I have been watching way too many editions of That Pedal Show with Daniel Steinhardt and Mick Taylor (not that Mick Taylor, nor that that one, but he’s still very good).
I have learned a few things from them.
- Kingsley Constable is the best guitar pre-amp or effects pedal in the world.
- I can’t afford the Kingsley Constable.
- “Being recycled for the Kings the constable” shows how my dictation software can’t manage a simple phrase like “Even if I could afford the Kingsley Constable”. (Oh, now you manage it!)
- Even if I could afford the Kingsley Constable, the wait is so long that I couldn’t get one during my lifetime.
- Like Daniel on the show, I’ve always said constable slightly wrongly and slightly rudely.
- I’ve actually got two guitar effects pedals which appear in many episodes of That Pedal Show.
- These are Boss Blues Driver and the Ibanez Tube Screamer, and they’ve been on boards of many of my favourite guitarists since they were released.
- Many of the pedals you see are inspired by or clones of these two pedals.
So, here’s a tribute to the Boss Blues Driver and the Ibanez Tube Screamer, and how some ingenious people have found ways to make clones of them so expensively you can’t afford those either.
If a pedal isn’t a clone of the BD-2 or the TS9, it might well be a clone of the Klon or Blues Breaker pedals, so named after the John Mayall’s Blues Breakers album with Eric Clapton reading The Beano on the cover and playing through a Marshall-made Fender Bassman clone designed to fit in a car boot (or trunk, if you have never seen an elephant or are living in the country that thinks it’s the Leader of the Free World). Why don’t I wax lyrical about the Blues Breaker or Guvnor pedals? Well, I’ve never had one and Dickens didn’t write A Tale of Three Cities.
These pedals go together like love and marriage.
For years, I used these pedals without really knowing how they work together. I figured the blues driver would give me a kind of crunchy, slightly overdriven sound for playing rhythm guitar. I thought the tube screamer would make me louder for the solos and give me more distortion, for that bit in Creep by Radiohead. It turns out that Matt always gets to play the solo in Creep, just because he’s much much better than me, which seems unfair. It also turns out that turning up some of the knobs on these pedals can actually make your sound terrible and harder to hear for your solos.
Some people find the Blues Driver to be a bit brittle or a bit too boomy in the bass. This probable depends on what it’s plugged it not, the room you are playing in, the difference in commonest from one day’s production to the next and you ears.
There are a few mods, e.g. Wampler (see this Blues Driver modification essay), Keeley and Analogman.
I have a BOSS/JHS Angry Driver that is a Blues Driver with the JHS Angry Charlie (based on the Marshall JCM tone) merged in. Handy, but I din’t sell my Blues Driver.