I like simplicity, so I have been very hesitant about pedals. My setup so far is minimalist; just the guitar running straight into an analogue SS amp (Orange 35RT). I do have a Zoom G four multi effects pedal but I don’t like using it much as there are so many things that can be tweaked that for me it takes the fun away from practicing. Also with the Zoom, there isn’t a proper bypass that allows you to play just the amp without some damping of the amps sound. However, I have to play at low volumes in my apartment and the dirty channel of my amp just sounds fizzy and horrible at low volumes. So I decided to see if I could get a better overdrive tone with a pedal. So here it is; my Boss Blues Driver (BD2). It seems to do the trick and I can get better overdrive tones at low volume than with the dirty channel of my amp. It just sounds so much better. I’m just starting the introduction to blues section of Justin’s course in grade 2 so hopefully it will get some use as I start learning a bit of blues. So far I’ve been mostly playing my guitar clean.
Got the pedal for a good price. Bought it used from someone locally but it looks like it had never been taken out of the box.
Yeah Orange 35RT’s like to be pushed to get a decent driven sound, turned up they’re amazing! Just one thing to always remember, put any drive type pedal straight into the front end of the amp on the clean channel, all time based Fx go into the Fx loop - this could explain the reason why you’re not happy with the Zoom if you’ve put it into the Fx loop. It’s important to not have time based effects before the pre-amp unless there’s a specific reason why, the sound will be totally different that way compared with the conventional way of putting the distorted sound through the time based effects after the pre-amp.
Actually I think the zoom is supposed to go into the front. It has a mixture of modulation effects, amp sims and overdrive distortion effects. But I have also used it in the fx loop. But I don’t use any of the time effects. I only use the amp sims and distortion and the drum and loop functions.
However that’s not the problem. The problem with the zoom, as far as I can work out is that even in bypass mode, it affects the sound and makes it quite and duller either before the preamp or in the fx loop because even in bypass it affects the signal.
this pedal is what I have my eye on for my “first” since I am also not entirely happy with my amp’s (Fender Champion 40) overdriven sounds at low volumes. It can get SUPER nasty and crunchy just fine (volume does cut out well before the volume knob is at its minimum, though). but I’ve had trouble getting a proper bluesy sound out of it.
of course, people keep recommending multi-effects pedals, too, and I’ve begun looking at some of those.
