Clean Fender Amp Rockabilly tone? Which Pedal?

[boogietube]

My Friend has a clean sounding Fender Amp. He's not getting the semi- distorted Rockabilly tone that he desires. He likes Brian Setzer and Reverend Horton Heat. He has a cool Gretch type of semi hollow body guitar with single coils. I don't know the make. Which pedal should I build him to give him a bit of grit or distortion or even drive the tubes in his amp? This area of tone is not in my realm and any help would be appreciated.
Thanks
Sean

[RDV]

Setzer uses his echo to OD his Fenders.

RDV

[phaeton]

The Rev uses a mess of things, but 95% of his sound is a Fender Super Reverb going full throttle.  Check out his interview:

http://www.guitarplayer.com/story.asp?storycode=13

Oh, and btw... He's a helluva player, IMHO.

P.S.... things weren't so bad, when I had a Galaxie 500 

[LP Hovercraft]

The PT-80 delay is aces for a rockabilly slapback sound. 

[JimRayden]

If your friend has a Fender tube amp (I don't think you mentioned if he did or not), the most reasonable would be to build an attentuator, so he could run the amp full throttle and get power tube drive out of it.

Here's one of them:
http://195.178.239.50/ax84/media/ax84_m228.pdf

Basically you hook up a high wattage resistor in parallel or in series with the speaker so it reduces the power that hits the speaker. It'll cost about as much as a usual stompbox and will be a much simpler project.

The other way would be to overdrive the preamp from a clean booster and turn down the amp's own volume, but that won't result nearly as good a result as a real cranked amp.

Setzer also uses one of Fulltone tape delay but I bet you'd be ok with PT-80 too.

As an alternative to the attentuator, you could check out "Proffessor Tweed" at runoffgroove.com, it's got a pretty good low-gain grind you're looking for.

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Jimbo

[scaesic]

if the design for an attentuator is so simple why do they cost a fortune? i thought they were a lot more complicated due to the massive heatsink style of some of them.

[JimRayden]

The expensive ones basically use a speaker coil instead of a resistor, for the best approximation of the resistive and inductive properties of speaker response to signal. Despite their electric function, attentuators are really mechanical devices, and building mechanical devices cost alot these days.

You'll want to choose a resistor of higher wattage than the amp to avoid worrying about heatsinking.

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Jimbo

[cab42]

For more info on resistive attenuation, see this great article:

http://amps.zugster.net/articles/attenuation

The link has been posted here a few times before, so you might know it.

Regards

Carsten

[JimRayden]

It's an excellent article. Adam's Amps has lots of great info about tone stacks and mini tubes. Great page.


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Jimbo

[Quackzed]

I have a twin (clean) amp and get pretty good rockabilly twang/grit with the muffmaster... plus it offers up enough boost to push the lead channel amps into overdrive...its a silicon treble booster circuit based on a section of the big muff...real small easy build...you may want to try a different input cap than(.005uf) but not too big, i think the treble boost is what gives this pedal its crisp , in your face tone... it kinda unmuddys your tone and adds some nice tight attack... good for rockabilly or chuck ... good ole fashioned rock and roll ,bright twangy.. clean yet edgy...check it...