TUTORIAL Why Your Clean Blends Suck ... or "How to (Clean) Blend"

[jesuscrisp]

My point here is that unless you are going for a very weird tone, putting a clean blend around a dirt pedal takes a lot of knowledge and effort. Or maybe you'll just get lucky.

If it's a standalone dirt pedal to be used into a clean amp I agree. If it's something you run into a dirty or heavily distorted amp/signal chain and you just want a way to make an extreme sounding pedal less extreme or get back some dynamics/definition, it's not all that complicated.

Which is why in the following case...

Let's look at an extreme case (I actually tried this one): Put a clean blend around a BMP. Suppose we set the Blend so that with very loud notes, the clean and dirty signals have the same volume. We'll hear a medium dirty signal that quickly decays into a very dirty signal. Not amp-like in the least. Let's set the Blend so that with loud notes, clean dominates. We'll hear a mostly clean signal that quickly decays into a very dirty signal. Even more unnatural. We could set the Blend so that the dirty signal always dominates, but that will sound the same as a purely dirty signal with no clean blend.

... you wouldn't care so much about all that playing through something already dirty, as the distortion later in the signal chain compresses your clean and dirty signals both together.

And again here...

Putting two dirt pedals circuits in parallel has the same problem because the gain, compression and EQ of the two circuits will be different, otherwise what's the point?

... if playing into a dirty amp you can feed it a composite of two different distorted signals and get different textures and mix of frequencies.


But yes, none of these are about getting natural amp-like response and not every pedal will benefit from a clean blend like so many guitarists may think.

 

[thunderaxe]

i've put a clean blend on a big muff style pedal, and the way someone else described it to me -- and i agree with them -- is that it doesn't really sound so much like you're mixing a clean signal back in with the dirty signal, but rather just that you get your transients and dynamics back. and i do find that really valuable.

 

[D.M.N.]

Thought I'd post this here, PRR on diystompboxes I believe came up with a schematic for a simplified ROG Split n Blend:

Note incorrect labelling on U1B.

As primarily a bassist, I like having a blend on distortion/fuzz, but a full frequency blend can end up sounding more like two signals, and I prefer to have my highs effected and the lows retained without retention of the clean highs, so my though is to put a LPF in the clean path to roll some of the highs out of the clean. Put the settings on internal trimmers so you don't need additional pots, just set and forget. I suppose you could also put a corresponding HPF at the start of the effect path as well for more tunability of what is being effected vs what is kept clean.

 

[Chuck D. Bones]

i've put a clean blend on a big muff style pedal, and the way someone else described it to me -- and i agree with them -- is that it doesn't really sound so much like you're mixing a clean signal back in with the dirty signal, but rather just that you get your transients and dynamics back. and i do find that really valuable.

The main feature of a BMP is extreme compression. If you don't want that, then maybe a different pedal might do what you want better? I know we all have different tastes and a clean blend on a BMP was not to my liking at all.

I suppose that when you take all of the stacked pedals and amp into account, the clean blend is not as bad as I describe. Just seems to me that there would be an easier way to get there. Circuits like the TS and BB have the clean bleed built-in to the distortion stage. The Swollen Pickle's CRUNCH knob is a variable clean bleed on the 2nd distortion stage. The CLIP trimpot is a variable clean bleed on the first distortion stage.

Apologies BtR for hijacking your thread.

 

[thunderaxe]

for me, what i'm chasing in a big muff is that creamy siamese dreamy sound, but with greater clarity and articulation, and the ability to play complex chords without it turning into mud. i know that might be impossible and those might be diametrically opposed goals, but i've found a couple of ways to reconcile them, and a clean blend is one of them. also, it's a keeley rotten apple, which has a lot more lower-gain overdrive kind of tones in its range, and especially for bass it's nice to be able to blend together clean and overdrive.