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another fx loop question


papadesophie
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My 100 watt combo has an fx loop between pre and power amp. Frustratingly there is no input gain control though, meaning that it only really does clean sounds. I have a clean boost pedal that I've made, and have though about sticking in the effects loop to drive the power amp a bit harder. It's all solid state though, so is this a bad, or potentially damaging idea?
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It's not potentially damaging as long as you don't go crazy with the levels.

On the other hand, solid state amps are not reknowned for muscial sounding distrortion when driven hard - it could well sound awful if/when it starts to disort.

A better plan would be to get a distortion FX pedal of some sort and use that at the front of the amp. The distortion created by that is likely to sound much more musical. Behringer FX pedals are really cheap if you just want to experiment.

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[quote name='BOD2' post='158420' date='Mar 16 2008, 02:53 PM']It's not potentially damaging as long as you don't go crazy with the levels.

On the other hand, solid state amps are not reknowned for muscial sounding distrortion when driven hard - it could well sound awful if/when it starts to disort.

A better plan would be to get a distortion FX pedal of some sort and use that at the front of the amp. The distortion created by that is likely to sound much more musical. Behringer FX pedals are really cheap if you just want to experiment.[/quote]

Thanks. I just didn't want to blow the amp up, but I'm pretty sure it will sound crap anyway. It certainly doesn't break up nicely when the clean boost is used in front of the amp. This is one of those annoying situations where I know exactly the sound that I want, but every distortion pedal out there that I've tried is either a: Horrible, b: too flimsy or too complicated to be reliable or c: too expensive.
The 'sound in my head' is very simply an overdriven ampeg with a P Bass. I've tried the Boss ODB-3 which is probably as close as I'll get within my budget, but not quite right (a bit to fizzy, not growly enough). The EBS multidrive sounds nice to my ears, but is too much money, as is every sansamp product out there. The Behringer sansamp clone has the sounds and the price, but is flimsy, and the slightest movement of any control throws the sound out (it's just too tweakable). Next step is building a Flipster from OLC [url="http://olcircuits.com/olc_flipster.html"]http://olcircuits.com/olc_flipster.html[/url] this is my last hope, and if that doesn't work out, it's back to the ODB-3.
Incidentally, this is an abridged list of pedals I've tried, and I think that the real weak link is my amp, which just doesn't take distortion well........

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  • 2 weeks later...

+1 on the DHA.

Another pedal you might like to try is the Nobels bass overdrive. I really rate the sound of these things - goes from warm valve type sounds to full on overdriven fuzziness (I had the same criticisms of the ODB-3 as you). The downside is they're really flimsy - I've had one for 10 years without a problem, but only because I treated it with kid gloves from day one.

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