Well, to start, you need volume. Nothing sounds as good as a tube amp cranked up til the panels are hot enough to burn you on contact. The problem is that that kind of volume is a lease-breaker. So instead, we need to use pedals to mimic the sound of a cranked amp.
Overdrive pedals are to guitarists what shoes are to the average woman. You can never have enough, there’s no such thing as too expensive or too cheap, and you need at least one in every colour. It’s a good thing there’s literally hundreds of different ones to choose from. When I was recording songs for my originals project, I was heavily influenced by the blues and by alt country. This called for a much different type of sound than what I need for Molly’s Chamber. My main overdrive was a Fulltone Fulldrive-2, which gave me the flexibility of having a light and medium overdrive sound in one pedal, but I decided I really didn’t like stompboxes with more than one switch, so when I decided to look for a pedal for Molly’s Chamber, I decided to stick with Fulltone and go get one I’d always had my eyes on. The OCD.
Dropped the reverb, tremolo and wah. Added boost and compressor. Switch giant delay with more reasonable sized one.
The Obsessive Compulsive Drive is a fantastic pedal that really gives you that Marshall tone. It sounds big and ballsy but also reacts really well to picking dynamics and volume knob changes; I can easily dial back the volume to get a clean-ish sound. The problem with the OCD is that it’s a hugely compressed sound, which can get a bit mushy sounding at high volumes with a lot of overdrive. Also, I don’t really want to be riding my volume knob all the time. It’s one thing when you’re playing a Strat, but with the Les Paul, the volume knobs aren’t as easily accessible. So the quest began for a second pedal to complement the OCD.
My candidates at the moment are:
1 – Paul Cochrane Timmy
2 – Crowther Hotcake
3 – Tone Factor Mule
I thought the Mule would be great for that Black Crowes/Neil Young type sound. I’d dial it in for some tweedy crunch and use the OCD to rock out. Except I’d forgotten that the Mule suffers from something that has annoyed me in the past. NO TONE KNOB!!! My list of Cardinal Sins for a stompbox (especially, but not limited to overdrives) is:
1 – Having more than one footswitch
2 – No tone knob
3 – Being unnecessarily large
4 – Requiring ridiculous voltages
The Tone Factor Mule ended up being really bright sounding with my gear. I wanted to be able to hit a switch and change gears, but with the Mule it’s like changing cars! I definitely dug the way it sounded on its own, but it wasn’t going to work in the application I was looking to shoehorn it into.
The Crowther was a pretty interesting pedal. It almost committed the No-Tone-Knob sin, but alleviated that somewhat with a Presence knob, which I’ve never A) fully understood; or B) liked. In any case, I’d heard it was a fantastic low-medium gain pedal so here it was. I definitely dug it’s mojo at low gain, but I decided to crank it up to see what’s what. Wouldn’t you know it, I actually liked the way it sounded better than the OCD! It doesn’t have as much of a compressed sound and individual notes in a chord ring out much better. It was a no-brainer. The OCD was relegated to low-gain status.
Finally, the Timmy. I only got this pedal the other day and in my initial testing, didn’t think it was all that special. Then I cracked it open and noticed a paid of dip-switches. Apparently the Timmy can be set to symmetrical or asymmetrical clipping, as well as an uncompressed mode (which is stock). Mine was set to asymmetrical (which explains why it didn’t impress me, it didn’t sound any different than my old OD-1 or Fulldrive 2), so I popped ‘er back to uncompressed. There’s that clean-ish, sparkly drive! The OCD could be in trouble.
I’ll have to do some more testing before I finalize the new lineup, but I’m thinking that it’s going to be pretty f-in’ awesome. Until I decide to change it again.
- Saro
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