Chapter 8

Overdriving and Boosting

There are many ways we can dial in an amp. We have learned a bit about finding sweet spots. We know about gain, power stages, peddles, pickups, and the differences between tubes, solid-state, and modeling systems. We are learning how computing, profiling, emulation, and virtualization can be integrated into a guitar rig and DAW. We have paid particular attention to how to deal with loudness in systems.

After finding its sweet spots and knowing what you want from a rig, we will discuss some general principles about using an amp. These previous chapters have been homing in on how to get the best from this chapter. For example, everyone in electric guitar eventually hears about how to use overdrive and boosts with amps. We have already discussed this before, but now we will comprehensively integrate these more sonic options.

Combinations of amp and pedal do not always work out. It will probably not sound good if you blindly put an amp and pedal together. You can take a well-respected pedal and a well-respected amp and put them together and get something not good. Some stuff doesn’t match well. One of the reasons for lousy rig experiences is jumping too fast into overdrives and boosting, or pedals in general, without first learning how to use the amp.

Adding a pedal before the amp might be mostly transparent, meaning the amp’s sound is mainly retained. We find this with boosts and time-based effects. The pedal may color the amp significantly, such as distortion pedal, altering the amp’s tone so much that it is hard to identify what the original amp model was behind it in the first place.

You can’t hear a pedal on its own, and even if you could, it would serve no purpose because they are engineered with amps in mind.

There are reasons why many professional rigs are very similar to each other. Gear has to run the gauntlet of critical guitar players the world over. What passes, stays, what doesn’t, quickly goes under. The most popular gear today is the gear that has been around, tried, tested, and trusted. So, you tend to find very similar pedal setups for certain styles of music. Maybe now is not the time to experiment. Why not start with what works and go from there? You will find custom pedalboards with hoards of pedals on them, and they look impressive, but chances are this is not what you need. You need minimal pedals with a focus on the guitar and amp. This is king in electric guitar, as demonstrated by countless top artists.

There are two general approaches to any amp. The first is to consider what are the main features of any amp. Is the amp sold because it is versatile, has crushing dirt tones, and has a great clean channel? Is the amp found mostly with Country players, Blues, Jazz, Rock, Metal, Classical, Grunge, Grindcore, or Thrash? Watching live performances lets you determine what amps are used in various genres. You get a clue that something like Vox and Fender is good for Country, Blues, Jazz, and many pedals, while Marshall and Peavey are suitable for Rock and Metal and may not need many pedals. Major amp brands will have models catering to each genre in modern times, making for quite an extensive gear catalog.

There are generally only two reasons to buy any amp. The first is that the amp will have the tone you want without needing to add anything. Second, the amp doesn’t have the tone you want, but you will get the tone another way with this specific amp, usually with a pedal. We will address both these avenues, but an amp with no pedals is always the preferred choice. After all, it is like a glorified version of a pedal at its loudest capabilities.

Amp boosting

Amps for rock music were blues amps with boosts in front or overdrives to increase their gain. We can call this vintage amp boosting to produce classic gain rock tones. Amp manufacturers didn’t even adjust their amps much for the era. They just knew people would order a boost pedal or overdrive with the amp, as this is precisely what early pedals were advertising themselves doing. Take any guitar magazine or music gear advertisement from the ’60s and ’70s, and you had an amp advert (Selmar, Silvertone, Supro, etc.), and on the next page, a pedal advert for use with the amp advert the page before. Early pedals included the Dallas Rangemaster treble booster, Tonebender, or Maestro Fuzz.

Fuzz pedals like the Maestro Fuzz and Tonebender gave amps a new and popular flubby distortion sound that sounded fatter. Blues amps tended to lack the high-end that classic gain rock could utilize. The Dallas Rangemaster is not a true booster of trebles despite its name. If you want to boost the treble, use EQ. The Dallas Rangemaster brings out the treble and the mids and colors the tone.

Driving the front of the blues amp into higher saturated tones for rock tells you about the origins of rock. Rock amps tend to be brighter than blues amps. You can only get so bright, and that was reached in the mid to late 1960s with the Marshall Plexi series of amps. With a Plexi that high-end can’t be dialed out, the amp is so bright. Trebs on 0 and presence on 0 is still a brighter amp than most. You need another amp if you don’t want that bright. Why so bright? The guitar is a mid-range instrument, and there is a need to cut through a mix in a band context. It is not that electric guitar has no high-end. All amps have high-end, and we hear plenty of high-end electric guitar in songs. It is just that the guitar is mainly a mid-range instrument but needs some bass and high-end to have the range an electric guitar sound should have. Some bass, lots of mids, some highs, or, in the case of rock, lots of highs to do more cutting through. When playing hard rock, drum high-hats, whistling organs, and screaming vocals can be matched with the peaks of a Plexi, which is shrill sounding outside of a mix. That is why you might find them so bright when playing independently. So, frequencies got boosted in designs.

An EQ pedal can boost or subtract frequencies from a 100% transparent flat baseline. If you increase the overall level of an EQ pedal with the volume slide, you are also boosting the pedal. So, an EQ can very much behave as a boost pedal, 100% transparent, if the sliders/dials are flat for the frequency values but up on the volume level.

An overdrive pedal is a distortion pedal with a gain/drive feature to add more gain to your signal. They are often not transparent, meaning they color the signal somewhat with a tone that bumps parts of the EQ curve in addition to boosting with the level/volume control. Some sculpting can be done with the tone dial.

If you have understood some things about EQ pedals and overdrive pedals, then it should make sense to you that by dialing the overdrive pedal’s drive/gain dial down to 0, the signal’s coloring is minimal. This is called boosting with an overdrive.

Any overdrive pedal can be a boost. Often, the result is called sounding tighter. Tighter means the note you want is quickly apparent with the struck chord and discreet from the next, even at higher playing speeds. The less tight they are, the more they blend into the next chord struck. Tightness is something fast rock and metal players like to use so that each chord can articulate somewhat separately from the next one, especially when distortion is involved in the amp.

A Boss SD-1 is a popular pedal used to boost Marshall amps. They match up well.

While the SD-1 is an OverDrive and a Super one, it is often used as a subtle boost with Marshall amps because they pair so well. The drive dial is set to 0, the level for volume at your choice, and the tone to sweeten (usually 1 o’clock). The circuitry at gain 0 leaves the remainder as a boost and doesn’t color the amp’s tone much. The result is like adding a tightness feature to your amp with a slightly overdriven sound. It is so popular that countless Marshall amp rigs even have this pedal always on and fixed into a rack tray. These guitarists don’t seem to use any pedals on stage. Almost direct to rig with this one single pedal. It keeps things efficient. It sounds excellent, and many guitarists have used this combination for entire albums.

The market has countless boosts available. Most are transparent, but some will have a color sought after, usually because it is known to pair well with certain amps. Some may also be called pre-amp pedals, but so are some distortion pedals. So, read the descriptions.

Spark from TC Electronic is a transparent boost but gives you some EQing options.

Dunlop Echoplex EP101 is a preamp pedal that boosts the signal but colors the tone as it does. It is part of an Echoplex delay unit but makes a Marshall Plexi sound hard rock great when in front.

EQ boosting

A tone boost was traditionally not transparent. A good example is the EP101 pre-amp into a Plexi. Instead, it boosted some parts of the EQ more than others. Usually, the mids to high treble got boosted because vintage high gain amps lacked the shine up there. Since then, we have had amps with different EQ curves and overdrives with different EQ humps.

We use anything with just a line-level volume increase to boost modern amps cleanly. Some volume pedals, EQ, and clean settings on boost pedals can all do that. It may differ slightly or significantly compared with just guitar volume dial or amp volume increases.

As we mentioned, pedals have different voices. You can also shift EQ to resemble those voices; however, the gain clipping type is another consideration when boosting with overdrive pedals. Some overdrives have selections for clipping type. EQ pedals don’t do clipping type selection (they will clip when set at max, but their circuits are all different, and results will vary). They aren’t distortion pedals or overdrive pedals, which factor in their circuit’s design for a tone from their clipping style. Some advanced overdrive pedals have multiple clipping types to select. For example, an Earthquaker Devices Palisades. Look at all the different settings you can have, which resemble different OD and boost pedals.

Earthquaker Devices Palisades. 6 voicings. 5 bandwidths. Normal or Bright. Two different gain types.

If you want to shape different overdrives and boost tones, that pedal is excellent. It is a bit of a Swiss army knife overdrive. The EQ pedal has a set clipping type, and these variable overdrive pedals don’t. So what do we do? Maybe the best thing is to keep the EQ pedal for EQ, the overdrives for overdriving, and the boosts for boosting. An overdrive is not a replacement for EQ, but can be a non-transparent boost. There are plenty of one-stomp clean boost pedals out there.

Xotic USA EP Booster. One dial for volume. One stomp button for on or off. Simple and works.

If you want some overdrive pedals, you can boost, then get the core overdrives into your pedal collection.

• Boss SD-1 (great for Marshall).
• Maxon 808 (great for high-gain).
• Ibanez TS9 (under high-gain).

If you want something more transparent, then look into boost-specific pedals. Some distortion pedals like Klon Klones and some boutique pre-amp boosts pedals can have low gain settings that can behave as boosts. TC Electronic Spark is a hugely popular choice.

Hopefully, this text has driven home some points regarding EQ, boosts, and overdrives by now. These core ideas behind the similarities and differences between amp boosting with boost pedals and boosted tone sculpting with an EQ pedal should give you plenty to experiment with and read more about. Before you consign any amp to the category of not for you, at least consider if EQing can do anything with it. We have a section dedicated to the topic of EQ after this one.

Amp with pedals

Imagine a pedal with a preamp section and onboard distortion that sounds like an amp. Isn’t that what you want from a distortion pedal? A souped-up pedal is like an amp without the tubes or power stage section. A pedal can be like an amp with reduced components. The amp will always be better for that tone, but it will also be more expensive. Nevertheless, it’s a way to think about things.

Pedals are sometimes used as a fix or a cheaper way to get close to what the real deal does. All amps can have different pedal effects if you search for a suitable amp. Onboard tremolo, reverb, delay, distortion, EQ, it’s all out there. If that’s your tone, get the real deal rather than a pedal aiming for it. You will eventually want the amp anyway.

If you can’t get there with a suitable amp, then the sound you want is augmented, and there are no two ways about it. So an amp plus some effect pedal to get that tone is what you have to do.

People who stick with the amp’s pure tone may consider using a boost pedal, an overdrive, or an EQ pedal if they add anything. However, once we get into delays, reverbs, chorus modulations, and the dozens of other possible pedal types and combinations, we look more at the possibility of quite a bit of complexity.

Remember what we said about efficiency and tone? When sound engineers introduce a new pedal into a chain, they learn everything about it. How much power it may consume even when off, and how much this may change the tone. When dealing with louder volumes, these become more noticeable. In addition, pedals can sound subtly different depending on how a battery or power block powers them. For this reason, when a guitarist has settled on a rig for a while, it is worth experimenting with the tone by trying both ways to power a pedal. Check this out because all the professional guitar techs do it.

Sometimes, pedals are the only way to go. This is particularly true for some genres that depend on a fuzz tone. Fuzz is a combination of an amp and a fuzz pedal, and it is not uncommon to find some fuzz amps (Matamp, Sunn Model-T) also using a fuzz in front to augment them.

Dunlop Fuzz face Jimi Hendrix. One dial for volume and another fuzz. Volume and fuzz up high and dialed back a bit in conjunction with single coils, and an amp crunch tone will bloom fuzz with the guitar volume pot up.

You will often hear about silicon or germanium in fuzz pedals. This is for tonal variation. Sometimes, the makers provide both options in different models of the same pedal. The Dunlop Jimi Hendrix Fuzz Face JHF1 is silicon. The red one is germanium.

Dunlop Fuzz Face, a mini version of the germanium, FFM2.

EHX Big Muff, heard on the likes of Pink Floyd. Many versions exist with mods and updates.

Fuzz is specific. It is a type of distortion, but if you get a distortion pedal, you will likely get regular distortion and not the fuzz type. Overdrives are a type of distortion pedal, but much more transparent.

Ibanez TS9-Tubescreamer. Three dials. Gain, tone, and volume. Tone dials in most pedals are dark to bright settings. Used in Country and Rock, for example.

As overdrives, the Boss SD-1, Ibanez TS9, and Maxon 808 can be used in their own right as distortion pedals by increasing the drive/gain dials. At 0 gain/drive they are boosts but not transparent, as they have their coloring. You should try owning and holding onto all three of these pedals. The reason is that you can swap them out and experience the subtle differences, but also just as important is that if you encounter another amp, you stand a much better chance of matching the right OD to it by having all three options.

As we said, overdrives and distortion pedals aren’t that different, but there are a few ways to set them apart. Overdrive pedals shouldn’t color your amp’s tone much. A distortion pedal changes the amp’s tone slightly to a lot. The higher-gain distortion pedals do this using the clean channel of an amp. Boosts can be used on nearly all channels except for the high gain that already sounds overdriven and might be too much.

Distortion pedals are not used as boosts because they are principally designed around coloring tone, with their gain up distorting more.

Distortion pedals tend to have names similar to amps with the distortion you want. Some amp engineers create pedals of their amps with similar names.

Friedman BE-OD pedal models the amp distortion of their Friedman BE-OD High Gain channel of the BE100.

Friedman BE100.

For example, the Friedman company has a BE100 amp and a pedal that recreate a similar BE-OD distortion. The pedal costs a small percentage of the price of the actual amp. It’s a no-brainer that we want the amp, but the pedal is an effective way of getting close to that amp’s tone. BE-OD pedal into your clean channel (especially an EL34 power tube amp) will get you close to 80s metal tones.