Forget Overdrive! What About A Wonderful Clean Tone?

[Music] do [Music] bravo good sir beautiful it's a different type of transient dan it really is hey everyone welcome to that pedal show dan here mick here hello um right we're talking about clean tones today the title of the video hopefully is something like forget overdrive what you need is a really nice yeah forget it come on let's throw it away what you need is a a really nice dynamic clean tone but before we do that some important housekeeping yes indeed thank you all for watching please subscribe if you haven't already subscribed also uh a massive thank you to anyone that's gone to thatpedalshowstore.com and grab some merch t-shirts hats and cups and mugs and pedals and all the stuff all that stuff it's the main way we fund the show and we greatly appreciate you buying stuff there indeed um yeah you said all of the things that needed to be said wonderful okay we're doing this show because um just recently we did a show about how to set your amp up [Music] one of the amps we used in that was offender hot rod deluxe much loved by lots and lots of people and loved less by others but it is a staple of backline amp uh provision all across the world really and in the discussion of setting up the amp we were talking about things like how eye-popping unpleasant chest thumping aggressive we were using lots of pejorative terms about the dynamic of the clean channel and quite rightly in the in the comments section that followed over the weekend after the video went live there was a few really good questions yeah such as okay what do you do about that then yeah if you want that to be a really nice clean sound or conversely i really love that sound it's great i don't have any problem with it at all so really uh we did a show on clean sounds ages and ages and ages ago it was a long time ago but the danger is whenever we talk about clean sounds they're always pretty overdriven yeah right so just as in just a notch back from el yeah so i said let's do a show on on clean sounds and he said yeah great we'll get the bd2 and just roll it back a bit i'm like no no no no not flush says no this is clean sounds um for those of you who really love that big bell-like chiming i mean you know insert adjectives here sure what we love about this thing and those things yes and to get into that we really need to have the discussion about headroom yeah because there are some apps that can do this and some apps that are going to struggle yeah i think we've got three amps today so we've got fender hot deluxe which we're going to start with as a kick off from the last video we've got our beloved hi-watt dr-103 which is our head roomiest amp of all and can be utterly brutal therefore we're going to use it to try and tame that brutality a bit and we've got something that you might not consider to be a great clean amp although users of these will know them to be great cleanups uh 50w marshall plexi you know what would you associate with the marshal plexi overdrive but we're going to we're going to prove it otherwise so those are the that's where we're going to begin and we're just going to run through 10 things that you can try or you can think about in order to make that clean sound feel sound and react in a way that isn't quite so brutal and popping and and so that when you go from that to a driven sound it's not this it's not you know uh worlds apart yeah because we are talking about the same things right we're talking about headroom we're talking about eq we're talking about compression and dynamics and we're talking about um harmonics and how they interact all of those things are equally applicable to clean sounds what we're going to call clean sounds as they are overdrive sounds the the big difference here and i guess the reason we're going to talk about it is because the envelope of that note is so radically different indeed what do i mean by envelope so the very start of that note which uh we call the transient in an amplifier that has headroom we're going to see all that transient but then it's going to die down very quickly as opposed to an amplifier that's limiting this overdriving that transient is going to be compressed basically and we're going to see a longer sustain before it starts to tail down so i mean the guitar is sustaining for the same amount it's just what's perceived through the amplifier is different so the amplifier with loads of headroom massive massive spike yeah and that i guess that manifests in two ways for you as the player one is you hit that note and it's like whoa yeah that's painful and then there's nothing right so you need to play another note pretty quickly yeah because it's gone away whereas with overdrive obviously it sustains so sustain is an issue okay let's start the 10 things got a list and everything nice um seeing as we left off with the hot rod deluxe last time we're gonna plug it back in and our first thing is make it wet so if you've got a really aggressively clean guitar amplifier sound and for whatever reason you don't have any reverb in the amps or turn it off in the hot rod deluxe this is what you get [Music] that mid-range of that amplifier just gets me every time well we're going to come to that in a sec you know it's a sound and it's a very useful sound and fans of people such as uh jerry garcia and grateful dead and those kind of really eye-popping loud brutally aggressive clean sounds you know you might like something like that it's not really what we're talking about today no so to take the edge off it we're just going to add a load of delay and reverb and it is amazing how much space this can give you [Music] [Applause] [Music] do [Music] just gives you a bit of space to move around doesn't it i want to play that sound yeah so if you're if you've got all that off and you're trying to play i don't know dan was playing all kinds of tricky stuff chords and everything there but if you just play a single note line [Music] [Music] it speaks for itself doesn't it it does just give me phone's edge of the room just gives you a bit of space around the note um so you've got a little time to breathe before your guitar sound dies away it's so obvious it barely is worth saying but it's not obvious to everybody yeah and one really important thing to mention is that when we have amplifiers that have this much headroom the delay in the reverb we're going to hear all the character of the delay in reverb so things like um you know whether you're going between a hall or a plate reverb or a shimmer all that stuff the detail that you hear in an amplifier with high headroom is colossal so you know you'll be able to tweak those parameters to to what really works for you as opposed to an amplifier that's that's limiting it's like it's less of a you get less of that detail can still be really cool yeah but the beautiful thing about a high hydro magnifier is that you can really make use of those delays and reverbs yeah we'll hear it more as the show goes on um also worth saying that if you're not sure about different types of delay and reverb please watch some of our previous shows where we go through different types of delay and reverb and you can hear some things that might suit you a little bit um right so number two try an eq pedal so if for example you're hit with that um it has a very particular mid-range voice and it might not be beautiful in your in your idea i'm going to turn the reverb and the amp back on done [Music] what would you how would you like the eq of that to change so i would love some if we can start between sort of 801k less yeah [Music] just to say for reasons we don't understand the leds on the eq pedal are not working but i promise you it's on and i'll prove that right now [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you can see how subtle that curve is that's a really important thing with eq especially when we're dealing again without headroom a little bit goes a long way um so that that tiny little bit of a dip between 800 and 1k yeah actually i've taken a bit of 500 1k and 2k out right so a little dip in there where the where the deluxe is most aggressive but because we've still got plenty of top end and presence there we're going to hear it you know what i mean it's not we're not making anything dull we're just moving a little feel those mids of course when we're rocking out we want those mids yeah but for the clean thing it just we don't want them to get in the way yeah and that is equally applicable you know it might be that your different guitars need a slightly different tweak but for example my les paul sheds a small tear every time you bring out that um so you know les paul um a lot of people don't associate les pauls with clean tones but of course they've made some of the greatest clean tones in history so um we'll just put the eq on and off again and we'll see if that particular shape works for this guitar or whether it needs it at all for that matter [Music] [Music] [Music] not sure what the mics are hearing super subtle just a little bit of tweaking tweak in whatever direction you want it's the first step really isn't it eq totally if you've got one of those brutal clean or at least you just want to shape it a bit so let's say you don't have an eq pedal you really you're not a massive fan of the front end of that fender hot rod deluxe you don't want to buy a new amp here's something that you can try that will help you shape in a similar way but give a completely different character as well we're going to try a separate valve preamp into the effects loop return we have done this before so you can watch other videos on that but it will fundamentally change the character yeah um so dan play the play that hot rod deluxe this is just the hot rod deluxe as it is [Music] so [Music] you might prefer either one of those sounds i certainly prefer that one you prefer that one man yeah yeah but you know it's these things are all uh beauty being in the ear of the beholder aren't they so you may prefer either one the point is the eq in the front end of that amp cannot do yeah what that eq does there's there's nothing like the range of scope in the hot rod deluxe's eq that you can get but it's interesting to see that like if you choose the preamp you know with with a an amplifier that's got such an open power section yeah what you can do with just choice of preamps is huge um it's all fairly boring so far let's make it more interesting one tool that fans of clean guitar sounds have used for eons is a compressor indeed and we want to show two ways of using your compressor indeed i'm going to move over to the hi what now um because it shows off the compressor yeah it does have a compressor yeah things are gonna get horribly wrong yeah you've got your high watt dr-103 you plug in and this happens [Music] i mean you know it don't get me wrong it's not bad it's also it's just quite hard to play [Music] and yeah i mean it's just and you might you might like that don't don't don't get us wrong we want to soften it up a bit yes we want to make it a little bit less attacky we want to even out the envelope of that note and the way we're going to do that is to use a compressor two ways yeah so the first way is the most obvious way we're going to you know we're going to really compress it think about your dynacomps uh your ross compressors those sorts of compressors that you know the classic two knob compressor that basically just squish everything and they've got a really great sound but it sounds like a compressor but it's the sound we know and love this is a kali 76 stacked version it's basically two 1176 type rack units in one ish um so it's not quite the same thing as a dynacomp type compression but we can get it there so dan if you play i'll adjust as we go okay [Music] so play that chord again [Music] so good overtly compressy you might want to use that sound um but it is a bit it's really fast this uh compressor historically yeah whereas your dyno can't be much slower yeah indeed so we're still we're still grabbing that front edge yeah it's play a funky thing [Music] yeah see now that's the compression sound i'm not massively in love with right because it's just you're slamming one compressor into the other there yeah and it's it's too much it does give you a load of match it does give you a load of extra sustain so if you hold on to a note [Music] so that's an overtly compress sound right and you really hear the character of the compressor when you set it like that right but one thing that works really well and loads of people love is being able to dial a bit of the original sound back in so we're still getting the attack the front end of the note but then it's mixed in with the compressor okay so if you play and i'll just dial in some of that front end [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Laughter] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] [Music] it's so great because it just gives you time absolutely which is what you don't have yeah if you've got an endlessly forever headroom right and you get that massive transient and then down to nothing right which is the what electric guitars do but that smooths out that transient and just gives you that lovely long note which is why players like david gilmore you know when you hear them do those those long you know all that stuff yeah wouldn't work without a compressor it is really really nice it's really really nice um i'm just going to preempt something we're going to do in a bit dan have a play of that and uh and enjoy it for a second okay and then i'm going to turn on a boost at the end and we'll come back to this but i just want to hear it for a second [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Applause] [Music] bye [Music] [Applause] do [Music] oh man preempted preempted two things there what do you what so what were you feeling uh the first thing you you can't play like that without a compressor yeah right you can't get that sustained stuff but then that little bit of modulation comes on and everything's good yeah it just opens up first of all i turned on the boost at the end and we'll come back to that but the boost at the end just gave a little lift in everything and you know what feedback with a clean sound yeah really that was the first thing i'm going and yeah you're right you hit the best of something that was awesome i've done it absolutely on purpose because it's my belief anyway and i don't have any like scientific grounding for this that it's the interplay of all those harmonics in your guitar sound because those are the sorts of things we associate with an overdriven guitar sound right right but actually it's equally applicable to clean guitar sounds and we just proved it feedback with a clean guitar tone because why all the harmonics and everything is into playing and they're helping you and they're just leading you along and they're i mean for sure if you don't want the feedback it's a pain but what you've got to do is turn out the way and do what dan did you know play it and then uh then we and we'll come back to the boost in a second but then we preempted thing number five which is a little bit of modulation goes a long way yeah so i think when we think of things like chorus and flange and phase and stuff we think of a really specific that sound it's but you know when we're talking about clean sounds we hear a chorus sound we think of that you know faux 12 string type thing but it really doesn't have to be like that um to the point where i think a lot more guitar sounds than you realize have chorus and modulation on them especially if you listen to anything in between about 1981 and 1989 and dave um i mean a really good example is a lot of stevie ray vaughn's tones where he was using the um the dimension d the dimension d yeah it was a post thing you know it was a post thing in the production just to give it a bit of width um you can hear that all over recordings from the 80s just to give it a little bit so what we'll do i'll start off with a chorus sound that you might know like with the depth turned up and then i'll get mick to turn the depth down and we'll get down to to quite a subtle thing and then we'll toggle between them actually i'll do it you play okay as well as a chorus tangent with the depth max than the speed minimum that's your classic analog chord so right isn't it i think [Music] do so [Music] beautiful as you can see as we're going through we're building up some of these things as well um because as you would have gathered from the top of the show in isolation they can be a bit uninspiring but once you start adding them all together yeah as you can see by that you know you can get amazing you know those chords those classic chorus tones are fantastic and if that's the way you want to go great but don't discount having just a tiny little bit because adding that little bit of movement and just be fantastic because also and you hear how it can cut out some of that bass yeah right so if you're doing a solo you know turn the speed and depth right down it can be a fantastic way just to help you push through you know with a sort of a clean seller type thing yeah wonderful you could try it with phasers you could try it with rotary speaker you could try it with harmonic trem yeah pretty cool actually yeah pretty cool just a little bit of movement in there um all right so what we're what we have been moving towards here by turning all these things on and playing in a slightly different way is sure you can use the compressor on the board but you can also use your natural compressor which is you and this is something i've been asking you about for a long time because it's always fascinated me how even you are with the way that you pick well i think with great headroom comes great responsibility right because to take it back to the top of the show the the problem of the envelope of a clean sound just as an adjunct at this point for anyone who says that none of these sounds are clean it's not typically not if you put it on an oscilloscope it wouldn't be clean no no proper electric guitar sound is fully fully fully clean but you know you know what we mean i hope you know what we mean um so if you if you take your plucker and we all hit the string slightly differently right but one of the ugliest things you'll hear with with a flat clean guitar sound is a flat pick hard against the string right i think okay because it you know it's just [Music] i'm playing deliberately staccato there you can't not make it sound good though i think you're at that point in your play is like no it's going to sound good but that's what gives it the the the immediacy the the die off no die off in the note and like that i mean obviously i'm doing a bit of staccato with with my left hand there but i think what some of these tools offer us is the ability to play with that dynamic range a bit more so yeah you might want to be a bit louder and this is where your compressor will help you as well and you might even want to invoke a boost but instead of hitting that you know note just the same and flat and the same every time let's do a couple of things let's maybe try a different edge of the plectrum oh let's try for getting the pick all together and using our fingers nice and what you'll hear is a vast array of different textures coming from the clean town that sound now many of you will do this completely naturally you don't even think about it some of you won't have experimented with this stuff so let's have a look at it and um let's see so i was going to build it up by starting with with the clean sound i'll turn a few things on so the compressor already mitigates some of that because it's taking the front off the note and making everything yeah things stop jumping out so if that's how you want to play that's good that can really help you i'll just move the pick around [Music] and now instead of hitting the note flat i'll just i'll rake it a little bit [Music] [Music] same pick i i think i might actually just be hitting it with the front of my finger actually is what might be happening but you hope i hope you hear the difference in the that was amazing the treble response that's before we've turned any other stuff on and as we said with great headroom becomes a great responsibility because now we're going to add some volume right now we're going to add the um thorpy heavy water on the end and this is a new revelation for dan and i is at least my favorite boost of all time ever and this will bring us quite a bit more volume right [Music] and just like when i'm walking my dog in the fields worrying the sheep so my uh picking hand is worrying the preamps of the recording software because now we've got loads of headroom right and just to make it even sillier i'm gonna turn them output the compressor up so it's even louder but what this now gives us the opportunity for is to vary between this and these and get a whole different bunch of textures right [Music] mm-hmm [Music] yes so between that was amazing it is guitar playing 101. that is amazing with apologies when i think about it as when it's never quite as flowing as when you're not thinking about it but between your pickup selector your volume pot and your hands and you pick the dynamic possibility there is just colossal it does mean you have to be a bit louder right right and then then what i say about responsibility is then you can't just hammer the guitar right because it's just too loud right have a go because dad's a hitter right dan one of one of the best things about dan's playing let me get mike is he flipping hits the guitar and it drives a telly in a vox in a way that is just the most wonderful thing so let's see for you to reign it back from there um okay [Music] so [Music] so [Music] it's mad isn't it not only is it mad i'm i am scared to play with that sound yeah because it's because as soon as i go as soon as as soon as i do my normal thing it's like oh man it's a punch that's too much for you it's not too much just that i'm not used to it and i'd need to spend some time yeah with that because i like i'm hearing you playing it's like stunning and all those dynamics and stuff i mean with the compressor on and all that stuff and the dynamics are out of this world yeah i'm thinking yeah i really want to get me some of that yeah but as soon as i start doing it's like yeah and it's not going to work well the temptation is there because it sounds so good and that's my thing because i get too excited and as soon as i get excited i'm digging in yeah so i guess that's maturity right well i don't know but i've never i've i mean if i'm doing like a you know bluesy stevie ray type thing then i will hit the guitar but my normal place on the guitar is to sit back a bit anyway right especially i think the strat really it's a paradox isn't it because on one hand the strat is a guitar that you really can hit but on the other side of that coin is it's so subtle that if you do give it loads and just go to the extreme put the other side of the heavy water on as well in fact i'll do it while i'm while i'm playing um we had all of this on didn't we [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Laughter] [Music] yeah too much right too much at that point because you can't you can barely even hit the guitar without it taking your head off but there's a point where you can hear everything right you can hear the pics like that or the pics like that or yes like that or the top of your fingernail i mean it's amazing yeah and i think that's where that you know where the clarity and the dynamic all those things we talk about come from very cool you do that it's very cool very cool all right um we've played the deluxe we've played the hi what the next subject is a marshall plexi can do a fantastic clean sound gonna prove it here you go dan [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] it's just beautiful in this and that's just really lovely the channels have jumped the the uh high treble channel is just on and the uh normal channel is on about two or three it's still loud i mean it's plenty loud enough to do anything useful with you'd want to do is it er-34s in that yeah is can you is there a room reverb on that yep machine yeah i believe there is [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] so [Music] just pushing the marshall into overdrive there yeah marshall fashion right right right right on the edge but what a massively dynamic clean sound that is really really killer wow amazing 50 what plexi celestia and alnico rubies noted for being quite a dark sounding speaker yeah and i guess it all comes back to the headroom right because the way the ant's running it's open yeah and if you did hit if you hit it with some humbuckers and you know turn the other side of the heavy water on it would be overdriving very nicely and it's just i i actually think a lot of the most beautiful clean sounds are that boy lives right yeah yeah very nice um okay don't be afraid of the bridge pickup right i uh went to see alan holdsworth many years ago and he had the best clean tone i'd ever heard and i saw him at the bar at the end of the game so i stood there by himself and i went no i'm gonna go and say hello glass i said excuse me sir and we sat down had a chat and he was he was so lovely and i said how do you get that clean tone from is he was playing um not steinberg it was a he played a carving with a headless carving for a minute with a actually one with the head as well yeah but anyway it's a single bridge pickup yeah and how do you get the sound from that it says i just dial everything in so i can get my sounds from a single humbucker all right well it's amazing but the thing to remember with humbuckers is you know we say humbuckers like it's all humbuckers are the same they're so not yep you've got a a vast variety of humbucker type tones i thought we'd just show you a few just run through them really quick yeah cool um humbucker o'clock then is it done humber clock go for it all right right so bridge pickup first thing we're gonna do with the volume went all the way up look at this do that again wow okay but the first thing you need to do is dial that volume back and you'll hear there's a point where all that bottom end goes um [Music] so it's you know it's it's a really great um you can get fantastic clean tones from it now if i sculpted that with a bit of eq as well [Music] so [Music] i think if you added the compressor to that it would even it would further accentuate that high end [Music] that's mad on the strut it was really accentuating the high end but on that it seems to accentuate the mid to more yeah right interesting um one thing that can help with humbuckers if they're a little darker sounding this guitar is brighter sounding than that one so it won't sound that dark but [Music] interestingly enough um on dan's uh g3 video from last year might have even been the year before uh all the clean guitars you can hear in the piece of music behind is this guitar amazing just in case you were thinking les paul couldn't do clean sounds anyway i'll do the same that dad did british pick up british pickaxe um uh and here we go one thing i find that can help is if you add an additional buffer right [Music] turn so i'm just going to turn all the other pedals off a sec we'll turn the um effect level in the reverb to zero [Music] humbuckers are especially susceptible to top end loss so it does really help and i find that that really works with a strat too where you turn the volume down add a buffer and you just retain all that high end yeah nice yeah okay so this is uh these are wide range handbags [Music] so [Music] charmy lovely nice i know this will play in tune [Music] uh malcolm's sg with mini humbuckers [Music] do [Music] bye [Music] [Music] um [Music] so [Music] get a bit carried away sounds killer it really does um so many you know mini humbuckers um i appreciate we were supposed to be talking about the bridge pickup but we sort of gone on to a discussion about separate pickups it's okay yeah yeah so i'll just briefly talk about this because i you know i know with the wide-ranging child because i had it in the middle position i think one thing that's really important you know like with all this stuff when we're talking about um you know headroom it's when we hear stuff right because we've got scope to hear everything so when we talk about different guitars this is when you're going to really hear the the noises and everything like that so um a really good example is p90s so if we here so we've got two different guitars with p90s and i'm just gonna obviously it's just a single bridge uh pickup p90 in this one but this guitar has some of the best clean tones in it like ever it's incredible so [Music] i'm gonna put them in here [Music] down [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] you [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] the horrific buzz of p90s well i think we kind of so we kind of we hit eight and nine there right unturned and and ten yeah wicked yeah so you know we get used to you know mick and i play strats and tallies most of the time yeah and we get used to those sounds but there is so many great clean sounds in other guitars and other pickups um you know and i think especially with humbuckers it might not be that obvious but spend a little bit of time with it rolling back that volume and it's like as the whole thing opens up it's pretty amazing i think some of the sounds today um are there to illustrate the point really they may they might not be necessarily your favorite sounds ever but by going overboard on that boost by going overboard on the compression by going overboard well we fairly subtle with the eq but you sort of get the i hope what you get out of this is that flat basic largely uninspiring sound that comes out of your amp when you hit it with the sideways of the pick and you just get a note and it's like buff here i am so what can be a little uninspiring hopefully we've introduced a few things and they don't have to be expensive things like this i mean it's a pretty spendy board today to be fair happens that way sometimes yeah i couldn't get here early and brought his board out and started stacking it with stuff i was like oh this sounds good so um but you know there are many more cost-effective options for all of these pedals um compressors delays reverbs preamps boosts right the most fascinating relation for me today though was that like when you turn the volume up and you're going for just using the pick yeah between that and your fingers i'm like oh man i've really got to spend some time doing that and that's where i think that's the difference between that flat uninspiring nothing's happening here clean tone yeah and one that does have all if not more of that feel feedback dynamic response harmonic that you would associate more with a with another sound amazing um clean feedback is my favorite thing today done yeah epic well there you go thank you so much for watching really hope you enjoyed that again please subscribe if you haven't already subscribed um a massive thank you to our patrons on patreon thank you so much really appreciate indeed a massive thank you to our preferred retailers in the uk and europe would be anderson's music of guild ford in surrey where i bought that strat just recently and there are some links in the description below indeed if you are in the u.s and you want to buy pedals and equipment you can go now to that pedal shop yeah um which is a thing that we're doing and if you buy stuff obviously we get a kickback from that and it greatly helps us fund this show um it only works in the us and you can't buy merch there if you want to buy merch it's that pedal show store.com and we ship all over the world indeed yes anyone that's gone to thatpelloshowstore.com thank you so much um yes t-shirts hats mugs pedals all there so yes massive thank you to anyone that's gone there brilliant we will see you on monday for viewers comments and questions where you can tell us all about your clean tones and probably talk about jerry garcia a lot indeed have a great day we'll see you soon okay bye bye [Music] [Applause]

Channel: That Pedal Show

Views: 196,438

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Id: 9aH-w8PFxNM

Length: 64min 54sec (3894 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 14 2022