Matchless Hotbox? And general question- tips on overdriving tube preamp?

[Nic.]

I just picked up a DIY clone of a Matchless Hotbox. It's a tube preamp pedal. It's pretty late here so I can't really mess around with it at the moment, but I guess I'll post my first impressions and questions.

So far my impressions of it is that it gives me this really smooth warm sound that still has definition. The previous times I ran through a tube preamp, I felt the warmth was slightly too muddy (but didn't really have time to play around with the settings). On this one, even though I turned the bass all the way max, it still didn't become muddy... I guess might be to do with this being a guitar pedal. Didn't lose the lows, though, even with EQ neutral. So far, I'm loving it, and other than the weight, I would just carry this around anytime. Over this week I'll think about how I can reorganize my board (while keeping the weight down... this damn thing is heavier than my amp head!)

One thing that bothers me, though... I couldn't seem to get the tubes to break up and overdrive. This is the first time I'm using a tube pre-amp pedal, as compared to a tube OD/distortion or a tube-based amp head. I'm not sure if it's really not supposed to break up, but I had the impression that if I turned the gain way up, and gave it a hot signal, it'll have some kind of tube drive. I coaxed a pretty decent drive out of my amp by using this as a gain pedal in front of the input, but when I plug this straight into the power amp (i.e. using this as the pre instead of as a pedal), it was clean all the way. I haven't plugged it after my overdrive yet (been using bass -> pedal -> amp), but I can easily overdrive my Shuttle 3.0 with just my bass alone, so I'm wondering why I can't do the same with this.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, I love the way it fattens up my tone and I think I'll use it for that purpose, but I would like to get some distortion out of it. Granted, it's a clone and not necessarily exactly like the original, but I'm looking out for tips on overdriving tube preamps in general... if I can overdrive this, and get an OD that I like, then I can possibly leave my overdrive at home and bring this instead since the songs I'm doing mostly don't need the drive.

It's late and I've gotta sleep, but I'll try to put up clips when I get home tomorrow.

[bongomania]

Tube preamps are designed a lot of different ways, and many of them are not designed to overdrive in a gritty/noticeable way. The Hotbox was designed with the idea that a guitarist would put it in front of an all-tube guitar amp, and overdrive that amp's tubes using the high output of the Hotbox. The only thing I can suggest for trying to get more dirt out of that pedal is to feed a very hot signal into it. Like get a clean-boost pedal (or an OD!) and use it to boost the level of your signal into the Hotbox.

[Nic.]

Ah that's good then, I thought something was going wrong with my preamp... I guess I'll run it in front of a distortion then. Thanks!