Understand The Types Of Overdrive Pedals On The Market

what what was the intro i was gonna do on this episode i think you did a voice memo i did oh oh my phone yeah yeah wait on today's episode i'm gonna help you sort through the thousands of overdrive options and understand that they basically all come from five types of circuits we're gonna make the complicated simple yeah that's good okay just roll the thing that's fine [Music] i know that most people that watch this show know everything about petals and life in general and most of you just watch me as a representation of how you don't want to be in your own life you think man the joshua is weird he's crazy but for some of you you don't know everything and i really want to help you today and the subject i want to help you on is very very important it is the fact that there are thousands literally thousands of overdrive pedals on the market new ones added almost weekly or daily and it can be really overwhelming to understand what overdrive you need what overdrives you like why you like the ones you like and why you don't really like the ones that you don't like so today's simple i'm going to play a clean fender style amp i'm going to play a scythe old hand telecaster style guitar bridge pickup only volume and tone knob all the way up and i'm going to play through five distinct categories of overdrive teaching you what each one is the petals that are in that style and let you hear them all with the same frame of reference and by the end of this episode hopefully you know why you like what you like and why you don't like what you don't like and maybe you'll discover some options you haven't tried with all that said i'm really excited let's get going the first category i want to cover is the most popular and most used and most familiar category of overdrive out there period it's been around since the late 70s and it is the category of soft clipping overdrives now the first type of overdrive within this category that you have definitely seen and possibly love or possibly hate is the tube screamer the tube screamer has been cloned copied modified it's just been used thousands and thousands of times in my own line i've had up to 10 versions of this pedal in some form or fashion now things like my bonsai cover multiple versions of the tube screamer through history we have pedals like the earthquakers plumes we have pedals like the seymour duncan 805 the full tone full drive the boss super overdrive and even pedals like the east river by electro harmonix these are all soft clipping tube screamer style overdrives and the distinctive factor in the tube screamer style is that it's not transparent it actually adds and boosts the mid frequencies causing your guitar to pierce through a mix really well it makes things feel thicker than they should feel and more saturated than other soft clippers that i'll show in a moment and to demo this simply i'm going to use the plumes because it's awesome it's like a hundred bucks as well made by our friends earthquaker devices and yeah you'll get to hear a soft clipping mid heavy overdrive tube screamer style but modern [Music] the second style of overdrive within the soft clipping overdrive category is the blues breaker style soft clipping overdrive now this came about in the 1990s when marshall made this blues breaker pedal based around an old amplifier we actually did an episode on this called what is a blues breaker i highly recommend it because it's awesome and it talks more about this sound but basically analog man designed the king of tone around this circuit and he kind of started a trend among other people like myself building upon the building block of this circuit uh we see petals like my morning glory we see the fox catcher this is a great one the black box overdrive the buddha by cmat and even brian wampler has the pantheon now the differences between this and the tube screamer are this is what we would call via buzzword transparent whereas the tube screamer that i showed earlier has a mid frequency hump it's not transparent this is going to sound like what your guitar and amps sound like just a little bit dirtier this is going to add some things that aren't naturally there that's the simplest way to think about it and just like the tube screamer all of those variations i showed you they're slightly different they might have little tweaks and sounds and things that builders like myself like and we do to our designs but these are all blues breaker style pedals but at the end of the day i think i'll play this guy it's pretty true to the original it shows you what you're dealing with and it's fantastic [Music] the next category of overdrive i want to walk you through is called hard clipping now unlike the tube screamer and blues breaker that are soft clipping meaning there's an op amp and within the loop of that op amp the diodes are in there and it's not fully distorting or fully clipping the signal these hard clipping effects actually put the diodes at the end of the circuit and every bit of your guitar signal is clipped in some way so they are by definition not as smooth not as easy on the guitar which is really fun in a lot of ways there are exceptions but for the most part i'll stand by that and the first form of this hard clipping i want to talk about is the 1977 style overdrive slash maybe distortion i did an episode on this called history of 1970s op amp distortion it's really cool riveting it has some dramatic soap opera type information in it you might want to check it out but the two best examples of this type of overdrive is the dod preamp 250 and the mxr distortion plus these both came out in the early 1970s before soft clipping was ever a thing and they are almost identical but over the years a lot of people have tweaked away and done a lot of different things with this type of idea utilizing an op amp pushing over diodes and hard clipping the sound and clipping the waveform and some of my favorites are the classics the distortion plus and the 250 but there are some things that you don't hear a lot about that are really fantastic black arts tone works quantum mystic is amazing it is a dod 250 but with an actual really powerful useful eq i say that because a lot of people try to add eq to this and it ruins the circuit but this does not also have the spiral effects yellow this is a fantastic take on this as well we have the drive by by daredevil it's more of a take on the distortion plus it's a little more aggressive and then we have the super famous full tone ocd there's a bajillion of these out there these are all hard clippers so to play this and demonstrate it let's use this guy it's one of my favorites currently the quantum mystic [Music] [Applause] so [Music] there are lots of different styles of hard clipping that i could get into that some blur almost overdrive but maybe their distortion and so on but i'm going to stand by the fact that the dod 250 mxr distortion plus topology is the most important but there is one more that i want to mention and it's kind of the new kid on the block it came around in the mid 90s and there is a pedal that absolutely is the craze of everybody everyone's obsessed with this pedal it's the clone centaur and it is a hard clipper a lot of people get this confused and think it's like a blues breaker or a tube screamer but it's not it's a fairly unique circuit and it does some interesting stuff now one of the things about this that has to be understood is that this pedal has this very strange arrangement inside of it where the gain control is actually two potentiometers turning at the same time and because of this the way that it blends in the gain signal you almost always have your clean signal going now this is really cool and really unique and it really really sets it apart from other hard clippers like this which are rather raspy at times being cool as that is this is always pretty clean and has a really distinct eq that holds together no matter how dirty you set it now this supposedly has mystical diodes that you can only find in an elvish paradise or something and people talk about this a lot and i get really tickled and happy about that because there's arguments and people are saying i can hear the mystical diodes and they have their gain knob turned off well the problem with that is if you don't run the gain knob on a clone up in the top 75 60 up you're not going to hear the diodes you're not clipping the signal they're at the back of the circuit and you have to have enough gain to hear them so that being said just know that it's a hard clipper if you turn the gain up if you don't it's just a really fancy boost pedal that's awesome now my favorite versions of this on the market are the centura this is cool it's by syria tone obviously they even went for it with the case as well we have the archer by rocket really really popular we have the wampler tumnus which is very small and convenient for certain boards we have the joyo tauren which is pretty affordable and really cool uh my favorite and the one i'm gonna play is the way huge conspiracy theory i think it came out this year i don't know this year's been a little crazy i've lost track of things i'm not even sure that it still is this year but we're gonna play this and i think you'll like it [Music] the last category i want to go over is in my opinion kind of the unsung hero of overdrives it's one that's not talked about enough and one that i think a lot of people don't give a lot of credit to or the opportunity to enjoy so this is one i'm going to encourage you to check out some of these pedals and dive into this and make sure you've tried these as a guitar player i'm going to use the blues driver as the example and the pedal circuitry category is transistor-based overdrives they don't have an op-amp they don't have a soft clipping section within an op-amp like a tube screamer or a blues breaker they don't have hard clipping necessarily the same way that these other pedals clip it's transistors in stages cascading kind of like multiple boost pedals all hitting each other and it works in the same way that a tube amp works when you turn it up things are saturating hitting another thing saturating and it's really the first pedals ever made were like this early fuzz pedals but these examples i'm going to show you are definitely overdrives and they're really cool really natural they have a lot of touch response meaning if you pick light they tend to stay clean if you pick heavier they get dirty and they're really great so the blues driver is legendary and this wazacraft version is fantastic this is one of my favorite pedals ever and kind of how i got into this whole pedal thing for a career by fixing one robert keeley has the super fat mod which is all of his legendary mods that he did to blues breakers back in the day that he did two blues breakers back in the day he just builds it from scratch it's really great um in the 90s we got this mt-10 from ibanez it's a mastorshin it uses mosfets in an arrangement cascading sounds really cool dan electro has a version of this that's out like a clone and it's really nice and then within this category of transistor discrete overdrives there's kind of a parallel subject line here like a category a parallel universe which is amps in a box and i think of things like the box of rock it uses transistors cascading stages just like an amp and it sounds like a marshall we have the brian wampler plexi drive british overdrive this is legendary and sounds fantastic probably my it is my favorite wampler pedal uh and it just does it well cascading transistors to sound like a a really nice marshall and i've done a couple things the twin 12 sounds like a silvertone 1484 and the charlie brown sounds like a classic jtm45 marshall so yeah that's something worth checking out and getting into and making sure you've tried because most everyone has tried tube screamer stuff you may not even know it but you might have never tried this style so do that i'm going to play the plexi drive [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] i know some of you have your fingers on the keyboard you're typing away you got a serious agenda because i didn't mention your favorite style i didn't talk about tube pedals i didn't talk about this version of hard clipping i didn't talk about the pedal you just bought and you think it's the best thing ever and i'm sorry i can't do it all i'm just a human i'm just a human i'm just a six foot six human i live in kansas city i have a family i have a dog he's out in the hall he wants in the room we can't let him in the room i have things to do i gotta go eat dinner i can't cover everything but you know i just want you to know as you're typing as you as you stroke away at the keyboard just flawlessly full of passionate words to kind of rip me apart in the comments because i didn't mention things i just want you to know i'm here for you and i hope you enjoyed this that's all let's go to record time today's record time is brought to you by matthew pearman jones land of the living this came out in 2012 and it is in my opinion a really fantastic amazing record that i highly doubt any of you have heard of the people on this record are some of my favorite people and some good friends tyler burkham on the guitar an amazing guitar player he's kind of an unsung hero of so many records as a studio player uh sandra mccracken on background vocals engineered by buckley miller one of my favorite engineers reed shipping he mixed it it's endless i could go on will sales on drums i'm not going to talk about every musician i just want you to know this band is fantastic and matthew pearman jones is like this seriously introspective moody philosophical rock songwriter and this is like an ambient folk journey through the heart of a million dreams and a couple nightmares that's all i'm going to say about it and true story told to me by some of those friends on this record it was tracked in a barn in a desert that was haunted that's all i'm gonna say i wasn't there i'm not gonna i'm not gonna talk about ghosts or whether i believe that or not but they say it's true i'll tell you this the songs haunt me because they're fantastic check it out in the comments below let me know what you think about it if you've ever heard of him and then thank me for this record because i think it's really a gift too and you're not really appreciative you should appreciate this i don't see it in your eyes and it's fine i'm used to that thanks for watching today's episode i hope you liked it and i hope it's very very helpful to you as a guitar player one of the things about overdrive is that you just need to try stuff that's kind of a theme of this show historically and if you like that theme there is this really fresh shirt we have the just try stuff jhs show shirt it's in the store www.jhshow.com check it out you don't have to it's an artist kind of thing local a guy that does their so it's awesome it's a great shirt hit like if you liked the episode subscribe to the channel click the bell icon to get notifications of future episodes check out the link below for our patreon account where i do long form talk super nerdy stuff if you're a nerd you gotta go check it out because i think you're a nerd and that's it that's really it just play guitar

Channel: JHS Pedals

Views: 466,847

Rating: 4.9629188 out of 5

Keywords: JHS, JHS Pedals, The JHS Show, Guitar Pedals, Guitar Effects, Guitar Gear, Guitar Pedal Demo, Music History, overdrive pedal, chorus pedal, distortion pedal, boss pedals, compressor pedal, univibe, delay pedal, octave fuzz, reverb pedal, reverb, eq pedal, boost pedal, behringer, overdrive effect, best overdrive pedal, wampler pedals, Ibanez Pedals, Fulltone Pedals, Analog Man pedals

Id: 8wVShbGe4pk

Length: 18min 46sec (1126 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020