How To Stack Overdrive Pedals (You Need To Be Doing This)

[Music] what's going on everyone welcome back to another video I'm Rachel and today we're gonna be talking about why you should be stacking your overdrive pedals if you're not already this is something that I've been doing for years on just about every iteration of almost every pedal board I've ever had so today I'm gonna take you through my thought process of when I'm putting a board together and picking OverDrive's to pair with one another I'm gonna show you some interesting tricks how you can basically make a fuzz tone with no fuzz pedal just by stacking some different over drives and I'm gonna show you some things not to do when stacking overdrive pedals so without further ado let's jump in and get started [Music] so today I'm playing through the revolta Mendota I've had this guitar for quite a while and I've really enjoyed it if you're interested in any of the gear that I talked about in today's video it will all be linked in the description box down below and here we have my pedal board in its current configuration right now the way I'm running my board is with two overdrive pedals and a boost there's also a couple of fuzz pedals and they JHS color box which I'm using kind of as a preamp but for today's discussion we're only taking a look at the Echo Park harmonic boost in the top right corner the vertex steel-string clean drive and the light speed from grier amps so from the board I'm playing straight into my port city pearl which is a 50 watt 6l6 all clean amp there is zero ant distortion going on you can hear [Music] really nice sparkly fender sort of clean tone and I just have a little bit of reverb coming from the big sky but that's it so through the years I've used a few different methods for stacking overdrive pedals the first one is kind of the way that I'm running this board currently which is by using two pretty light gain / drives and when you stack them together they build to a really really nice thick creamy crunchy rhythm tone really good overdrive so here's an example of that now we'll start with the vertex steel string because it's the first in the chain between the steel string and the light speed so right now I've got this thing set up pretty mild so you can you can hear the the overdrive on that is really subtle and if you dig in there is your distortion there's your overdrive that you don't get from the amp by itself [Music] still pretty clean I want to kick this on so that's the first thing that I look for when I'm searching for an overdrive pedal is the touch sensitivity does it clean up without me having to touch any volume knobs or anything on my board can I clean up my tone just by lightening the touch in my right hand to me that's the sign of a really well-designed pedal if it cleans up like a real amp would I'm a big fan of it so that's the steel string here is the light speed this is how I always run it this tone right here [Music] so you can hear it's adding a little bit more gain to the signal than the steel string was it's also adding a little bit of clarity and brightness to the top-end now the reason for that is because when I combine these two petals together I want the second pedal in the chain to add some clarity to help my tone cut through in a mix so just for reference here's my clean tone steel string it's the light speed with two steel string so there we have a really great crunchy rhythm tongue but because both of these pedals are really touch sensitive if I lighten up [Music] nutone cleans up that to me feels like a real amp breaking up and I achieved that from a totally clean tone just by stacking to medium gain and light gain OverDrive's alright so another great method for stacking OverDrive's is what I've done here so on the board you can see I've swapped out the greer Lightspeed with Paul Cochran Timmy this is another one of my favorite overdrive pedals I've ever owned basically what I'm doing here is instead of stacking to light to gain over drives I'm doing a light gain into a medium to heavy gain overdrive and what essentially that is doing is using the light gain to sort of add an extra color and a little extra harmonic richness if you will to the heavier overdrive so this is clean tone Timmy by itself god I love that pedal I really love that pedal so you can hear that's basically by itself is as crunchy and as saturated as the to light gain pedals were together so that's a good starting point if you like more gain in your signal overall it might be better to go with this method where you're using a heavy gain and a light game pedal together so there's the Timmy now when I stack the vertex on top of that right before it you can hear it's subtle but it is changing the character of the Timmy just a little bit it's really more of a feel thing than a tonal thing now if I were running this setup what I would do is put a boost pedal directly after the Timmy and that would be my solo boost because leading the steel string into the Timmy doesn't actually boost the volume that much you really need something after that medium to high gain overdrive pedal to bring it out for solos and leads and things like that okay so the third method for overdrive stacking is putting a medium to high gain pedal before a low gain pedal and this is something that I would actually really recommend if you are a fan of running a higher gain overdrive pedal the reason being it eliminates the need for a boost pedal after the stacked chain so I just threw on the dynamic distortion from vertex before the Lightspeed and I'll let you hear it by itself for a second so for the record this pedal is kind of unique in that it is a blend of a tube screamer and a fuzz face if you want to see a full demo of this pedal you can follow the link here I did a full in-depth review and demo of this pedal a few weeks ago but when you have the gain setting a little lower it's really more so in the tube screamer territory than the fuzz face territory so you can hear by itself that's a pretty high gain sound much beefier than the two low gain OverDrive's that I had at the beginning of the video and so this is you know your rhythm tone right here so that's pretty nice and when you're ready for a solo boost you kick on the light speed which is adding a little bit of top-end clarity as well as a volume boost and a little gain boost so that is a good solo time you don't need a boost pedal after those two because the Lightspeed in this case is actually acting as my boost pedal now let's talk about some things to avoid when you're stacking over drives I really don't like stacking to high gain pedals together I don't think it works I've tried it I've tried it with a bunch of different pedals in my experience it doesn't yield a good result the other thing to avoid is getting two of the same style of pedal there are exceptions to this rule I think tube screamers work well together if you stack two tube screamers maybe an 808 and 909 or something like that but for the most part I would recommend experimenting and trying out a bunch of different stuff there's no real formula that I've found that says this pedal will always pair well with this pedal it really just takes your own ear to tell you what works and the last thing that I would really avoid is stacking more than two maybe three / drives together at once the reason being again as we've talked about it can make your tone muddy and horrible and nobody wants that and so as promised the last thing I'm going to show you today is how to get a fuzz tone with no fuzz pedals so I've switched back to the steel string and light speed combination like I said because I really like those and I'm gonna use the Echo Park boost in front of those two pedals to really overload the circuitry and give me a crazy-cool fuzz tone so I'm going to turn on both pedals and go back to this stack drive sound and because I have the boost before the OverDrive's if I really crank this boost so it's slamming the front end of both of those overdrive pedals it's gonna send them into a different sort of harmonic territory than you would get without the boost so check this out so just for reference I'll turn on the hoof Reaper so you can hear an actual fuzz pedal [Applause] it's not that far off from a couple of light gain OverDrive's and a boost for this to work I recommend a good clean boost that has a lot of headroom and cranked the crap out of it so that it hits those overdrive pedals really really hard you can tell it does that thing that a good fuzz pedal does where when you first attack the note when you hit the transient it compresses and then the note blooms open love that so who says you need to buy a fuzz pedal so there you go guys that's how to stack overdrive pedals if you enjoyed today's video please let me know by liking and subscribing down below this video also let me know what you think in the comments section down below do you like to stack over drives if so what pedals do you like to use together that maybe we didn't cover here also let me know if you'd like to see something else in these gear talk tutorial videos that I'm doing if you want to support my channel you can check out the Amazon affiliate links down below in the description box as well if you click through one of those links and buy something I get a direct kickback which helps me in making these videos anyways thanks for watching that's gonna do it for today i'm rachel and remember there is no plan B doing it for the thumbnail

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 380,091

Keywords: Rhett Shull, overdrive stacking, how to stack overdrives, how to stack overdrive pedals, how to stack overdrive and distortion, guitar effects, rivolta mondata, vertex steel string, vertex steel string clean drive, vertex steel string pedal, vertex steel string review, vertex dynamic distortion, vertex dynamic distortion review, paul cochrane timmy, paul cochrane timmy pedal, paul cochrane timmy v2, echopark guitars, echo park harmonic boost

Id: mrlL_KBgLss

Length: 13min 30sec (810 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018