Most over-rated pedals? What are superfluous?

[lovekraft0]

I love my dog best.

Now that's the most cogent comment in this whole thread!

[brett]

Maybe the topic could have been "Dogs of pedals"?  Gotta love dogs, but not dogs of pedals.

Confusion can be easily reduced by staying with the topic.  It concerns pedals that people feel are over-rated or *under*-perform, or are superfluous.

[Toney]

I just saw Bill Frisell put one to great use live a couple of weeks ago. So even there I think you have clarify: On stage playing what? 

Kerry M

Ha, yes yes.
More meaning too delicate with huge variations from small knob tweaks.
Perhaps too twitchy and easy to knock off setting would be a better description. Though personally I don't enjoy it's tone so much, but hey there are no doubt a million things you could do with one.
Sort of made me want a Fuzz with ONE knob.


Blum blum blum.... approximation of F1 car at idle.

Snnnnarrrrrreeeeeeooong......F1 on track.

I think all "opinions" and reviews are near meaningless without a clear description of the gear used and whether we are talking about stage volume or bedroom. So many pedals metamorphasize once put through a tube  amp at happy volume. I mean completely and utterly have differernt characteristics to the extent of making bedroom level reviews redundant.

Specially true for drive/distortions.

[searoad]

Hi

am i the only one who realizes that tubescreamers arent supposed to do fuzz?  i see this all the time in reviews, its not a high gain pedal so why would you expect fuzz

If you were new to pedals, the name would be misleading.  Neither "tube" nor "screamer" applies.  But nobody was going to buy it if it described what it actually does: "mild diode distorter".
cheers

but it can make ur TUBE amp SCREAM!!
isnt it?
that is the thing it can do its best.

[brett]

Hi

but it can make ur TUBE amp SCREAM!!

In my experience, many tube amps make better distortion on their own or with a boost than with the tubescreamer.  My three "dirty" amps  - Firefly, Marshall 18W, JTM60 (clean and dirty channels) - sound worse with a tubescreamer.  Maybe that involves interaction with Marshall tone stacks.  Also, these amps break up fairly easily, even the "clean" channel on the JTM.
cheers

[MartyMart]

If you have not been there, take alook at  www.ts808.com
This is Jacques site and he's a VERY clever and talented chap.
He see's the "808" as a "pro" tool ( it's called a ts808 pro ), on stage and pushing a VERY loud tube amp
.... then you get the whole point of it , NOT playing quietly on a small amp in your bedroom !!

I think that hits the nail firmly on the head re: 808's

( no offence meant to bedroom players BTW )

MM.

[Mark Hammer]

I'm joining this kind of late.

I suspect the key to responding to the question properly lies in the adjective itself: over-rated.  The term implies that something has been described, depicted, advocated, hyped, flaunted, desired, commanded huge prices on e-bay, etc.  The reaction to something as being "over-rated" implies that the thing itself, when examined first-hand, simply does not live up to what was expected, based on he advance information.

Think of it this way.  I try something out with no expectations.  On a scale of 1-10, where 10 is "OH....MY....GOD!!  Where has this been all my life??!?!", I'm expecting a 6 or 7.  I figure that products or designs are only released if people have enough confidence in them to do the job.  Few would market a product that was a 1 unless it was a deliberate money-losing effort, à la "The Producers".

But the pedal exceeds my modest expectations.  That could be because it has wider range of control, or because the sound quality is much better than I am used to, or because it delivers sounds I had never produced before that intrigue me or revolutionize/expand my playing style.  Some aspect of it pumps me up, and the contrast between what I was expecting and what I encountered is enough for me to start REALLY talking up the product/circuit/device.

But what happens to people who had no expectations of it beforehand?  They now start off with some notion of this as a 9 or 10, which means there is no way for the product to ever exceed their expectations (that DOES happen once in a while, but the odds are very very low).  The problem lies not in the product itself, but rather in the advance publicity.  Someone who has never played an envelope controlled filter before would likely be impressed with just about any design, no matter how crappy (assuming it works properly) because they had never sounded that way when playing.  Same thing with a flanger, or any extreme-sounding fuzz.  If the person was accustomed to the way that they had to work so hard to manage their dynamics when playing rhythm guitar, and tried a humble Orange Squeezer for the first time, they would think it was God's own gift to music.

So, are there going to be lots of pedals that don't seem to live up to what we have been led to believe?  Sure, because there are going to be plenty of players who encountered those pedals with little or no expectations, or little or no experience with that category of pedal, and were completely taken by surprise.

The funny thing is that in the world of DIY, how is it possible for ANY pedal to be unsatisfactory?  We talk as if we were nursing home residents, from who all salt, pepper, hot sauce, or condiments werehidden away so that we could never ever season our food to our own tastes.  For me, if a pedal doesn't do quite what I want it to do, stock, I *make* it do what I want it to do.  If it can't be modified easily, I simply switch horses, or accept the design as having been milked to the extent of what it is capable of.

Finally, and we have had this discussion many many times, a number of pedals acquire their reputation (and our consumer expectations) via their association with a well-known player.  Often, the well-known player's tone lies in their fingers every bit as much as in their gear.  I've had better and worse sounds from Tube Screamers, and I like all those white Texas guitar slingers as much as anyone, but I've never been able to nail that sound with MY Tube Screamers.  It isn't the chip, or design, but my fingers.

[petemoore]

  1,000 questions, 10,000,000,000 words in answer...
  Here's a few..
  what kind of speaker, how many
  What type of cabinet
  SS amp?
  What type of tube amp, what are the settings.
  Do those settings equate to exactly the same sound on an 'identical' amp?na
  What kind of pickups.
  Do you dime the guitar controls?
  Do you have good cables?
  That covers only a small part, of the part of the tip .. of the side of the iceberg .. that you can see...
 

[Melanhead]

Boss overdrive OD-1,  too nasal, too grainy/rhaspy, not enough sustain and loss of lows.  I could never figure out why this is such a sought after effect.  Instead of selling it, I simply gave it away.

Funny! ... This is the pedal that got me into modding in the first place ... not enough low end to keep up with the other 2 OD's I had on my board ... I modded it and then sold it

I still have 2 of them though but both are just PCBs ... I got 'em for nothing, I know one works, not sure about the other.

[Toney]

If you have not been there, take alook at  www.ts808.com
This is Jacques site and he's a VERY clever and talented chap.
He see's the "808" as a "pro" tool ( it's called a ts808 pro ), on stage and pushing a VERY loud tube amp
.... then you get the whole point of it , NOT playing quietly on a small amp in your bedroom !!

I think that hits the nail firmly on the head re: 808's

( no offence meant to bedroom players BTW )

MM.

Exactly, and that is also true for the OD-1.
Play it through a tube amp being spanked hard to find out what it's all about!

[searoad]

anyway, u can try this to let ur ts scream
http://acapella.harmony-central.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=966937
discovered by Brain
just connect pin5 and 7 of the ic chip, and ......

i have no idea about this mod
it doesnt work properly on my ts9 clone nor sd1 stock
but it sounds really cool!!