Pedal Idea

[freshmeat1989]

First of all, I hope "damper" means to cut or reduce, because in this thread thats what I'm gonna use it to mean, to make me feel smart.

Anyways, how about a Signal Damper effect? It would be used with tube amps to get tube overdrive sooner and at lower volume levels. It would have adjustable damping for higher and lower wattage tube amps. Does anyone have anything like this? If so, who? If they do, I'munna sock em in da kissa!

 

[BillyB_from_LZ]

Isn't that what a master volume control is for? You crank up or down the gain control and then adjust the overall volume with the master volume.

If you're thinking about an amp with no master volume (old Marshalls/Fenders) etc. There is at least one preamp tube stage before the volume control so you could drive the input with a tube screamer or similar and still control the volume.

Or, use a power attenuator that goes between the tube amp and the speaker cabinet so that you can overdrive the power tubes and saturate the output transformer yet control your overall volume.

Would any of these scenarios do the trick?

 

[IvanMike]

congratulations you just invented the "power brake"
unfortunatly a bit too late
dr z makes a good one and marshall also has one. mostly these are used for guitar and are used in the speaker outputs along with cabinets to get the amp to hit the "sweet spot" in the power tube od at a lower volume
maven peal also has a 100 watt guitar head called the ganesha which claims to be adjustable from 1 watt to 100 watts so you can hit the "sweet spot" at whatever volume you like.
I'm not sure about anyone using these for bass rigs as we typically need all the volume we can get. Generally speaking, the guys i know who want their svt's to distort are competing with marshall half stacks

 

[freshmeat1989]

Ahhh, so thats what the power brake does. I thought it was like a fake impedance so if you had the wrong ohmage in a cab you could get it to the right ohmage. Thanks guys!