About This Shootout
Purpose
The goal of this ongoing pedal shootout is to create identical demos of as many distortion/overdrive pedals as possible. The first batch of pedals were provided to me by my local music store (Rainbow Music). My reasons for doing any of this are explained here.
Consistency for Comparison
If you are to truly evaluate two things side by side, you must limit the variables that change from one test to the other. The problem with most gear demos is that they are done for marketing purpose, in order to make pedal “A” sound good. Then when it comes to pedal “B” it’s also done in a way to make it sound good.
This is a great for marketing pedals if you’re a manufacturer, and I wish more companies would put more effort into this, but is also nearly useless to people trying to compare two pedals. One site has 3 recordings of pedal “A” recorded by some guy with his own studio, guitar, etc.. and another site has a recording of pedal “B” recorded by another guy who has a completely different recording setup, playing style, and equipment.
When you’re recording, any change in mic position, amp, guitar, strings, pickups, and especially the player can result in noticeably different results. So when I had the idea to do this demo, I knew I had to do it in one shot, without changing anything.
Tests
What was being tested?
There were a couple characteristics of each pedal that I was evaluating.
- Transparency
- Pedal/Amp Distortion Blending
- Available Distortion
- Distortion Quality/Tonality
Transparency
Some of the most popular pedals ever suffer from what I call “Tone Thinning”. This is a highly scientific term to describe the way that bass gets lost in the pedal as you increase the treble in the tone along with the distortion. With many pedals it seems you have to choose between losing bass or muted treble.
I wanted to test and demonstrate how well each pedal could pass the signal through, and match the tonal balance of the guitar and amp without the pedal.
Pedal/Amp Distortion Blending
It’s a pretty standard thing to run a tube amp partially distorted for a “base” tone. However when switching to play lead, a distortion pedal is often used to add more distortion to the signal. This combination of pedal distortion and amp distortion is important because not all pedals and amps mix well together. I wanted to test for each pedal how a partially distorted signal from the pedal would blend with the distorted amp.
Available Distortion
Occasionally you may find yourself playing an amp that has no master volume, no distortion channel, and be expected to play a nice solo. Most places don’t want your amp at obscene volumes so you won’t get any distortion from the amp in that event.
For this reason, I wanted to evaluate the total amount of distortion available from each pedal. The upper end of this spectrum is a fuzz pedal, and that’s a very distinct sound that I was not looking for. So I was evaluating how much distortion and sustain each pedal could generate with no assistance from the amp.
Distortion Quality/Tone
Scientifically speaking, not all distortion is created equal. Distortion happens when a waveform is clipped at the top and bottom. There are many factors that determine the harmonic recipe of the resultant tone including the symmetry/asymmetry and physical characteristics of the clipping device(s).
In plain English, some distortion sounds smooth and organic, and other distortion sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard. As I tested each pedal, I tried to listen to see if at any point the sound of the distortion sounded too glassy, shrill, or harsh.
Settings
Each pedal was tested at 3 settings.
- Clean Boost
- Partial Gain
- Full Gain
Clean Boost
For this setting, whatever distortion control was available on the pedal was turned all the way down. The tone controls were adjusted to match the sound of the clean signal as closely as possible, and the volume set to provide a slight volume boost to the amp.
The purpose of this setting was to test the pedals ability to pass a boosted signal to the amp without changing the tone. The amp was set to have a decent amount of preamp distortion, but not enough for doing a heavy-duty solo. The pedal was supposed to push the amp a bit further into distortion to allow for moderate soloing.
Partial Gain
Using the same amp setting as “Clean Boost”, the pedal was adjusted so that the distortion knob was set exactly halfway between no distortion and maximum distortion. The tone controls were re-adjusted to match the clean tone again, and the volume reset to provide a slight boost over the clean volume.
In this way, the pedal was adding distortion to the signal, then passing that distorted signal to the already-distorting preamp tubes. I was evaluating how well this blended, and if any phase cancellation, or high frequency reduction was present.
Full Gain
Then I set the amp to run pretty clean. The master volume was maxed out but the input volume was set fairly low. The resultant tone was fairly weak on it’s own, definitely not suitable for high-octane soloing of any style.
The pedal was then set with the distortion control maxed out, the volume and tone controls adjusted accordingly. This exposed the distortion circuit of the pedal by testing if it could produce enough distortion and sustain into a low-volume, clean amp, to allow for convincing soloing (for me at least).
Gear
Amp
The amp used for this shootout was a Fender Blues Junior, Tweed NOS edition. It is my amp of choice right now due to it’s size, portability, and because it’s one of the few amps that I’ve felt produces good sounding preamp distortion without losing too much tone in the process. It is not modded in any way (yet).
Guitar
The guitar used was a Don Grosh Retro Classic. Here are the specs:
- Swamp ash body
- Brazilian rosewood fretboard
- Lindy Fralin Blues Specials Pickups
- Strings: D’addario EXL series, .11 – .49
- Saddles: Graph Tech Labs string savers on the high strings, regular on the low strings
This is as good a guitar as you’ll find anywhere, but it does differ from most strats in one key area. The combination of Swamp Ash and Brazilian Rosewood makes for a very bright, articulate guitar. This is something that I like very much about this guitar. It also brings out the best/worst in a distortion pedal depending on how many harsh harmonics it’s producing in the upper frequency registers.
Pick
Dunlop Tortex, 1.0 thickness.
Setup
Mic Placement
I place a Rode NT1000 Studio Condensor microphone about 19″ away from the front of the Blues Junior and 10.5″ off center. The mic was set with the diaphragm at 13.5″ off the floor, and aimed at the center of the amp, at the same height.
This position was chosen after about 20 minutes of experimenting with various mic placements to achieve a clean tone that I felt was representative of what the amp really sounds like. Anyone who’s done any recording knows that even the slightest movement of the microphone either in position or aim can have a drastic effect on the recorded tone. So it was fairly important to me to get a mic position that yielded a good sounding clean signal. My only complain is that this mic is much more sensitive to the lower frequencies than the human ear so everything sounded fatter on tape than it sounded live. I compensated for this in the “studio mix” version of each recording by introducing a uniform bass cut in the EQ of each recording.
Recording Setup
I then assembled 3 backing tracks in 3 different pairing on one track in GarageBand. The first pairing was for the Clean Boost test, the second paring was for the Partial Gain test and the last pairing was for the Full Gain test. Lastly the pedal was setup for Full Gain and recorded over the last pair of backing tracks.
Each pedal was recorded onto an separate track in GarageBand.
Mixing
Mixing
When all pedals had been recorded, I imported the project into Logic Express. The first thing I did was to normalize every pedal recording to -3db. This was to eliminate any recordings that came out louder from being percieved as better sounding due to being louder.
Studio Mixes
The first goal was to create studio mixes of each pedal, mixed with the backing track. As I mentioned before, the Rode NT1000 picks up a lot of low end which made each pedal sound fatter and more bass heavy than it sounded live. For the “studio mix” version of each recording, I wanted to apply a uniform EQ, and reverb to each pedal to decrease the muddiness and give a bit of ambience. So I assigned all the pedal tracks to run through an auxiliary bus and mixed the auxiliary bus into thhe main outputs.
I inserted an instance of the Waves Q4 parametric equalizer into the auxiliary bus. I set it to provide just a slight treble boost, and a slight mid and bass cut. This took the muddiness out of each track. The important thing to remember is that it was applied to the mixdown of each pedal equally.
I also put an instance of the Waves RVerb plugin across the auxiilary bus to give each pedal recording some ambience. Each recording was mixed down to a separate .aif file, which was normalized after exporting. These .aif files were converted to high bitrate (192KHz) mp3 files.
Raw Mixes
For reference purposes, I also mixed down each pedal to separate files without any effects or backing tracks as well. These are labeled as “No Music” on the demonstrations page.