What is "highest" high gain pedal you have heard?

[caspercody]

Just curious (with so many in here) what is the highest high gain pedal you have used, heard, or made?

I know everyone has a different view of what is high gain, but have to start somewhere. Plus, I am curious to maybe find out which components give a higher gain (Mu-amp, 386...)

Thanks
Rob

[jacobyjd]

Check out the 'Tufnel' by beavisaudio

[R.G.]

Just curious (with so many in here) what is the highest high gain pedal you have used, heard, or made?

Craig Anderton's "Optimum Fuzz Adapter". Op-amp, no feedback. Full open loop gain.

[caspercody]

I looked up both these mentioned.

I love the 386 chip, and to use two, might be interesting..

Using a 741? Could I replace that with a dual op amp, and wire the other op amp like a buffer?

I am just starting to try the Eagle program, and make my own pcb boards (just did my first of the Nobels ODR-1, big board and many jumpers but it works) and these two look like easies ones to try.

Thanks!!!

[ragtime8922]

The Joe D stuff...yet so controllable and unique.

[petemoore]

  With or without self oscillation ?
 

[bancika]

For me it would be dr boogey. I play fairly hi gain stuff like dream theater and never go over 3 on the gain pot...

[darron]

For me it would be dr boogey. I play fairly hi gain stuff like dream theater and never go over 3 on the gain pot...

+1

[Mark Hammer]

The gain of a RAT above 1.5khz is over 2000x atmax gain.  Pretty much near the open-loop gain of the chip.

[Paul Marossy]

Boss Metal Zone, Wampler Pinnacle II. I guess I could also throw the Dr. Boogey in there, too.

[pazuzu]

i used the dod grunge for years before i switched to madison amps. better for death metal than the dod death metal imo. super high gain but still a lot of headroom and clarity.

[bumblebee]

BOSS metal zone and EHX Metal Muff. The former is higher and more saturated and artificial too.

[Processaurus]

A dude I know uses two metal zones in series (and that's it), because just one wasn't high enough gain to make the noise when you stop playing as loud as the notes.

[Paul Marossy]

A dude I know uses two metal zones in series (and that's it), because just one wasn't high enough gain to make the noise when you stop playing as loud as the notes.

That must sound horrible. 

[R.G.]

It's funny. Mother Nature is lurking unrecognized in the background here.

When a guitarist says "more gain" he means "more distortion". The way he gets his distortion is by higher electronic gain banging on some kind of limiting.

Unfortunately, gain always brings up noise as well as signal.  There are professionals who devote their entire careers to designing low noise gain devices. It's a fundamental problem. Thermal noise is not optional. It's in every device which is either active (all amplifying devices) or has a resistive component. There are other noise mechanisms which can be reduced, but thermal noise you have with you always. You get flicker noise from random signal processes and active devices, and excess noise from some resistors, and those are on top of thermal noise.

Thermal noise in resistances is bigger with bigger resistances and with higher temperatures. Guitars use high-impedance pickups and force us to then use high impedance inputs to not lose treble. So we can't get out of front-end noise by going to lower impedances the way RF devices do.

Temperature is what it is. No guitarist I know of would dunk his high gain pedal in a tank of liquid nitrogen to cool the devices to make it less noisy, so we live with the temperature-generated thermal noise.

Bottom line, we can't get below some minimal amount of noise coming into the gain devices we use. We can only live within the noise they generate. We can - and often do - make the noise situation worse by clumsy designs or poor device choices.

One trick pros use to get the best signal-to-noise ratio is to use big signals to start with. Unfortunately, we're kind of stuck on the pickups we have, so the signal levels are fixed. We can't get bigger signals without amplifying, and that means that we live with the noise from that amplifier.

Then there's distortion. When we distort a signal, we clip off the tops and bottoms. Noise is generally smaller than signal (we HOPE!) to start with, so by amplifying both signal and noise because we can't do anything else, and then selectively clipping off the amplified signal to make it distorted, the resulting signal is smaller, but the noise does not get clipped. That means:

Every signal clipping action makes the signal-to-noise ratio worse.

So the way Mother Nature has things set up, asking for more gain means also having to accept more noise. Asking for more "gain" (to a guitarist, distortion really) means asking for even worse noise. The two are fundamentally tied together by The Way The Universe Works.

Knowing this leads to the best noise practices.

1. Use the biggest signal source you can get to start with.
- ugh. We're stuck here. Can't change the signal source.
2. Use the lowest signal impedance you can get.
- ugh 2. We're stuck with those vintage guitar pickups we love.
3. Since the noise of the first stage is amplified by all the other stages, make the first stage of amplification as quiet as you can and also make it as much gain as you can.
- sticking equal lumps of gain in a string will make things worse from the noise perspective.
- to let this do its work, don't distort in your first stage; give it a big power supply voltage so it's not clipping there. This lets you preserve the best signal to noise ratio you can get for any further gain stages.

As you recognize, typical pedals do *none* of these. Signal-to-noise is something that simply doesn't come up until we get an especially flagrant offender.

In my darker days I think about putting a knob labeled "More!" on pedals. This knob merely adds in more hiss and noise from a noise source, nothing else. I bet it would be popular as long as the user didn't know what it actually did, and there would be long discussions about what the best setting of the "More!" knob was.

[anchovie]

When a guitarist says "more gain" he means "more distortion".

I think the distortion has to be of a certain timbre too. I've seen it on less technically-minded discussion boards referred to as "teh brootalz".

People obsessed with "teh brootalz" often seem to insist that the sound is achieved with a tube amp, because tubes add "warmth". I don't think I've ever listened to an extreme metal band and thought "hmm...nice warm sound".

[Ibanezfoo]

Probably the old dod death metal pedal.  It wasn't really usable in my opinion.  For nice usable gain, probably the Dr. boogie.  Like someone else said... I play a lot of higher gain stuff (heavy hardcore or death metal type stuff) and I find it has too much gain past like 40-50%.  There have been various transistor based fuzz boxes that were just noise to my ears.

[space_ryerson]

RG, I have a semi-related boneheaded question. I've noticed in one of my amps that certain resistors get pretty hot. If they get hot, then they will likely add noise. If I use a higher wattage rated resistor, would that reduce how hot the resistors get? (...and potentially lower the noise?)

[Paul Marossy]

RG, I have a semi-related boneheaded question. I've noticed in one of my amps that certain resistors get pretty hot. If they get hot, then they will likely add noise. If I use a higher wattage rated resistor, would that reduce how hot the resistors get? (...and potentially lower the noise?)

If they are carbon comp resistors, then you might benefit by changing them to a quieter type. I don't know that increasing the wattage rating would help that much because everything inside a tube amp chassis is very hot anyway. Maybe if they were borderline on the wattage it would be a good idea, though.

[John Lyons]

If the resistors are hot then upping the wattage will help
dissipate the heat and cool them down.
Usually higher wattages are quieter but the composition
will help the most. Metal film or Metal Oxide being the quietest.

John