Slight touch-controlled attack crunch WITH altering my tone

Hi folks,

I've searched and searched, experimented and experimented, but I still haven't found what I'm looking for ("I have kissed honey lips...")

So I play various basses (stingrays, BTBs, jazzes, talk about different tones and output levels) into my EBS multi-comp (best device in the world), into my zoom g3 (yes, G 3, I play other axes too and wanted multi-purpose multi-fx) then into my ampeg PF-350 micro head.

So what I'm looking for is an optional grit, rather like a tube amp that is entering mild saturation (so no fizz and still lots of dynamics but mild compression with increasing PLEASING warm distortion) when I play my hardest.

I've tried lots of amp sims in the zoom (often which behave great for what I want) but they all either are too high gain even with gain all the way off or have some strong eq altering effect that I dislike - I already have my tone, I don't want this thing altering it further. I've tried disabling the cab sim in the zoom amp sim section and it loses all depth completely (which is odd... why is there virtually no low end without a cab sim in the zoom? that's not like a real amp at all).

I've tried a few of the distortion pedals in the zoom since I figure they are a better bet without tone stacks and without cab sims... but they are all way too high gain even with gain at zero, and still mostly they seem to suck the low end punch from my tone.

I want a pedal that, like my EBS compressor, makes it difficult to know when it's engaged, but just adds the effect I need when I play hard.

Maybe in fact I need something in my chain before the EBS compressor? maybe I should go zoom->EBS? Maybe that's my issue because it's compresing things a fair bit before the zoom and therefore there aren't enough dynamic changes going into the zoom for it to work with my touch control? But then there is still the issue of the tone (frequency response) changes that each zoom effect imparts when engaged, which I'll assume is true of the real pedals as well.

help!

 

by the way, the closest pedals I've had to what I want are the svt emulation pedals like sansamp, bdi-21, etc. but they too of course are amp and cab sim pedals which defeats my purpose as I'm going into my ampeg amp and cab which is where I like to get my eqing from.

As we all know - amp sim into amp isn't what we're mostly looking for.

Cheers
Don

 

Excellent! Thank you!

 

googling it now, ty! ps, I love the names of boutique pedals LoL. barbershop, as in "a little hair"... clever people out there :-D