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Two distortions are better than one !?!

Don’t forget about the EHX Hot Wax. Two overdrive pedals in one (Hot Tubes and Crayon).

I don’t know that one. I’ll check it out.

My tastes change and often circle back, so I've learned not to sell them off...

Yes, I’m resisting the temptation to sell.

I run a darkglass with my big muff…

I’m really tempted by the Omicron or the B3K as well as the Big Muff. So much goodness out there!
 
Double Distortion!! Good times for sure:)
I found my big muff does me just fine as is but playing around with different combinations of distortion/fuzz/overdrive can lead to some cool sounds, as well as some hideous ones:dead:
 
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Many moons ago (back in the 80s), I ran a BOSS Heavy Metal (Guitar pedal) into a '68 SVT with two 8x10" Cabs. I ran the gain on the amp. very high up and set the EQ section of the pedal where I got a sound which simulated a distorted guitar playing along with a very clean-sounding bass line.

Now, we were a three piece band and I could only use those settings when the song was a "ride-the-root" bass line.

For those times, when the Heavy Metal didn't really fit the sound, I used an Ibanez Tube Screamer (TS8, I believe) and turned the gain down on the amp and used the EQ section of the amp.

I had the predecessor to the Rumble, a million years ago (it seems). Because mine was the modeling type, I never found the need for exterior pedals. That said, there were amp models that were distorted by default. I would use those and in the FX section, I would add a distortion effect.

Now, my gigging career is over and I make all my music in my studio. I have a BOSS GT1-B and I set that up much like I did with the previous rig.

I get some really nice distorted sounds which fit many different genres and when I record, I always add at least a tiny bit of "hair" (sometimes, even in post production) to increase sustain.
 
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I’m messing around trying to get a nice Hysteria type tone and discovered that my Sansamp BDDI into Rumble with drive at 3 o’clock is fun! This isn’t a thread about Hysteria so please lets not get into that. Id always thought my Rumble overdrive was a bit meh but not when used with another pedal. I was on the verge of disappearing down an expensive Big Muff v Microtubes type rabbit hole.

Just on the off chance that there are other fun options, does anyone else combine drives and what are you using? Any other Rumblers care to share how they use the amps effects with drive pedals?

using an LS-2 is a great idea for this.

but, even better is a crossover. I got a rolls crossover to copy billy sheehan's rig, (used as a high pass on the P pickup) but you can also use it to split your high and low frequencies at whatever crossover point you want.

sending the lows to a bass-gain, and the highs to something else (guitar stuff works nice) and varying the amount of gain and eq can yield in anything from complete and utter nonsense to really beautiful rich almost organ-like sounds.
 
Don't forget about how effective an EQ pedal can be in there, too. I have a guitar amp that was decent, but when I added the EQ to the FX loop and used even just the onboard gain, it came alive as an entirely new amp at that point. Adding different pedals was even more crazy.
EQ... it's your friend all the time!
 
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Effects I'd heavily recommend for their stacking abilities:

JPTR FX Jive:
This is one of those pedals that have a reputation to be a magic tone sweetener pedal. And indeed, put it after your dirt pedals and set it up so it just saturates without much breakup. It's a very pleasant sound on its own, but it will help generate more/richer harmonics when you play any dirt pedal into it.

Way Huge Pork & Pickle:
It's a nice and somewhat special overdrive that sounds very soft - it somehow has a mildness to it that lacks aggression. And with the flick of a switch, you have a fuzz - which is really great on bass. I'm still discovering ways to play that in combo with other dirt pedals. It stacks differently.

Nobels ODR-1:
This adds a bigger amount of compression than your ears tell you. It's the opposite of a tube screamer in terms of EQ. Instead of mushing it all together around the mids, it pulls it apart and gets you good lows and a bright but not too bright top end.


The great bit: None of the above are expensive pedals.
 
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Tonebender IV or Muff into Rat. Good stuff.
Also Darkglass (MicroTubes, X7, Omicron, etc.) into Depth Charge (I have JohnK clone). Nice and brutal but tight. Instant Nine Inch Nails. A Mr. Excane fav. Check out his demo:
 
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Two distortions are better than one !?!

4 are better than 2 ... The bass pod is very midrange, The YYZ pedal has a ton of low end and high end grit, TBilly Sheehan pedal is also very mid range, and the VT bass is the classic SVT tone. By combining 4 parallel distortions with different characters, I get a wonderful tone. These days I use it to get the Tom Paterson Cheap Trick tone.

my current pedalboard Except I eliminated the Octave pedal, and put in a second EQ pedal.

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I remember around 2004, in Santa Fe NM at the 2nd street High Mayhem show, they stacked over 100 pedals and I would say 6 to 8 guys were playing with the pedals. It was very interesting result. Yeah the objet was to create noise and soundscapes.

I am sure there are good pedals that can do a clean blend but using 2 amps one a guitar amp tube if possible is the best, unless you are in a studio. Distort or overdrive away and run that through a guitar amp , a Fender Twin for example and keep the other signal to your regular amp clean
 
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When you distortion pedals in series then you can get bad results. Each distortion pedal will accentuate the harmonics of the notes being played. a lot of distortion in series will give you harmonics on the harmonics. It can get so bad that it can become difficult to determine what notes are being played.
That is why I run multiple distortion pedals parallel, that way some can be over the top aggressive and some can be slightly distorted.
 
I got a modified ODB-3 and a Wolly Mammoth clone with the input impedance control. Both sound great alone, but ODB-3 into Mammoth sounds big and nasty. No low end loss, infact I hear a boost.
 
When you distortion pedals in series then you can get bad results. Each distortion pedal will accentuate the harmonics of the notes being played. a lot of distortion in series will give you harmonics on the harmonics. It can get so bad that it can become difficult to determine what notes are being played.
That is why I run multiple distortion pedals parallel, that way some can be over the top aggressive and some can be slightly distorted.
How do you do this? Ive no idea what the setup is.
 
A Source Audio UltraWave can allow for 4 different distortions morphing back and forth (with 44 distortion engines available, and any of them able to pair with any other), and routing options such as cascading channel 1> channel 2, or mono> stereo> mono, for huge crunchy sounds. The distortion engines aren't labeled as easily as they are on the AfterShock (they use names similar to the original effect such as Tube Screamer, Muff, Rat, Darkglass), but it tells you what they are as distortion types, such as diode (positive and negative), many varieties of foldback, etc. There's a killer compressor/expander, as well as multiband tremolo and multiband eqing to drive the distortion further. Sequencing can be done, there's LFO, it can do ring modulation, altering the phase offset can give some nice panning, you can get tube driven sounds or synthy, insane overdrive sounds, or you can use it absolutely clean for the compressor. You have 128 presets to fill. Well, 122 since you start with 6 that run the gamut, and there are tons of great presets in the Neuro community, available to download right to the pedal. Always tweak to taste, and start with the output volumes and gain knobs (of which there are multiple across two channels).

All this is done in the desktop editor, not the 4 knobs on the box. This is the most difficult of the Source Audio pedals, but may also be the most rewarding. I'm not much of a distortion person per se, I like overdriven sounds like Jack Bruce on Frank Zappa's Apostrophe is a monster fuzz sound, even bigger than he had with Cream. Larry Graham's sound back then as well is fantastically fat. I like anything that really cuts through the mix. So, I mainly use the UW for clean, but when I do set it through its paces on dirt, man does it deliver! I spent last weekend using it for the Harmonic Tremolo presets made by TriPedalReviews for their demo of it, really enjoying the self-panning tremolo with phaser washes, and this weekend really focused on some crunchy guitar sounds using Tube> Tube cascading into Foldback> Absolute Value (Superfuzz) for one of the tracks. I left the bass with a touch of clean drive, but envelope filter and 4-stage phaser. When I first plugged it in, it still had the guitar crazy QuadFuzz going and it sounded massive on the bass. But lost all of it when playing along. So went with envelope-phaser. But the many EQs could have helped me cut through more, had I wanted to stick with the distortion.



And the Friday night one. Used a different Quad-combination, still a fairly nice distortion sound to me. Especially for an acoustic-electric.

 
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