Full Blast

Tonight I did something I’ve never done before.

I had always wanted to do it, but prior to last March I didn’t have the means. Since last March I just didn’t have the guts.

I played guitar through a tube amp at full blast.

It was Glorious.

I have been reading up on overdrive pedals lately. Specifically the Klon Centaur. To me, the point of overdrive was always to make my guitar sound distorted without sounding like a heavy metal wanna be. I think I was sort of missing the point. Maybe an overdrive pedal isn’t meant to make you sound like a rock god, but instead maybe it’s just supposed to make your low volume amp sound like a loud, broken up tube amp. That made sense to me.

That was all well and good for a solid state amp, but what about a tube amp? I bought a Fender Deluxe Reverb last March, knowing that if I cranked it I would be able to overdrive the tubes and thus distort the sound. Of course that would require a huge amount of volume which even with my little 22 watt sucker would be more than I want to deal with. I read an article that suggested using an overdrive pedal with the volume knob up all the way, and the gain knob down all the way. The pedal isn’t going to distort your sound (much), but it might push your tubes up to the point of distorting for you.

The other day while I was getting my stuff together for the Lizardfish gig I tried it out with my Fulltone OCD pedal. It sounded pretty good. Not exactly broken up, but not exactly clean either. I planned to start using that setting after the gig. (no changes like that will ever be made without being used in rehearsal for a while at least)

Tonight I decided to try it with my Joyo Ultimate Drive pedal, which is an OCD clone. I wanted to see if the clone sounded as good as the real thing. It did. I was pleased, and spent about 45 minutes just noodling.

Then I just did it. I looked at my amp. I looked at the volume knob. How high do I have to turn that sucker before the sound starts breaking up? I had no idea at the time, but now I do. You start getting some nice overdrive at about 7. When you’re up to 10 it’s pretty sweet. It doesn’t sound heavy by any stretch, but when I kicked on the overdrive (volume at 10, gain at 0) it sounded really cool.

As for the volume level, when I got to 3 it was loud enough for me to want to turn it down. 10 was significantly louder, but the volume level seemed to stop going up around 6. Extrapolate… volume ceases to increase when the tubes are over saturated? Sound logical.

When the volume knob hit 10 though… oh it was glorious.