any THD users?

[Carrier Flux]

I'm thinking about picking up a THD Univalve head for recording. I do mostly black/death/thrash metal stuff and think this head might be really fun to play around with...but I'm not sure how it works for metal.

Has anyone here used THDs on their recordings in the metal genre? any possibility at all of posting a sound sample? All the samples on their site are pretty well non-metal.

thanks.

 

[Matt Crooks]

I know people that have them, but I have not used one myself. I have never heard anyone say that it would get tones heavier than classic rock.

 

[ltratt]

The UniValve is a good amp, but it's nowhere near being contemporary metal out of the box - that's just not its thing. With the standard valves, the heaviest you're going to get with it is in the region of stoner rock. I did mess around for a while getting heavier sounds with it, and the trick is to put a lower gain valve in the preamp, with a distortion pedal into the front. I used a Keeley MT-2, and a couple of parametric EQs, and got a good crunchy tone with Vintage 30's and an Audix i5. But frankly it's a lot of fiddling around to get a tone that you'd probably get a lot easier with an amp aimed at that task.

Of course ultimately this also compromises what the UniValve does best which is clean, and low-mid distortion sounds IMHO. There are some gorgeous tones to be had from the UniValve in that area and these days I'm happier playing to its strengths.

 

[Carrier Flux]

well I finally had a chance to play through a new/stock univavle the other day. I was definitely able to get a decent metal tone out of it, but it wasn't a "to die for" metal tone...so I decided to pass on the head. it was definitely usable, but it didn't sing any more to me than my mesa rig does for the metal stuff. And I don't do much cleantone, so that aspect isn't important to me.

Definitely a cool head with the tube swapping capabilities etc. but probably not the answer for straight up metal.