Your best and worst pedal hot takes? 🔥

Coda said:
I have incredible sounding builds that I refuse to keep on the board because my stepped bit was a bit old and it slipped a little on the footswitch…
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Same! I've also used a file to slot something to center in the rare case when drilling the hole "one bigger" doesn't do the trick. Those white plastic washers do have a purpose (sometimes)!
 
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benny_profane said:
Are circuits with a ton of panel controls better suited for low-volume bedroom players than stage volume?
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that's a thought i've pondered a bit.
and not just panel controls on a pedal, but on tube amps as well, PCB/turretboard/whatever. (e.g. friedman/ceriatone).

a device with lots of controls and switches, no matter how well built, gives me an irrational anxiety/concern about potential points of minute signal degradation, or possible failure entirely. it's really dumb, i know.
and then to make that worse, the whole thing about having the shortest possible signal pathway, via minimum number of components etc., really gets in my head, and with all of that, for some reason i just feel more confident/at peace playing through a rig with less shit on it.

i.e.
- i love that my SLO 40W build only has 7 knobs, no mode switches, 1 channel, and no FX loop.
- it gives me the heebie-jeebies that my SLO100 clone has x3 switches, x5 optocouplers, and the FX loop is constantly in series with the audio pathway.

of course none of it matters, i'm just an idiot, that SLO100 build functions perfectly.
 
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owlexifry said:
that's a thought i've pondered a bit.
and not just panel controls on a pedal, but on tube amps as well, PCB/turretboard/whatever. (e.g. friedman/ceriatone).

a device with lots of controls and switches, no matter how well built, gives me an irrational anxiety/concern about potential points of minute signal degradation, or possible failure entirely. it's really dumb, i know.
and then to make that worse, the whole thing about having the shortest possible signal pathway, via minimum number of components etc., really gets in my head, and with all of that, for some reason i just feel more confident/at peace playing through a rig with less shit on it.

i.e.
- i love that my SLO 40W build only has 7 knobs, no mode switches, and no FX loop.
- it gives me the heebie-jeebies that my SLO100 clone has x3 switches, x5 optocouplers, and the FX loop is constantly in series with the audio pathway.

of course none of it matters, i'm just an idiot, that SLO100 build functions perfectly.
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Brian May agrees with you.

 
benny_profane said:
The "doom" amp-in-a-box is silly. "Doom" amps are basically old, dark jazz amps that get tremendously loud without breaking up. None of that is recreated in a pedal.
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I agree with you to the extent that you’re correct about the difference and how silly it is. But it’s just a marketing trend that works.

Hell it’s made me some easy sales, as almost every doom marketed pedal is a derivative of a Rat, Acapulco Gold, or sunn preamp. Most egregious are the AG and rat derivatives that aren’t really derivatives so much as clones with a custom board.

Also to this point as someone who very much doesn’t “get” the Doom craze I’m close to it via friends and thus have been bothered by it as well. Despite the profits I’ve made from it. And the funniest part to me is I traced out two different Sunn amps and a peavy 400 just to make pedals thinking these guys would eat it up. They still all want rats and AG designs.
 
spi said:
Dual overdrive pedals are a bad idea. In the best case you'll love both sides, but sometimes one side will just be better than the other and you're stuck with a side you don't care for. But in both cases, having the two singles is superior.
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Not in total disagreement with you, but I’ve made some decent money off of bassists specifically from one random dual drive I made early on when learning to design from scratch.

Unintentionally it’s similar to the grey channel, just based off a different source and the channels don’t switch they stack.

Still not my favorite concept as a guitar player but the things bassists will buy with purpose is so much broader than guitarists in my experience. I’ve had one customer order like 7 different custom designs at a premium because he realized the slight upcharge is less than chasing tone at the store
 
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Joben Magooch said:
  • I like the white washers.
  • I think in a lot of cases “pedal overdrive” sounds better than amp overdrive. Plenty of cases where an amp sounds great as the primary means of dirt, just being pushed by a pedal for sure… but there are also a lot of amps that just don’t break up in a very pleasing way to me.
  • I’ve never found a good use for when a pedal has a clipping switch that includes a “no diodes” position. In my experience just about every "clean boost" I've played sounds better than an overdrive with the clipping diodes lifted.
  • A lot of the time various mods or component changes can probably be approximated by just tweaking the knobs on the stock version of the same circuit
  • Sometimes mojo DOES make a difference and I’m not sure it all boils down exclusively to differences in tolerances/values. Maybe it is just confirmation bias or something I guess. I'm sure there is some science-y reason to explain it but it's beyond me :p
  • I like the idea of "you can run it at 18v for more headroom" in theory but in practice I can probably count on one hand the number of times I've preferred any drive/boost/distortion at 18v over running it just on 9v.
  • I know it is kind of a polarizing topic, but I am generally in the camp that prefers a more "tuned" pedal vs one that has more "options" or "versatility". The latter often comes off to me as a jack of all trades, master of none type of case. It just ends up feeling fiddly to me and sometimes even comes off as a bit lazy from the designer. A personal example... my favorite take on a Bluesbreaker is the Pro-10 Blue (Browne Carbon/Blue side of Protein). I used to own a Snouse Blackbox 2. The Snouse obviously has WAY more options and can be more "accurate" to the original, too. But I can dial in the Browne in 30 seconds and even with a million different options/combinations I wasn't able to dial in a sound on the Snouse that I actually preferred to the Browne. Different strokes for different folks, obviously, but I've generally found this to be the case over the years.
  • Perhaps undermining much of what I've said above, but I just don't really think I've got the ears (or at least the patience) to bother much with taking the time to swap out diodes or op amps or whatever. I've done plenty of builds where I socket the clipping diodes or the opamp and either a.) get the "stock" parts in there and decide it sounds fine and close it all up or b.) try it out "stock", flip it over, swap out some components, try it out again and hear no discernible difference/improvement. Kinda reminds me of when people talk wine tasting and have all these fancy descriptions and "notes" for their wines and I'm just over here like "It's red" "it's white" "It's kinda sweet" "it's not very sweet" "It has bubbles" and that's about the extent of it. I mostly feel the same when I try swapping diodes or opamps, idk.
I’m sure there’s more but that’s enough for now.
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RE: Amp drive, of course it’s gonna depend on context.

But I agree that for home use / small venue level volumes even the best amps drive isn’t as good as a drive pedal you like with the master turned up.

I’m a fender guy at heart and I know Marshall and Orange guys would disagree, and that’s not unfair or wrong. Just very different amps, and that’s all speaking tubes specifically.

SS OD be it a tube amp with SS drive or a SS amp the drive always sounds ass because it’s usually more or less equivalent to having a 250 built in with less control and random values depending on the maker.

To the point I’d still rather have my old SD-1 or 250 in front of my Princeton , Bassman, HRD or Bassbreaker than use drive where it exists. Bassbreaker especially is an incredibly underrated amp for what it is and while the drive circuit in it is cool on paper it’s so flat sounding I literally only run the gain at like 2 on the low setting.
 
han-tyumi said:
RE: Amp drive, of course it’s gonna depend on context.

But I agree that for home use / small venue level volumes even the best amps drive isn’t as good as a drive pedal you like with the master turned up.

I’m a fender guy at heart and I know Marshall and Orange guys would disagree, and that’s not unfair or wrong. Just very different amps, and that’s all speaking tubes specifically.

SS OD be it a tube amp with SS drive or a SS amp the drive always sounds ass because it’s usually more or less equivalent to having a 250 built in with less control and random values depending on the maker.

To the point I’d still rather have my old SD-1 or 250 in front of my Princeton , Bassman, HRD or Bassbreaker than use drive where it exists. Bassbreaker especially is an incredibly underrated amp for what it is and while the drive circuit in it is cool on paper it’s so flat sounding I literally only run the gain at like 2 on the low setting.
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That’s because the tubes are compressing the signal. Try your 250 into a compressor into SS…
 
jesuscrisp said:
you're not witty and creative, you're pretentious.
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I'll have you know I'm both, thank you very much!
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jesuscrisp said:
Not sure I ranted about it yet, but calling the knob labels something nonsensical for no reason at all. I can handle stuff like "glass", "grit" and "body", but once it's "lasers", "viagra", "dogwater" and "roots" you're not witty and creative, you're pretentious.
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I actually ran an experiment once to get people to name my unlabeled controls, some were devious 🤣🤣 but funny enough, on one of the builds I swapped the pins of the high and low pass filter, that's how bass became treble and vice versa.. boost, second gain or clipping stages always turned out to be something like "grit" "punch" "texture" or whatever
 
jesuscrisp said:
Not sure I ranted about it yet, but calling the knob labels something nonsensical for no reason at all. I can handle stuff like "glass", "grit" and "body", but once it's "lasers", "viagra", "dogwater" and "roots" you're not witty and creative, you're pretentious.
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IE the point in DOD/Digitech history where they completely jumped the shark - the 1990s/2000s “Jason Lamb” pedals
 
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