A Tale of Two Pedals

It was the best of tones. It was the worst of tones.

Charles Dickens

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.

Other people can explain this better than me, for example:

Link one

Links to

My ‘takeaway’ from this all is that to be heard above all the other frequencies in your live band, you need to be clever about which frequencies you occupy for your lead work. The bass owns the lower frequencies, singers range from to. your drummer is a frequency terrorist. Just how much of a problem the drummer is depends on the song bits of his kit needed for the song if you are doing covers religiously or their particular predilection for the tom-tom, snare or cymbal (dictation software: snail symbol).

You have been at a gig where a guitarist, it might even have been you, steps on a pedal (dictation software: opens the Kindle reader) as he starts the solo he spent hours perfecting. Sadly, no-one in the audience can hear it. They are just wondering why the singer’s gone quiet: has she forgotten the words?

Another danger is any other guitarist you foolishly allowed into the band. Many guitar players are unable to conceive of a song, in which then don’t play all the time, including when the other guitarist’s on a solo. So they don’t offer you the courtesy of going bit quieter during your big chance to catch the ears and eyes of your partner and show them why it was worth hearing that screeching sound at home for the last fortnight.

In the interval, you’re told nobody can hear your solos, so you turn up for the second half. Now the others can’t hear themselves so well and they turn up. The sound engineer has gone for his supper. The whole band turns to mush and the audience back away from the aural onslaught. And the increase in volume means the singer has to ruin their voice and you bring forward the hell that tinnitus will be.

What you should have tried is turning down. What? Yes, you could try removing things instead of adding gain or volume. You know that Mies vas Der Rhoe quote advertisers are always hijacking and forcing into the wrong context?

Less is more.

Mies vas Der Rhoe

Ever noticed a teacher speaking quietly to calm a load classful of excited children? She’s learned not to go louder and more distorted. She changes the tone of her voice. She’s on to something about frequencies too.

Try these tricks.

  • reducing gain/distortion down so your notes (dictation software opens Notes app. Thanks for nothing!) are more distinct from each other and better articulated,
  • filtering out some of the lower frequencies in your sound so you are not competing with the bass and drums or the rhythm guitarist chunking away with his E string power chords.
  • filtering out the very top end too, so you are sending out your musical message in a narrow frequency band.

Another way of putting that is focusing on the middles.

How do I make all those adjustments when I’ve got both hands busy? Well, you can get some of the way by stamping on a graphic equaliser pedal like the Boss GE-7 or Mooer. If you have a lead channel on your amp activated by a footswitch, you can adjust the tone or EQ for that channel.

Putting forward the middle frequencies is what a Tube Screamer with the gain knob set low is for. Many guitar players find that the Tube Screamer emphasises and also shapes the mids in a more pleasing way than just sliding up a couple of frequencies on your equaliser or turning down both the bass and treble knobs on your amp.

You might even find that using your Tube Screamer in this way allows you to cut through the other sounds the band’s producing, without having to increase your volume at all. If not, a twiddle with the level knob, or a separate clear boost pedal might be needed. But try tone and frequency before volume.

People say the Blues driver is an ‘amp-like’ pedal. In fact, in my ‘ampless’ rig I’ve used an EH Magnum 44 power amp pedal, with the Blues Driver in front of it acting in place of a pre-amp. I’d put the reverb and delay pedals between them as if it were the effects loop of a posh amp. So the BD-2 is an essential part of my basic tone for rhythm guitar. My amp set up it a custom-made RAT 5W amp, and it loves the Blues Driver in front of it, but for rehearsals I usually just use a pedal board with a REVV G2 pedal acting as the pre-amp.

In front of the Blues Driver go the effects pedals, e.g. my Ibanez Tube Screamer and Boss Compression. Since the Blues Driver is pretending to be a part of the pre-amp circuit in this ‘ampless’ set-up, it stays on all the time. Except, when it doesn’t, of course. You can put the Tube Screamer in front of the Blues Driver as a clean, mid-focused boost for solos. You can also put it after the Blues Driver, so the Blues Driver is driving the Tube Screamer. You can use only one at a time or both. Some people put them in parallel.

More detail on each below…

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.

Many guitar players find that the Tube Screamer emphasises but also shapes the mids in a more pleasing way than just sliding up a couple of frequencies on your equaliser or turning down both the bass and treble knobs on your amp.

What about Stevie Ray Vaughan? He seems to have often kept a Tube Screamer on for the whole song, to push the preamp of his tube amplifiers, to make the tubes scream, in fact. SRV is a specialist subject, beyond the scope of this page. Try Voodoo Guitar to read about him using a second Tube Screamer for this purpose.

How to Use Your Tube Screamer to Dial-In the Tones of Five Famous Players. On Reverb.com

Yours truly never saw him live, but I did see his brother Jimmy join Buddy Guy on stage in Austin, Texas. I couldn’t really hear him properly on the gear he was given to plug into. I think he needed a Tube Screamer!

Debate rages about whether SRV preferred a TS808, TS9 or TS10 and what his settings were. But it was definitely a Tube Screamer!

There’s even a FaceBook page dedicated to Stevie Ray Vaughan gear.

Even guitar heroes have guitar heroes…