Clean Boosting an amp?

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dandan

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Dec 29, 2005
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I'm assuming its taking an OD pedal and not using it for the gain but for the volume?

Do you leave the gain down and leave the "tone" at 0??

What exactly does clean boosting an amp do?

If i'm way off, can someone tell me what it does and what pedals do this?

I have a Boss SD-1
 
From what I know (which isn't a whole lot) Clean boosting is taking the weak signal from your guitar and boosting it before the preamp of your amplifier. The guitar puts out midrange frequencies and this just boosts the midrange sound coming from your guitar making it a louder clean signal. It adds bite to palm muted riffs and clarity to power chords. There are settings for a tubescreamer on this forum somewhere. Try a search.

Mainly you want the level turned up, tone at about 1/4 to half way up, and add overdrive as needed. You won't need a whole lot of overdrive if you have a high gain amp.
 
Pedal should work fine for this, any pure "overdrive" pedal should do this. You can even accomplish it with an equalizer in front. Distortion pedals will not work well.
 
from www.legendarytones.com

What I'd suggest before going through all of this though is to work on boosting your signal at the input stage. The idea of course is if you give the front input of the amp a "hotter" signal (not distorted, mind you), you'll allow the amp to break up easier and get better gain. This approach, also called "clean boosting" has been used for years by all the pros. It allows you to retain the great dynamics and presence of your tube amplifier, but just have MORE of it. Obviously, a "distortion on distortion" approach (e.g. if you had a distortion running before the amp and then distortion in the amp itself as well) lends to an overcompressed sound with little "feel". So how do you do the clean boost? Very simple (did I mention this was the world's greatest "secret" mod?). Take ANY overdrive pedal such as those made from Boss, Ibanez, etc. (don't use a metalzone or a high-gain pedal - that won't work for this application) and think of it in a "backwards" approach. Meaning turn the volume all the way up and the distortion/drive all the way down. As you play, raise the drive control just to the point where the volume into the amp is no longer increased. At this point, this is your maximum amount of "clean boost" available from your pedal. Of course, it's o.k. to add some drive from the pedal if you want a little bit more, but of course you don't want to overdo it as you'll lose the dynamic feel of the tubes themselves. So who's used this "trick"? Lots of guys from all different styles of music. Stevie Ray Vaughan used this boost with his famous TS-808 Tube Screamer. This was also used by countless heavy metal players especially in the 80's. From that crop, all of the Ozzy guitarists used some form of this idea with their Marshalls (Randy Rhoads used an MXR distortion plus and went beyond the boosting a bit, Jake E. Lee used an old Boss OD-1 with his plexi marshalls, and Zakk Wylde used a Boss SD-1 Super Overdrive in boost mode with a pair of JCM 800 Marshalls). The list goes on and on... As far as the quality and type of overdrive to use, it's not so critical when you are using this as a clean boost. While a Boss, Ibanez, DOD, and a boutique pedal such as the FullTone FullDrive II all sound dramatically different as overdrive boxes, when used as a clean boost, the differences are MUCH less dramatic.
 
yeah, as he said....volume high, gain low, tone to taste, and back off the preamp gain on your amp a few notches to make up for the gain the boost contributes.
as far as pedals go.....yep, most overdrives do the trick nicely, the boss sd1 and ibanez tubescreamer being the most common ones, but i found the boss metal zone to be a very good booster due to the semiparametric EQ section, believe it or not. not so much with marshalls, but the 5150 as well as rectos can get seriously crushing when boosted with a mt2, total death metal (cannibal corpse do it all the time, and their tone kicks mucho ass)
 
thanks guys i found this very useful

So if I really dig my amps pre-amp gain then i should barely be putting up the "drive" correct?

I don't doubt the Boss Sd-1 is a decent pedal, but I don't want it taking away from my amps sweet gain.
 
lol.. well it doesn't hurt to try it out : )

I want to have the tightest high gain posible and this might tighten it up even further
 
Does the clean boost work well with a Solid State amp, like a Randall Rh 100, or maybe in front of my sansamp Psa-1??
 
Metal Lord - That RH100 Randino is my fave solid state head. The orig, not the G2 version. I used to hit it with my 808 and really liked it (with mids and contour quite high on the modern channel, gain at 4.5).

I use a maxon 808 with the Krank (although it doesnt really "need" it) but it does add that over the top "sparkle/grit" to the sound and tightens the low end a bit.

When I had a JMP-1 rack pre, I was on OD2 with gain at 12, and a Boss SD-1 with drive all the way down, level all the way up. It worked awesome in that situation and make a very big difference. I do notice that the SD-1 will take away some bass though...

If you are on the cheap, the digitech bad monkey for 40 bux does NOT suck as a boost.. bonus of a 2 band eq as well... plus.. its green.
 
Thanks man, i will check out the digitech.
My Randall is the g2 series, it sound really good, i bought it on ebay for 200 bucks, the first edition is better?, if a can buy another randall i will check out the Rh100
 
metal - nothing wrong with the G2, but having owned both, here is why I prefer the non G2.

you know the contour knob? With the original rh100, the contour knob was only tied to GAIN2 (the "mesa" sound) but not GAIN1 ("marshall").

the G2 series has contour tied to BOTH channels - not cool with me! reason being that if you get gain2 all nice n brutal with the contour knob, you sacrifice the lead sound of gain1 because it becomes way to scoopy sounding and not middy enough.

i was REALLY surprised they did that... from a design standpoint...
 
Boosting will tighten it up. Clean boosting would be adding no gain. Most overdrives even with the gain all the way down add gain. A clean boost pedal does just that in adding no saturation but a bump in volume. I use a boost(sd-1) with the gain at 8:00
 
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