For sure. What am I to do, play blind? I’m no Stevie Wonder.
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My Dirt Bender - Another Jounal
- Thread starter el murdoque
- Start date
I swear some of those lights on pedals you could guide ships in through the storms with.
I don't really understand the motivation behind those LEDs.
You want something that works in sunlight and when that is met, why go any brighter?
I remember playing with a guitarist that had two of those on his board, they were visible on the ceiling in a lit room.
You want something that works in sunlight and when that is met, why go any brighter?
I remember playing with a guitarist that had two of those on his board, they were visible on the ceiling in a lit room.
If Neil Armstrong had taken a Darkglass Vintage Microtubes pedal with him to the moon, there would be no conspiracies about whether man ever went to the moon. Everyone on Earth would have seen that blue light.
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Thanks for chronicling your dirt journey @el murdoque. Setting up a separate website is also an excellent idea. With multiple pedals being auditioned at the same time it was sometimes hard to know which one was under discussion in this thread.
At some stage I want to pick up an amp-like light overdrive pedal. Going by comments here it seems like the leading candidates are:
There are so few decent demos on Youtube for bass overdrives. I thinkI like the Barbershop the best from the few demos available. BBBODs seem to be as rare as rocking-horse poo and I could likely buy both the others for less than the price of a used Blueberry.
Since you've moved on from total cork sniffer overdrives to more mainstream screw cap varieties (and maybe the occasional goon bag overdrive too) can I put in a request for you to try out a One Control Blackberry if you get a chance? I know you like the real deal, but it would be interesting to compare it with what's probably the closest readily available descendent.
Keep up the great work
At some stage I want to pick up an amp-like light overdrive pedal. Going by comments here it seems like the leading candidates are:
- Fairfield Barbershop
- Xotic Bass BB
- BJFe Blueberry
There are so few decent demos on Youtube for bass overdrives. I thinkI like the Barbershop the best from the few demos available. BBBODs seem to be as rare as rocking-horse poo and I could likely buy both the others for less than the price of a used Blueberry.
Since you've moved on from total cork sniffer overdrives to more mainstream screw cap varieties (and maybe the occasional goon bag overdrive too) can I put in a request for you to try out a One Control Blackberry if you get a chance? I know you like the real deal, but it would be interesting to compare it with what's probably the closest readily available descendent.
Keep up the great work
To use a German proverb: Thanks for the flowers!Thanks for chronicling your dirt journey @el murdoque. Setting up a separate website is also an excellent idea. With multiple pedals being auditioned at the same time it was sometimes hard to know which one was under discussion in this thread.
At some stage I want to pick up an amp-like light overdrive pedal. Going by comments here it seems like the leading candidates are:
Creation Audio Labs Grizzly Bass and JPTR Jive might also be worth considering. I should probably try out some of my guitar overdrive collection to see if there is anything there that might work but I expect most will cut lots of lows. Maybe I should try out my Super Hard On clone which the JPTR Jive seems to be derived from.
- Fairfield Barbershop
- Xotic Bass BB
- BJFe Blueberry
There are so few decent demos on Youtube for bass overdrives. I thinkI like the Barbershop the best from the few demos available. BBBODs seem to be as rare as rocking-horse poo and I could likely buy both the others for less than the price of a used Blueberry.
Since you've moved on from total cork sniffer overdrives to more mainstream screw cap varieties (and maybe the occasional goon bag overdrive too) can I put in a request for you to try out a One Control Blackberry if you get a chance? I know you like the real deal, but it would be interesting to compare it with what's probably the closest readily available descendent.
Keep up the great work
You bring up an interesting point that has had me thinking for a while now.
Amp like overdrive vs. pedal like overdrive.
I would really like to hear what everybody thinks that makes an overdrive be one or the other.
Here's my personal take: It's the perceived direction the pedal goes. I've used the term "push back" a lot in this context.
A pedal that feels like an amp feels like something that wants to play as clean as possible and you push it towards dirt, which it 'fights', by pushing back.
A pedal that feels like an overdrive feels like something that has a single job, which is adding drive to the signal. It feels like it wants to go where the amp like pedal does not, and has less clearup on note decay, often giving you more sustain and a totally different kind of compression.
Of those pedals you mention, I think the Barbershop is the one that excels at adding a not-so-subtle kind of drive, one that hangs on your fingertips and adds an audible amount of grit, which can be controlled in an effortless way and blends in with your signal in such a tight way that the Barbershop is often used as an always on pedal.
The Jive excels at doing a bit less than that. Adding that hint of a thing, that suggests there is more going on with your bass than just a sterile tone. It's one of those effects that is quite subtle and actually becomes most apparent when you play it for five minutes and then switch it off.
The Xotic BB is, simply put, sounding so organic it's hard to describe. I want to say it's what many pedals try to achieve, but fail. There's nothing special about it apart from the fact that it's a perfectly executed low gain drive pedal. It's not very amp like from the description I gave just now, but it's also not Overdrive like either.
The Blueberry in the BJFe version (Try Joe's Pedals if ordering from the UK is possible for you) gives you that tone sweetening of the midrange, something that makes it sound more excited - and that knob that decides how hard the lows are driven is great to match it to your taste.
It might be that there is some variation from pedal to pedal, but everything I really loved about my Blueberry was absent in the Bearfoot version I tried.
One was a good drive pedal, the other was something special.
I don't know about the Grizzly. I've seen one being offered time and again in my local market and nearly bought it, but then watched some videos on it and they were not really reeling me in - also the fact that this one Grizzly lives in the local classifieds for ages now shows that it might be hard to flip once acquired.
Here's another canister with a faint odor of antifreeze:
This pedal is made with different brand names on it. In Germany, it's sold by Thomann under their house brand Harley Benton, but it's more popular as a Joyo pedal.
It comes in a cardboard box with a small slip of paper that represents the manual, no extras (of course).
Reading the paper gives me the impression that this text is not only not really helpful, I want to go as far and say it's actually misleading.
Looking at a pedal that retails for 29.99, this feels surprisingly well made. Yes, the edges could be a bit smoother, but the knobs and foot switch feel okay. The input and output jacks seem to be on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but they hold a cable well enough. The bottom lid is rubberized so the pedal will sit better on flat surfaces, but it also means it's not easily velcro'ed to mount it on a pedal board. There even is a battery compartment with a lid that opens without tools.
All in all, first impressions exceed expectations.
Plugging it in, the first thing I wanted to know was if I am dealing with a Fender tone stack here, where the three band EQ is boost only for bass and treble and cut only for mids. The answer is not as easy as that, though.
After putting in a fair bit of work with headphones and a keen ear, and I arrived at this: The bass knob is post clipping and it is boost/cut. I found that I reached unity with the knob slightly before noon. Turning it down made the sound anemic and raising it gave it a certain oomph.
The mids knob is weird, because there is a LOT of interaction with the voice knob. With the voice knob all the way down, it feels that mids maxed is flat. With the voice knob going higher, it feels like other things are happening, the sound gets honky and when you turn down mids, the honk gets less. At first I thought I was dealing with parametric mids, but it was not as simple as that. The treble knob acts north of 3k, at least my ears tell me so, so cutting and boosting is a bit hard to determine in my setup. The pedal is not super noisy, but there is a certain floor and a bit of hiss and when you filter out the latter with a LPF, it's not exactly easy to tell what's going on. Yes, turning up the treble will give you more top end. But turning it down, I could not really say if going back from noon would cut anything or not.
Apart from the EQ, there are three more knobs. Level is volume, and that one is straightforward. So is Drive.
Voice, as already mentioned, will influence what the mids knob sounds like - but it also affects the drive.
The closest explanation I could come up with is that it is some sort of pre-clipping mid scoop that turns to a mid bump when you turn it up - that sounds about right. It feels like the mids are only mildly affected when you have the voice knob all the way down and the mids knob all the way up or vice versa. Interesting design choice. I know this was geared and marketed for guitar, the bass playing community merely adopted it because it works well on bass, too. So the midrange takes a bit to find a sweet spot that works. Especially at higher drive settings with higher voice settings, it nearly sounds like a cocked wah, and you have to EQ your way out of that before you can properly use it on bass.
Baffled by the complexity of that pedal, I started thinking less musician and more philosopher.
I asked myself how the people at Joyo came up with such an intricate design and then sell it to shops who retail it for 29.99, making profit.
The prompt answer was actually quite simple: They did not. These pedals usually are not an invention of any kind, but a more or less straight copy of something that already exists. Asking google what pedal might have been the origin led to a straight answer: The Tech21 Sansamp Blonde. Now looking into the manual of the Blonde, I saw a very detailed description of what I experienced earlier.
It turns out that the EQ is boost and cut, with the lows sitting at 125Hz and the treble sitting at 3,2kHz, but I suppose the bass and treble filters are shelving, so it's from 125Hz downwards and from 3,2kHz upwards. The mids are described as doing +-12dB at 1000Hz, but I could not confirm that by ear.
Google led me to the Telecaster Discussion Page Reissue ( https://www.tdpri.com/threads/joyo-american-vs-tech21-blonde-comparison-many-graphs.786013/?ref=tonealchemists.com ) where a user had conducted some real testing and posted the created graphs. It turns out the mids knob on the Blonde is 1kHz while the Joyo sits way lower than that. Here's my philosophical explanation:
I know the Tech21 Character series has a few pedals in it. I also know that Joyo has done copies of at least some of them. The Tech21 VT Bass, Liverpool, British and California all have the mids knob centered at 500Hz, only the Blonde has the mids at 1kHz.
My humble guess would be that while trying to make credible copies of those existing designs, they also aimed at retailing them for thirty bucks and still wanted to make a profit off that, so it might be easier to put in the same mids components they use in the other pedals instead of making this one different.
Since this is ...inspired... by a Sansamp product and these usually come with a cab sim in the form of a treble roll off, I started listening for that - and indeed, the American Sound has that, too. It's actually a nice feature for bassists that aim to go ampless. The only downside here is that the pedal does not feature a balanced output to go straight to the mixer, you would need to add a DI.
Let's summarize the controls once more, after reading up on this:
Level is level.
Drive is gain.
Voice is a pre gain mids control that applies a 400Hz cut fully CCW and an 800Hz Boost fully CW
Low is bass, sitting at 125Hz, reaching down to below 50Hz, boost and cut
Mid is mids, around 450Hz, boost and cut
High is treble, boosting or cutting at 3,2kHz, with the Low Pass filter not far behind - this pedal cannot get into shrill territory - you're not even approaching 10kHz.
Armed with that knowledge, it's time for the next round. Setting up the pedal while actually knowing what the knobs do should make things a little easier and more straightforward, at least I thought.
In the end, it (yet again) came down to using my ears and carefully applying the EQ and Voice to the signal in small increments, listening to what sounds better or worse. I found that the Voice knob should stay below noon for bass use and that it is more fun to play at lower drive levels (also before noon).
This pedal is made with different brand names on it. In Germany, it's sold by Thomann under their house brand Harley Benton, but it's more popular as a Joyo pedal.
It comes in a cardboard box with a small slip of paper that represents the manual, no extras (of course).
Reading the paper gives me the impression that this text is not only not really helpful, I want to go as far and say it's actually misleading.
Looking at a pedal that retails for 29.99, this feels surprisingly well made. Yes, the edges could be a bit smoother, but the knobs and foot switch feel okay. The input and output jacks seem to be on the cheaper end of the spectrum, but they hold a cable well enough. The bottom lid is rubberized so the pedal will sit better on flat surfaces, but it also means it's not easily velcro'ed to mount it on a pedal board. There even is a battery compartment with a lid that opens without tools.
All in all, first impressions exceed expectations.
Plugging it in, the first thing I wanted to know was if I am dealing with a Fender tone stack here, where the three band EQ is boost only for bass and treble and cut only for mids. The answer is not as easy as that, though.
After putting in a fair bit of work with headphones and a keen ear, and I arrived at this: The bass knob is post clipping and it is boost/cut. I found that I reached unity with the knob slightly before noon. Turning it down made the sound anemic and raising it gave it a certain oomph.
The mids knob is weird, because there is a LOT of interaction with the voice knob. With the voice knob all the way down, it feels that mids maxed is flat. With the voice knob going higher, it feels like other things are happening, the sound gets honky and when you turn down mids, the honk gets less. At first I thought I was dealing with parametric mids, but it was not as simple as that. The treble knob acts north of 3k, at least my ears tell me so, so cutting and boosting is a bit hard to determine in my setup. The pedal is not super noisy, but there is a certain floor and a bit of hiss and when you filter out the latter with a LPF, it's not exactly easy to tell what's going on. Yes, turning up the treble will give you more top end. But turning it down, I could not really say if going back from noon would cut anything or not.
Apart from the EQ, there are three more knobs. Level is volume, and that one is straightforward. So is Drive.
Voice, as already mentioned, will influence what the mids knob sounds like - but it also affects the drive.
The closest explanation I could come up with is that it is some sort of pre-clipping mid scoop that turns to a mid bump when you turn it up - that sounds about right. It feels like the mids are only mildly affected when you have the voice knob all the way down and the mids knob all the way up or vice versa. Interesting design choice. I know this was geared and marketed for guitar, the bass playing community merely adopted it because it works well on bass, too. So the midrange takes a bit to find a sweet spot that works. Especially at higher drive settings with higher voice settings, it nearly sounds like a cocked wah, and you have to EQ your way out of that before you can properly use it on bass.
Baffled by the complexity of that pedal, I started thinking less musician and more philosopher.
I asked myself how the people at Joyo came up with such an intricate design and then sell it to shops who retail it for 29.99, making profit.
The prompt answer was actually quite simple: They did not. These pedals usually are not an invention of any kind, but a more or less straight copy of something that already exists. Asking google what pedal might have been the origin led to a straight answer: The Tech21 Sansamp Blonde. Now looking into the manual of the Blonde, I saw a very detailed description of what I experienced earlier.
It turns out that the EQ is boost and cut, with the lows sitting at 125Hz and the treble sitting at 3,2kHz, but I suppose the bass and treble filters are shelving, so it's from 125Hz downwards and from 3,2kHz upwards. The mids are described as doing +-12dB at 1000Hz, but I could not confirm that by ear.
Google led me to the Telecaster Discussion Page Reissue ( https://www.tdpri.com/threads/joyo-american-vs-tech21-blonde-comparison-many-graphs.786013/?ref=tonealchemists.com ) where a user had conducted some real testing and posted the created graphs. It turns out the mids knob on the Blonde is 1kHz while the Joyo sits way lower than that. Here's my philosophical explanation:
I know the Tech21 Character series has a few pedals in it. I also know that Joyo has done copies of at least some of them. The Tech21 VT Bass, Liverpool, British and California all have the mids knob centered at 500Hz, only the Blonde has the mids at 1kHz.
My humble guess would be that while trying to make credible copies of those existing designs, they also aimed at retailing them for thirty bucks and still wanted to make a profit off that, so it might be easier to put in the same mids components they use in the other pedals instead of making this one different.
Since this is ...inspired... by a Sansamp product and these usually come with a cab sim in the form of a treble roll off, I started listening for that - and indeed, the American Sound has that, too. It's actually a nice feature for bassists that aim to go ampless. The only downside here is that the pedal does not feature a balanced output to go straight to the mixer, you would need to add a DI.
Let's summarize the controls once more, after reading up on this:
Level is level.
Drive is gain.
Voice is a pre gain mids control that applies a 400Hz cut fully CCW and an 800Hz Boost fully CW
Low is bass, sitting at 125Hz, reaching down to below 50Hz, boost and cut
Mid is mids, around 450Hz, boost and cut
High is treble, boosting or cutting at 3,2kHz, with the Low Pass filter not far behind - this pedal cannot get into shrill territory - you're not even approaching 10kHz.
Armed with that knowledge, it's time for the next round. Setting up the pedal while actually knowing what the knobs do should make things a little easier and more straightforward, at least I thought.
In the end, it (yet again) came down to using my ears and carefully applying the EQ and Voice to the signal in small increments, listening to what sounds better or worse. I found that the Voice knob should stay below noon for bass use and that it is more fun to play at lower drive levels (also before noon).
Good stuff and matches the experience I had with the pedal and sounds like you arrived at a voice setting similar to what I did. Does this pedal sound quite as good as a lot of the over $200 AIB pedals out there? Not quite, but it is one of, along with the British, best sounding pedals at $30.00 you’ll ever play.
The British is worth a look. It is not night and day different from the American, but the small changes in EQ give it a different character. The American gives that overdrive like you’d hear in lots of rock/classic rock from the 70’s. The British sounds more harder rock and even early metal. I found you could get close to Sheehan and Steve Harris sounding drive with that one.
If I played more harder rock and older metal stuff, I wouldn’t hesitate to throw an American and British on the board.
Would we call that board the 1776 of the 1812?
Using that Joyo pedal is indeed a bit weird and I would want to try it against the original, but TBH I don't really dig the sound that much.
In all objectiveness, it's good, but it has a somewhat identical vibe to my Sansamp PBDDI and I like the Sansamp better.
So I'm gonna go ahead and take the word of that user from the Telecaster forum. If you do those spectrum analysis thing and then decide to go with the Joyo pedal instead of the Blonde, I guess they are not that far apart in terms of sound quality.
Testing the Tumnus vs. the Mosky was a bit unfair - they are both based on the Klon and they both come in golden mini enclosures, but one of the reasons that made me like the Wampler a lot more was how it treats the low end and I'm fairly sure that Wampler takes a detour from the original here, so you can't blame the Mosky for staying true - even though as a bassist, you might want to.
However, that experiment did give me an insight into Klon type pedals and surprised me a lot by showing me that hard clipping a Germanium diode can be useful, even to me.
In all objectiveness, it's good, but it has a somewhat identical vibe to my Sansamp PBDDI and I like the Sansamp better.
So I'm gonna go ahead and take the word of that user from the Telecaster forum. If you do those spectrum analysis thing and then decide to go with the Joyo pedal instead of the Blonde, I guess they are not that far apart in terms of sound quality.
Testing the Tumnus vs. the Mosky was a bit unfair - they are both based on the Klon and they both come in golden mini enclosures, but one of the reasons that made me like the Wampler a lot more was how it treats the low end and I'm fairly sure that Wampler takes a detour from the original here, so you can't blame the Mosky for staying true - even though as a bassist, you might want to.
However, that experiment did give me an insight into Klon type pedals and surprised me a lot by showing me that hard clipping a Germanium diode can be useful, even to me.
Getting back to what I posted earlier:
Amp-Like Overdrive vs. Pedal-Like Overdrive. Your personal take on this.
@sloppy_phil @mouthmw @Parzival @sunbeast @warptheory @GrowlerBox @Maxi Funkl @Ritter667 @Charlie Tuna @dedpool1052 @deepestend @bassbrad @moon-bass @johnk_10
....and of course everybody else.
How would you, in your words, describe the difference between a pedal that has a very amp like overdrive vs. a pedal that has not - and therefore probably has a very pedal-like overdrive? Is there consensus or are these fancy words that get tossed around without being properly defined?
Amp-Like Overdrive vs. Pedal-Like Overdrive. Your personal take on this.
@sloppy_phil @mouthmw @Parzival @sunbeast @warptheory @GrowlerBox @Maxi Funkl @Ritter667 @Charlie Tuna @dedpool1052 @deepestend @bassbrad @moon-bass @johnk_10
....and of course everybody else.
How would you, in your words, describe the difference between a pedal that has a very amp like overdrive vs. a pedal that has not - and therefore probably has a very pedal-like overdrive? Is there consensus or are these fancy words that get tossed around without being properly defined?
Cabling the board has been done now.
If you open the lid, a nest of angry snakes explodes in your face, but I'm gonna clear that up once I confirmed I have everything the way I like.
One thing, though: With taking off the Mobius and the C4, the only MIDI capable pedal on my board is the BigSky. The AMT expession pedal is somewhat useless now because I mainly used it with the C4 and I did try to plug it into the PX-101 but they did not play nicely. I could, in theory, get away with a much smaller MIDI controller now.
If you open the lid, a nest of angry snakes explodes in your face, but I'm gonna clear that up once I confirmed I have everything the way I like.
One thing, though: With taking off the Mobius and the C4, the only MIDI capable pedal on my board is the BigSky. The AMT expession pedal is somewhat useless now because I mainly used it with the C4 and I did try to plug it into the PX-101 but they did not play nicely. I could, in theory, get away with a much smaller MIDI controller now.
That's a pretty good take on it. Feel is an important part of the equation.
My 2 cents. For overdrive (not distortion or fuzz), it's as much about the change in feel when the tubes start working and you get compression and saturation starting. I reckon amp like overdrives have at least a small part of the drive range where the signal stays clean and a range where you get some grit when you dig in hard or play double stops but cleans up if you pluck softer or back off the volume. Pedals that capture that organic interaction with the instrument like a nice amp does are more, well, amp like I suppose.
The opposite are pedals like Big Muff variants which have that chainsaw-like quality no matter where you set the drive level. There is always drive and it's usually some kind of hard clipping that can sound good, but doesn't sound much like an amp to me. A useful tonal variation in the right context but I don't consider it amp like.
Dunno if that makes any sense to anyone else but it does for me.
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I feel like the overdrive pedals have a kind of on/off type compression going on versus a more gradual state you get with the amplike pedals. And with the overdrive pedals the dirt is continually present, oftentimes feeling like it sits on top of the dry signal versus being a single malleable form you shape with your fingers. I feel they both have their uses depending on whethere you want to sit in or cut through the mix.
I think I'd more or less agree with your assessment. I spent many years playing exclusively through tube amps for bass, and that push/pull relationship I could get where I was "playing the amp" with my dynamics with the amp set at a low level of saturation is how I got into dirty bass to begin with. Its a feeling of massive headroom, even as most of those amps didn't actually have much "clean" headroom- they gave the impression of it by having a very smooth transition from barely noticeable soft clipping (just sounds like compression) all the way up to very obvious gritty saturation. Very few pedals seem to be capable of that truly- much of that I think is in the difference in power supply headroom, where a 9V supply runs out of headroom very quickly vs a high-voltage amplifier circuit. One of the first pedals that I found felt truly amp-like to me was the Tronographic Rusty Box, which makes sense as it is essentially a recreation of the actual preamp of the amp it was emulating and run at high voltage- I haven't tried the newer 9V version (with internal charge-pump to raise the voltage), hopefully it retains similar headroom. The Blackstone Mosfet has that touch-sensitivity part down, but maybe not quite the feel of endless headroom. I can't think of too many pedals I've tried that do it that well on their own, but these days I'm usually playing through a hybrid amp (Mesa Walkabout or WD800) that can fill in the missing headroom feeling so its not really that important!
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On my pedalboards I’ve been using the Blackstone run into another “amp in a box” type pedal to get most of the way there. I’ve found the Origin DCX taking that “amp in the box” spot pretty well, set right at the edge of its clean headroom and pushed by the Blackstone- it fills in that little missing 3D polish. I haven’t recorded any DI stuff from this pedalboard yet but will be curious how it holds up without the Mesa Walkabout tying it all together
Yup, it’s the headroom and dynamics for me. I wanted a high headroom amp so that my lows don’t get mushed/compressed so not all amps are the same obviously and then there’s tube and ss differences and not all tubes are the same and not all ss are the same, obviously.
I would say the Blackstone is a perfect case of neither A nor O after the definition I gave. It's not pushing or pulling at all, it just hangs in there, reacting to what you do.
The DCX OTOH really works well in that regard, too since you can flip the switch from amp to overdrive, and it is a credible amp like device in EQ mode and a credible overdrive like device in OD mode.
The thing is it is actually not a straight Tech 21 clone, as you found out, Joyo added their own touch, read and have a look at this:
Joyo American vs Tech21 Blonde comparison (many graphs)
Since this pedal comes up a lot and since I owned both (as well as the original sansamp) I might as well post some info on the differences and similarities. A while ago I checked the frequency responses of both pedals. I owned the Blonde V2, which is identical to V1 apart from the extra speaker...
www.tdpri.com
And from what I can gather online, many people seems to think Joyo's version, while obviously not of the same build quality, actually works better for guitar than the original pedal.
Personally I am not a big fan of this pedal for bass, for clean guitar tones though it sounds pretty awesome.
I am more partial to the Joyo Orange Juice and Oxford Sound, which are both based on the Tech 21 Oxford, the former though minaturrized with simplified EQ controls, just a regular Tone knob and then the signature pre gain stage Voice mid control, and no analog cab sim filter build in either, really functioning more like a regular overdrive, than an actual amp-in a-box pedal.
Great for dynamically responsive low gain overdrive, as well a quite grindy high gain overdrive tones, on both bass and guitar, as low gain overdive device it does work better for guitar though, and a high gain grindy overdrive better for bass, as far as I am concerned,
The Oxford Sound though does cut quite a deal of low end, but not an issue with how I use it in my setup, actually desirable, as sort of faux bi-amping setup, in tandem with a Boss LS-2.
I 'll get back to you regarding my take on amp-like vs. non amp-like drive later.
But the above I would not actually call fully amp-like, except for the fact that they do respond dynamically to your playing to some extend, but they don't quite sound and feel the part.
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The thing is it is actually not a straight Tech 21 clone, as you found out, Joyo added their own touch, read and have a look at this:
Joyo American vs Tech21 Blonde comparison (many graphs)
Since this pedal comes up a lot and since I owned both (as well as the original sansamp) I might as well post some info on the differences and similarities. A while ago I checked the frequency responses of both pedals. I owned the Blonde V2, which is identical to V1 apart from the extra speaker...
I am sorry to be the smart-ass, but I will have to quote you, quoting me, back at you. Have a look at this bit of the post:
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Curious what the percentage of bass players use rounds vs flats is.- Latest: Wez Yo Bice