Just got done putting the polish on the initial release of The OD Pedal Comparinator. In my opinion a better way to compare pedals than just listening to samples. It’s bound to have some bugs but just shoot me an email or a comment if something doesn’t work.

Compare OD Pedals…

Now that the pedal shootout has been up for a little while, I thought I’d post a little bit about a somewhat amusing little utility I’m building right now. My real intent in doing going through all these pedals was to be able to compare the recordings side-by-side for A/B style testing.

The current format is pretty, but it only allows you to play one at a time. So comparing two pedals Read the rest of this entry »

Conclusions to follow…..

On Saturday, I stopped by Rainbow Music in State College where I confiscated ever single overdrive and distortion pedal in the store.  The only things I left there were pedals that were obviously designed for metal or grunge.  Everything else was fair game.

I then set up 3 different backing tracks to play along with.  I then created 3 categories, “Clean Boost”, “Partial Gain”, and “Full Gain”.  I put two backing tracks into each group for a total of 6 minutes of backing music.

For the next 4 hours that night, and for 5 hours the next day, I went through 17 pedals, recording each one at 3 different settings matching the groups above.  Each pedal was played over the exact same backing tracks with the exact same recording setup.

By the time I was done, my fingers hurt so bad I that it hurt to type.  My ears were complely worn out and I think I’ll never want to hear those tracks again.

So to sum up,  my weekend was spent like this: 17 commonly available distortion/overdrive pedals recorded the exact same way, over 6 minutes of the exact same backing tracks for a total of 1.7 hours of audio for your evaluation.  I think I’ll name this pedal shootout “Play through the pain”

I’ll be posting the recordings here sometime in the next week or two after I get them mixed down.

A lot of people ask what the difference between the Tolex Fender Blues Junior and the Tweed NOS Fender Blues Junior is.  The only difference is that the Tweed edition has a better speaker.  How much better?  Well judge for yourselves, but I think the difference is quite big.  The amp settings are identical on both amps, and both amps are unmodified (so far).

Volume: 3.5 | Treble: 12 | Bass: 12 | Middle: 12 | Master: 12 | Reverb: 0 | Fat Switch: Off

Blues Junior Shootout from Anthony Stauffer on Vimeo.