Pedals that Don't Work (Well) with Some Amps, but are Great on Others?

Fingolfen

Well-known member
While many pedals work great across the board, I'm discovering certain designs play well with my tube amp (Bad Cat Classic Deluxe), but not my solid state amp (Boss Katana).

One pedal I've gotten a lot of requests for is the NG-2 (Nugget Fuzz). Even when built and biased properly seems to sound "meh" on the Katana, but is anything from punchy break-up fuzz to liquid death incarnate on my Bad Cat (that's a good thing, BTW). I have dialed in pretty much my baseline clean settings on the Katana, and the gain may be higher than it needs to be when I run something like a NG-2 through it... so I may play with that some...

Unfortunately I only have the two amps to play with at this point (I don't count my Blackstar tube practice amp).

Has anyone else encountered similar effects with their... effects???
 
I've never played a solid-state amp that reacted well to boost/OD type effects very well. The main one I remember was in my early days of building I showed a Klone I had built to a guitar teacher at the store I was working at, and he chose to plug it into a Blackstar ID:Core modeling amp. Needless to say it sounded like hot garbage.
 
I've never played a solid-state amp that reacted well to boost/OD type effects very well. The main one I remember was in my early days of building I showed a Klone I had built to a guitar teacher at the store I was working at, and he chose to plug it into a Blackstar ID:Core modeling amp. Needless to say it sounded like hot garbage.
My Katana plays pretty nicely with boost and OD most of the time. Klons sound nice, screamers sound nice, anything that takes you into amp breakup can be suspect though!
 
I have an SS Vox practice amp and no overdrive pedal sounds very good with it. But I still use them because what else am I gonna do with all these pedals?

On the other hand everything sounds good with Peavey C30--takes overdrives well.
 
Last edited:
Very interested in this topic since I just picked up a katana to mainly play as a practice amp. I have only plugged my board into it once and it was a mess because I hadn't configured the onboard effects in the right spot. 'twas a shock when I kicked on my fuzz war and the level spiked hard enough to make my ears ring. I am dubious of people who say it reacts like a tube amp.... So far that hasn't felt true... But I have yet to play with any channel but the clean one. Nice sounding amp though.
 
Very interested in this topic since I just picked up a katana to mainly play as a practice amp. I have only plugged my board into it once and it was a mess because I hadn't configured the onboard effects in the right spot. 'twas a shock when I kicked on my fuzz war and the level spiked hard enough to make my ears ring. I am dubious of people who say it reacts like a tube amp.... So far that hasn't felt true... But I have yet to play with any channel but the clean one. Nice sounding amp though.
On the clean channel with some reverb and a little gain, honestly I'll say at almost all effects pedals work as advertised. I can literally count on one hand (with a couple of fingers left over) the pedals that don't play nicely with it.
 
I used to have a 50w Katana and was kind of surprised that I liked the sound of my SD-1 into it. I traded it to a buddy after I got a Vox. Pedals sounded great into the normal channel on the Vox, but the top boost channel would mangle some pedals (Big Muffs for sure). I got rid of the Vox while I was tone chasing and ended up where I'm at now (Orange OR15 and TH30). The OR15 with the drive down takes pedals like a champ. If you push the front end too much it can get flabby/farty though. The TH30 is really weird about pedals. People say the clean channel takes pedals well and the distortion channel doesn't, but I have better luck the other way around as long as the drive is down on the distortion channel. The schematics for the OR15 and TH30 show basically identical preamp sections with tweaked values aside from the different EQs. Seems like lower gain amps with scooped EQ sections like Fenders take pedals a little better.
 
I am going to try to redo my pedalboard today a bit and try some other drives into my katana. I used to play strictly a clean solid state fender and not have too much issue.
 
My main amp is a Yamaha THR10C, the connivence of good tone at low volumes or headphones along with the ability to mix in backing tracks or Truefire courses makes for a happy home life.

My pedals sound better through my valve amp, but not bad through the THR. I am however favouring ‘preamp’ style pedals like the Son of Ben or less coloured pedals like the Mach 1, but this could also be because I’ve ditched the Strat in favour of a Les Paul and Tele.

For fuzzes, going into an OD first rather than straight into the THR seem to be the answer for me.

With all the pedals, I only let them add a hint of level boost, I’m not expecting the THR to have a nice analogue front end that’s going to react nicely like a tube to being kicked. It’ll have an analogue stage then an analogue to digital converter, and the gain knob is not affecting the input signal, but is actually a emulation within the digital domain.
 
For the last year I've only played one amp: a 1972 Acoustic Control Corp. 134. Just last week I fired up my late 90's, BillM modded Blues Jr, and have been having quite a blast. The fun is in reconfiguring settings to fit the amp. I could get just about any pedal to work with the Acoustic...if I balanced everything out. The amps ARE different; they behave different, and sound different by design. It makes perfect sense that the same pedal settings would not work on both amps. The Acoustic has waaaaaay more headroom than the Blues Jr, regardless of the fact that I play the Blues Jr. clean (Master up, Volume down). The Blues Jr, however, has compression. One way I have found to get certain pedals that don't want to play nice with SS to play nice with SS is to run a compressor all the time. Of course, the Acoustic is essentially a Super Reverb...and with the volume up a bit, and the amp REALLY kicking (I'm talking bell-bottoms flapping in the breeze), anything sounds good, proving once and for all that louder is more gooder...
 
Back
Top