OD / Fuzz to work with an acoustic?

[Les Paul Lover]

I was wondering if any of you had any luck with OD or Fuzz with acoustic guitars?


One of my friends would like to find something with a good crunch, fat and reasonably articulate. But he's tried a couple of distortion that have made him sound thin and harsh.

Any suggestions ?
Some things that might work better than others?

[Quackzed]

try an eq pedal after the od/fuzz... much more versitile to use the od's and distorto's that he's already got and THEN adjust the eq after them to get lots of good tones, as well as tuning out that feedback frequency that will change on a gig by gig basis...

[Keppy]

Acoustics can get nasty with distortion. The trebly pick attack splats like mad, and if you turn the treble way down it dulls the sustain. What I'm trying to say is, using a compressor first (set to STUN) can enable you to get a more pleasant distortion tone. An added bonus is you don't need the distortion to create a ton of sustain, so you can be more judicious with the amount of gain applied.

Another pre-treatment that can help is reducing treble INTO the distortion, to reduce non-harmonic pick splattiness.

Most distortions limit the bass content with a small input cap and/or a shunt cap on the inverting input/source/emitter of the gain stage. Increasing the value of these caps will restore bass.

Something with more tone options post-clipping might be useful. Catalinbread SFT or Xotic AC Booster come to mind. These both have separate bass and treble controls. Same with the Timmy, though the bass control is pre-clipping.

[Les Paul Lover]

Thank you guys!

This is giving me food for thought.
My friend wants to use the pedal mid song, so if a compressor or an EQ is needed too.... It means we need a loop in which we place both effects, or I built one pedal with both effects in.

I'm not sure he is particularly happy with his current distortion anyway so an OD / Fuzz might be required.

I have an 80s guyatone compressor that has a tone control, so will try that with his current set up too.

[digi2t]

Check out Monte Montgomery's "Little Wing". If that's the kind of tone you're chasing, a quick internet search will give you his set up.

[LightSoundGeometry]

tube screamer ..have seen many musicians using one live on an acoustic set .

[bool]

+1 TS