How To Make Any Overdrive Sound Great 

What Gino said.

@@jstnxprsn they said they did

When I'm in a bluesy pentatonic mood,I'll use the ts9 as my overdrive!👍

I also find that the mid hump is not as extreme when you run the level/volume on a TS style circuit fairly high and run the tone knob above 12. It gets bright yes, but it helps clear the "nasal sound" up a bit.

I recently bought the Waza Craft Boss Metal zone pedal. And it's absolutely bloody amazing. It sounds so good. I instantly fell in love with it. I should have bought a metal zone a long time ago. But yeah I put my Robert Keeley tubescreamer before it and it is some of the best tone I've EVER gotten before in my 18 years of playing (the keeley tubescreamer is called the Red Dirt overdrive, but it's the exact same circuit as his old modded ibanez tubescreamers that he modded for people, and they were and still are considered to be the best version of a tubescreamer in the world, he just stopped modding pedals made by other companies, and started selling his modded versions of pedals as their own product these days, to avoid a lawsuit probably, but yeah my keeley red dirt pedal is my dream pedal, as a teen I always lusted after the idea of finally having enough money to buy a modded tubescreamer by Robert Keeley, but now I'm in my 30s and I finally own the keeley modded tubescreamer, it's just called the red dirt pedal now). I've never owned a high gain tube metal amp before. One day I'll probably buy an all tube Marshall combo or something. But yeah it means I've never been able to properly try this thing of stacking the overdrive and distortion together, by having the amp with the gain distortion turned up, but then plug in a tubescreamer before it to give it a boost. But now I finally own a metal zone I can replicate that. Using a tubescreamer before the metal zone is just absolutely gorgeous. It's ridiculous how good it is. I didn't believe it would be so instantly delicious. But yeah, it's so creamy. It's creamy distortion. It's great for chugging. It's absolutely brilliant for solos. The sustain lasts indefinitely. I'm even getting tones out of this combination of the 2 pedals that I never found useful before. Like if I was doing power chords I'd always use the bridge pickup, I thought the neck humbucker just never sounded at all any good with that level of gain for power chords. But the keeley tubescreamer going into the boss wazacraft metal zone makes every pickup position so useful. It somehow has an incredible amount of clarity, getting that strat-like glassy quality to it even though I'm playing my new Epiphone muse SG into it. It makes power chords on the neck humbucker sound so so so good. It just sounds so dark and yet so sharp and full of clarity. It just sounds evil. It's absolutely perfect for metal. And the Epiphone muse sg is a wonderful guitar, I loved it instantly when I was at the shop, I'd been looking at getting a metal guitar, a superstrat by ibanez or Jackson etc. Because I thought those are the guitars that are designed to make playing really fast much easier. But the Epiphone sg beat them all, it is just so incredibly easy to play. I spent like 7 years only playing an acoustic, my dad's old acoustic he bought in the 60s, and the neck in that is absolutely enormous, they don't make necks that thick these days. So I got used to it. And the Epiphone had a bigger neck, so maybe that's why it was so incredibly easy and smooth to play But yeah the Epiphone Muse SG (and every other guitar in the Muse line) has coil splitting for both pickups, plus another push pull knob that reverses the polarity of one of the pickups, or something. I don't really understand it. But it makes you get that fender-like in between "quack" tone, in the middle position. Especially if you have both humbuckers coil split while doing the reverse polarity thing, because then it sounds exactly like the middle position on a telecaster does. This Epiphone muse sg is the most versatile guitar I own, now. But when I mentioned the glassy strat-like clarity quality of the neck humbucker with the keeley TS and the metal zone both on, I was talking about the neck humbucker as a humbucker, not coil split. If sounds even more like the neck pickup of a strat or tele when you coil split it. But yeah even if you just have humbuckers, you can still get this tone, with this combination of pedals The wazacraft Metal Zone is just an absolutely wonderful pedal. It's so versatile too. You can get classic crunch overdrive with it if you put the gain at a low level. You can make it an overdrive itself. And still combine it with the tubescreamer at the same time, for a really great vintage tone, a lot of The Who on the album Who's Next, that classic Pete Townshend power chord tone. Both positions on the Waza Craft metal zone sound great. It's got the original metal zone circuit, but then also has a new one that updates it and makes it sound even better and fixes the problems people had with the original metal zone. But both positions can sound really great, you just have to know how to eq the pedal properly, which isn't difficult. But I definitely do play more on the new version of the metal zone that only comes with the Waza Craft version, not the original bog standard metal zone I only even bought the metal zone because I've been looking everywhere for a boss ds1. And they're nowhere to be found. Here in the UK, literally no online or physical guitar shop has even a single boss DS1. No exaggeration. They don't exist in the UK for now. Hopefully boss will send a few storage containers worth of DS1s so I can finally buy one. But I bought the metal zone Waza Craft as a stop gap, cos I always meant to buy a metal zone too anyway. I've put off buying a boss ds1 for 15+ years and when I finally try to buy one they're sold out everywhere. But boss should definitely do a Waza Craft DS1. For sure. Essentially mod it so it has the keeley DS1 mod on it or the AnalogMan DS1 mod. Along with the original DS1 circuit of course. It's still their best selling pedal. People would absolutely eat it up, a Waza Craft ds1. Even people who already have DS1s would buy a wazacraft version too

We could get our tour sponsored by AARP

@@RhettShull and feel GOOD about it!

@@RhettShull Paging Mr Beato. Mr. Beato….

“Boomer and the bends” … and it’s only eagles and early Radiohead covers.

@@adamlazzara5372 eagles and Skynyrd

Yes, the GE-7 is a huge blessing in the chain of effects! Super versatile. It's a Swiss Army pedal 😉

@@ImYourOverlord yeah I bought one and it just opened up my Ac15 and made it sound incredible

My GE7 always introduced a hiss as soon as any band was moved off "0". Anyone else have this problem?

@@koda1960 yeah, it’s common to have that happen. I know they make a mod to where it gets rid of the hiss if you want to get it installed, but I don’t think you really need to if all you do is play live shows because other equipment is already hissing to begin with.

@@koda1960 Get the XTS Midrange Graphic Modded GE-7 if you can. It’s a modded Boss pedal that fixes the noise problem and really hones in on more guitar-specific frequencies.

This! And much cheaper than a $400 double overdrive pedal

The Spark is a great boost. I have the full-sized one. The mini wasn't out yet when I bought mine.

Same. It IS my amp in an FRFR setup with a torpedo as my speaker and power amp emulation and IR’s from Celestion. Sounds amazing and no traditional amp needed.

Totally agree on this one! And as an example, this is the reason why I love the Gladio SC. That clean blend really does wonders

Ears. It takes a while to notice the differences and remember which is which.

@@ImYourOverlord right. He even talks about running all the knobs from minimum to maximum so you can hear exactly what each parameter on the pedal is doing. A similar method could be applied to the amplifier before running drive pedals into it.

THIS is why I dislike most demos of overdrive pedals, because most reviewers do NOT set the power amp truly clean so we can hear what the pedal is doing. Instead we are treated to the breakup tone of their $5k amp and cabinet. Then when we get the pedal we wonder why we can't get it to sound like the review did. Rhett shows us his "clean" tone that is clearly already breaking up, and then hits the amp with a boosted level, so he is doing exactly what I detest. Sure, this is a nice way to use an OD pedal, but it covers up what the OD pedal is doing.

Sd1 into nobles is the jam!!!

Same I use it to help my guitarists 🤣

You can set your amps to a edge of breakup and roll your guitar’s volume down to clean it, or if you use humbuckers coil splitting them. Hope it helps!

Hi Ron, the difference is huge. Imagine having 2 cables from your guitar to 2 amps. one carries your clean guitar signal. You can hear the pick attack and the fullness of that clean signal. The other has the compressed distortion which is typically tighter and less full . You can blend between these two so you can still hear the details and pick attack and fullness of an uncompressed signal and also have the crunchy distortion kind of on top of. The blend adjusts how much of each you're hearing.

I do the same thing. It lets you dial and listen at the same time. Your attention is listening rather than playing.

would sound even better if you ran a ring modulator before and after the metalzone

Surely you can crank it and then down the volume at the back?

@@OscarRichardson - I can, but it sounds like shyte.

The vs-xo is one of my favorite pedals. Don't think I'll ever sell mine.