I use a Magellen 800 a lot and the overdrive channel works really well for me.
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Love your amp(s) overdriven tone?
- Thread starter Peter - Oregon
- Start date
I think you're referring to tribute bands that form their whole sound around mimicry. "we strictly play 80's Joel, sir!"
Pretty much everyone plays a cover or two but most don't take extravagant efforts to cop that perfect tone (many times it wouldn't work anyways unless all the other notes are just right). Anyways, if you're making music you'd benefit from different sounds for different goals/songs. How much studio work is direct vs through the live setup?
On amps, I like a little breakup from my GK MB800 channel B (switchable), but I also use a few pedals so I can gain/tone match the songs needs with better precision. I find it easier to stack gain and preserve attack.lows with pedals than an amp because they have those features more commonly.
Dear Minnesotan,
Please tell me about your cabs. This form factor is what I've been looking at for a long time. What to you like/dislike.
Sorry to threadjack.
buddy try a ampeg optocomp.. nobels odr-1.. also a clean germanium fuzz like a phat phuk.. and a master effects super 300.. put them on a board with a petersen hd mini tuner.. store it behind your amp.. out of site out of mind you'll never know the difference and you have a di incase..Okay, I'll be that guy that provides a completely useless answer, making me scratch my own head in wonder....
My feelings about distortion with bass is that I worked for years and spent a lot of money trying to get a great clean tone with a lot of volume, until modern PAs came along (two SVT 810 rigs did that quite nicely back then!....).
I later tried to warn up to the idea of controlled overdrive and grit. But I....just....can't....
I still want a clean, warm bass tone. No grit. No overdrive.
I guess I'm still in the Old School. For several reasons. And glad about it!...
(let the head-scratching begin....)
My Rusty Box and Annex have been bagged up with my pedalboard for about a year now, been really digging the breakup of my GK 400RB all by its lonesome. Makes sense, I guess, because all of my basses are high output and sound awesome un-effected hehehehe but now I wanna plug the pedalboard in, thanks for the inspiration
Exactly - something with a footswitch....
Ha! - a bit "juicy" (I think I've heard that word as a tone description?)...
It's usually bass > tuner > Amp, but also nice to have pedals for when you don't have your Amp.
Not really. I personally haven't played a cover tune live in a long time. After HS (30yrs ago) cover bands, I went to all original bands. So my sound was my sound. As for tribute bands, that's basically a cover band. Except you'd probably want to cover a specific tone more closely.
I've seen many cover bands playing bars and what not, most all use a very clean tone. Sure they may like their amps OD, but if you never really use it....my point was most would use it if they were writing music, as part of their tone.
Guess it comes to what ones definition of OD is and at what point the amp is producing OD. Clearly people are defining their thoughts on OD vs distortion. Does OD become distortion? Are they totally different? Is OD just a form of distortion? Lots of variance in this.
Greetings @pyrat56host and @Bag of Lazers, and other Quilter users! For the past year I've been using a Quilter 101 Mini Head through my sealed 2x10 cab to play bass at home and I love the driven tones without any pedals.
Been diggin the saturation circuit on a Peavey Century. It stacks nastily with pedal drives or boosts...
JeezyMcNuggles
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- Feb 23, 2018
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My drive comes from my playing. My amp doesn't clip. In other words, I drive my pickups, not my amp.
So's the Super Bassman. Even though it's 300w, into a single 115 (it does 8 ohms) it's fantastic pushing the Vintage channel
Overdriven or not, the challenge is having the sound emanating from your speaker accurately reflecting the sound you are hearing in your head.
I love the drive I get from my Mesa amps. The Boogie channel of the TT sounds so friggin good, and I still play the WD every week and really dig the warm, fat drive I can get out of that head too. They're two different-sounding, different-reacting amps that use the tubes in their preamp sections very well. They also both sound great clean. But I almost always have at least a little grit from the amps.
For that extra something, I've settled in with the Genzler 4 on the Floor, which gives 4 additional flavors of drive, each of which interact well with both of those heads. It has a great range of control, from subtle to as much fuzz as I'll ever need, and can even be used as a clean boost.
To say what I'm trying to say in a different way, Jimi Hendrix and Guns N' Roses didn't exactly cover Bob Dylan, they played his song as if they wrote it (with explosives). The tribute thing was a rockstar movie reference, but another good example would be DarkStar Orchestra (they'll learn an entire Grateful Dean show note for note). Musicians can play someone else's song exactly like the original, or wildly different in a number of ways so the idea that people playing original music vs covers is the important distinction in how they chase toan doesn't hold up. RATM did Renegades for Christ's sake.
I might propose that the question is more simply whether someone is trying to hone their own tone vs replicate someone else's. Another bifurcation could be that the tone of a song, or section is determined more from a songwriting perspective. I have an envelope filter on my board for exactly one part of one song because it belongs there for that song. That song is an original, but I'm also covering some commercial country songs with octave/fuzz so clearly not covering the tone there.
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If the '60s turned out to be the '90s, I don't mind, see, the hair that hasn't fallen out has been shorn, no cause for scorn... I've bitten the plastic fingers, wear what I want and my freakin' flag is flyin' high, baby! High!
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