Treble boosts and Marshals are like pb&j. There are so many types and brands of great boosts- where do you start?
I personally like LPB and mosfet boosts.
I personally like LPB and mosfet boosts.
I think @Business has a Klon for sale, that should do a great job.I have one of the 1 watt 50th anniversary JMP heads and love this thing to death. What would be a good transparent pedal to goose the gain a little more? I don’t want to change the tone, just try for a little more balls. Maybe a transparent boost of some sort?
HahaI think @Business has a Klon for sale, that should do a great job.
I used to use my CS3 as a lead boost all the time. I sometimes still use it as a boost when I'm playing a cranked up class A amp.Transparent-schmanzparent. If you're going to use a booster to push an amp into more sweeter overdrive, you'll want something that can prepare the signal to push the amp the way it needs to be pushed. And generally that requires some means for taming the treble. Sometimes a clean boost can do the job, and sometimes (as many Klon users can attest), you need some additional lower-order harmonic content.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "what about treble boosters?". The reality is that classic germanium treble boosters are really upper-mids-boosters. You could plug one into an over-drive-proof solid state power amp and you would NOT hear any sort of pristine top end that would make a string section stand out.
Compressors are often underestimated as boosters to push amps into overdrive territory. Just make sure you don't set the compression amount too high (i.e., max squish).
If you were in the Ottawa area, I'd be happy to loan you 6-10 suitable candidates, from very clean to various gradations of bite, so you could see what works for you.I have one of the 1 watt 50th anniversary JMP heads and love this thing to death. What would be a good transparent pedal to goose the gain a little more? I don’t want to change the tone, just try for a little more balls. Maybe a transparent boost of some sort?
I like where you’re going with that. I’ve done Egnator’s amp building course and normally wouldn’t hesitate, but this amp is a bit of a collectors piece so I’d hate to eff it up. I’ll try some pedals first. Thanks for the cool idea though.Here's a bit of a left turn...
I can't seem to find a definitive schematic for this model, but it would appear to have a "normal" Marshall tonestack, minus the midrange control. IF, and I emphasize "if", it is like typical Marshall/Fender tonestacks, then it provides some passive loss. A mod I learned about, and implemented quite successfully on a blackface Tremolux I owned some 30 years back, involves lifting the ground connection of the tonestack.
This pic shows a standard treble/bass/middle tonestack. It works by bleeding off signal, selectively, to ground. In Marshall and Fender amps that might only have treble and bass, the middle control is replaced with a fixed resistor - which is what I had on my old Tremolux head. When the ground path is severed/lifted, that passive loss is drastically reduced, resulting in a heftier signal hitting subsequent stages. It's not an increase in "gain", per se. It just conserves more of the pre-amp signal. I installed a jack for a footswitch to lift/resume the ground connection, and found that it produced a nice volume boost and a little more grind.
Note that this mod effectively disables the bass and middle controls, but tends to leave the treble control functional.
Again, all of this presumes that the tonestack in your amp corresponds to the typical Marshall/Fender topology. Something to think about.
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I have a Timmy and an OCD ( the two popular choices) so I’ll try those first, then about 10-15 other OD/Distortion specimens.What kind of pedals do you own?
Thanks, I’m on the left coast. I have a bunch I can try. There are a couple boosts I’d like to experiment with so I may go schlepping tomorrow and see what I come home with.If you were in the Ottawa area, I'd be happy to loan you 6-10 suitable candidates, from very clean to various gradations of bite, so you could see what works for you.