or i'd use it like wes, as a volume boost during solos, but i'd keep the gain high, since they kind of sucked out the clean tone, so you might as well have a distinct sound during the solos.

Hehehe, that was my main sound back in the 80s. Distortion+ into a Carvin X100B head and two 12s. I'd set the D+ at full distortion (and I refer to it as a fuzz box too, because of the hard edgy sound), but have the level so it was just a tiny bit louder than when it was off. I also used it standalone into the clean channel, but for the ZZ Top or other 'wild' type whammy bar solos and stuff, I'd click on the Lead channel of the amp, click on the Distortion+, and hit the wah pedal. To me it was an incredible sound - with that much gain (not loud though), and the wah engaged, you could get feedback at any note by working the wah, or just turning your body a little bit. The regular channel distortion was great in itself (the X100Bs were like JCM 800s I hear), but the fuzz box put just a little 'edge' on the sound, sorta focused it without making it that much louder, and then the wah pedal focused it even more, but allowed you to sweep slowly through the overtones (I guess), until you found a note that would float off into complete feedback.

And then click the wah and fuzz off (on the beat) until you get to the chorus.

I've even put the Distortion+ through the POD's JCM 800 model, and that's pretty wild - except I can't get feedback through the headphones ;)

But I think it has to do with using it through a tube amp; like the odd harmonics love mixing in with the even ones.

I usually have my Keeley DS-1 run with full distortion over a medium gain overdrive - I use warm tone and neck pickup. I find it sounds really amazing. Real thick and rich with huuuge sustain.

With two channel amps, one channel set kind of dirty and the other not so dirty, I use one or two different distortion boxes with several amps going at once and an A/B pedal plus my footswitches for the amps. There is a lot going on, but I can get a lot of different sounds for many different songs and ideas.