I love Tube Screamers. I love the sound associated with Tube Screamers. I love the belligerent shade of green Ibanez chose to paint them. Some of my favourite players have rocked Tube Screamers and have laid down fantastic tones that are considered benchmarks of how certain styles of music should sound. For example, SRV single-handedly created the blues rock genre and the pair of Tube Screamers he used are as integral to the Texas Blues sound as his fluid style and vicious attack.
The association with SRV is as much a curse as it is a blessing, as many mistakenly consider the Tube Screamer as a pedal for the blues. This unfair pigeon-holing of the TS conveniently forgets that many hard-rock and metal bands from the 80’s stuck TS pedals in front of their Marshalls to get some really heavy, gritty and ballsy rock sounds. Mike and Stone of Pearl Jam have both used TS pedals in the past as part of the Alt Rock vanguard, but so has Tom Petty. If nothing else, the TS pedal is perhaps the benchmark for versatility.
The reason for this is its intended usage. Unlike other overdrive and distortion pedals, the TS is intended to work in harmony with your amp to naturally push it to overdrive. This, of course, is referring strictly to tube amps. Nothing can make a solid state amp sound good, not even pickups wound by God. The TS certainly has a flavour to it, which is a mid-heavy sound that helps your guitar cut through the mix and sound huge, but most of the tone you’re going to be getting is that of your amp. A Vox will still sound chimey, a Fender shimmery and a Marshall will sound like angels making love to 2nd order harmonics.
At one point recently, I had the fortune of owning two original 80’s TS9 pedals, an 80’s SD9 and a 90’s TS9DX, which had been modded by Analogman. It was more to satisfy my curiosity than out of any insane desire to run all four at once (though the thought did occur to me with startling regularity). Having previously owned a reissue TS9, as well as many TS clones and variations (Fulltone Fulldrive, Boss OD-1, Boss SD-1, Goudie 808, etc.), I wanted to see if the vintage mojo associated with the original pedals was based on a legitimate tonal superiority, or just nostalgic hype.
After much noodling and knob-tweaking, I came to the conclusion that the original TS9s both sounded much better than other TS pedals I’ve had in the past. Whether using them as a booster, or as a drive pedal, they had an immediacy and an organic quality that I hadn’t encountered previously. They cleaned up better with volume control changes on the guitar and reacted better to picking dynamics. I wasn’t surprised by this, since I had heard as much from countless others, but it was somewhat interesting to hear the difference for myself.
A pleasant surprise was how fantastic the Analogman pedal sounded. In the stock mode, running the original JRC4558 op-amp chip that is the heart of the TS’s sound, it sounded fantastic compared to its vintage cousins. Switching to the other modes yielded a bevy of tonal options impossible to attain with the original. In terms of overall usefulness and variety, I found the Analogman TS9DX to be the hands-down winner. It was capable of doing so much more than the stock 80’s TS9s because of its 4 different modes, especially the 3rd setting, which switched the pedal to asymmetrical clipping similar to a Boss SD-1.
The SD9 was an awesome monster. Right from the get go, this pedal was a Marshall stack in a box. Using it like a traditional TS pedal, with the drive rolled all the way off and the volume set for a bit of a boost, this bad boy turned a completely clean Traynor YGL3 into an older Marshall just pushed into overdrive. Think Clapton’s JTM on the Beano album, or early AC/DC sounds. With the drive turned up to 9 o’clock, there was some definite 70’s rock sounds starting to come out, and the closer to 12 o’clock that drive knob went, the more 80’s metal started to come out of my amp. This pedal is 1.5 lbs of arena rock.
As much as I liked the TS9DX and the SD9, I still run the two TS9s on my board. I don’t need one pedal to do it all. I’d rather have two pedals I like set to slightly different sounds so that I have some options. Also, I don’t need a pedal to make my amp sound like a Marshall, because I play one. For me, I set my JTM45 to a good amount of drive on its own and judicious use one or the other TS9 to give me some tonal variations. I run both of the Tube Screamers with the drive all the way down and the tone knob around 11 o’clock, but one of them has the volume dimed while the other is just past the noon setting. I can go from a few different rhythm sounds to a couple different lead sounds, as well as the jaw-dropping sounds I can make with my Les Paul, the Marshall and both Tube Screamers turned on. With that setup, I can hit that middle note in Parisien Walkways and hold it for almost as long as Gary does.
