overdrive chain

[Richard S]

Does anyone have experience with running an overdrive pedal through another overdrive pedal? How about a third?

[Enzo]

Do you have more than one? If so, hook them up and see how you like it. It won't hurt them. generally, too much gain just makes a noisy mess. Imagine looking through a magnifying glass to read the print in something like a dictionary. Makes it larger and easier to read. Now put another magnifying glass in between the first and your eye, and now instead of seeing a sentence, you see half a word blown up big. Now add a third, and all we see is half a letter filling the view, pretty useless. I think cascading too many pedals will have the same result sonically.

But that assumes you have them all on and cranked. if you had three cascaded but turned down to just slight gain, you might find a pleasing setting. And certainly if you have three pedals, but only click one on at a time, that is no different from just running the one pedal alone.

[Richard S]

I've considered the same outcome. I will be coming into possession of a digitech hardwire vintage overdrive, a behringer vintage overdrive and the original model of the Zakk Wylde signature overdrive.
I like the idea of keeping their individual influence low, so as to acquire more hair splitting options. The downside being increasing the length of the signal path.
When they arrive, I'll declare my results.
Thank you.

[Enzo]

Length of the signal path? Well the signal moves at the speed of light, so I am not sure what the concern is in that regard.

[Richard S]

It's my understanding that prioritising economy in the chain leads to greater signal preservation. Maybe its to a small degree.

[Mark Hammer]

Of course, one can always have as many overdrive pedals on your pedalboard as you have power for, assuming they're not all in use at the same time. And they can be used in whatever combination you want. However:

1. As already noted by others, applying yet more gain to any hiss simply makes the hiss more obvious, and imposes more burden on any noise-control you use.
2. There are limits to clipping set by the supply voltage. Once the signal is boosted to the limits imposed by the power lines and voltage swing, you can't clip more than that. So there are practical limits to how much "pushing" the signal accomplishes anything. Two pedals can be useful. More than two is pointless.
3. YMMV, but for most players, their overdrive tone is a function of a pedal in tandem with their amp, with the amp's breakup contributing to the final tone. In such instances, what the player really wants from the pedal is the sort of tone-shaping that brings out the best in the amp. And, realistically, the amp and speakers hold the trump card as far as final tone goes.

[Richard]

I've one it. For me it works best with a couple of lower gain pedals. One interesting thing is that because the output impedance of a pedal difers from a guitar there may be a difference in response, while either of the two pedals may no have a difference in level to your clean tone, when combined there is sometimes a boost.

[Mark Hammer]

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the output impedance of a pedal vs. a guitar; particularly since there is often more than enough cable leading up to the amp to supercede all of that, with respect to frequency response.

[Richard]

Possibly. There are so many variables that to assign a result to a specific one without testing is silly. It could be the eq curves complement each other yielding a volume boost. I don't really understand the impedance thing that thoroughly but I have read of some pedals acting funny because they are being fed by a buffer.

[Enzo]

The key to that sort of lore is to worry about it IF and WHEN you run into it. As a whole guitar amps are not picky, and most pedals work fine with most guitars and most amps.

[Mick Bailey]

Sometimes vintage effects can load the guitar signal, so driving such a pedal from anything other than a guitar can produce varied results. Some fuzzes can be too harsh-sounding due to the emphasized treble when driving from a low-impedance source. There are various circuits that use an LCR combination to simulate a guitar pickup to 'fix' the problem if you come across it.

[Steve A.]

I think that the early dirt pedal stackers were trying to get as much gain and distortion as humanly possible... "let's crank all of the controls up to 10!" But for the connoisseurs today it is more like wine pairings (flights of wine might be a more accurate term.)

One of the first rules (which will be broken later) is to set the volume of each pedal for unity gain. That way you can hear how the waveforms blend rather than just trying to boost the gain and distortion in the subsequent pedals. You might start with just two pedals and switching the order to see what works best. Now you can start experimenting with gain and volume settings for each pedal. What I look for is an increased complexity to the distortion, with it having more dimensions but your mileage may vary...

You might try using a "foundation"-style pedal plugged directly into the clean channel of your amp to make it sound and respond like a particular amp that you are trying to emulate with and without whatever pedals you plug into it. The following article mentions the Catalinbread Dirty Little Secret which emulates a Marshall amp. The Character line of pedals from Tech 21 is another good choice.

You generally want to run a lower gain pedal into a higher gain one but there are exceptions. The $40 Joyo Sweet Baby OD (based on the $200+* Mad Professor Sweet Honey OD) is a lower gain pedal but it puts a nice sheen on practically any pedal plugged into it, making it sound fuller and more multi-dimensional.

http://tonereport.com/blogs/tone-tip...s-for-stacking

Steve A.

P.S. My pedal-stack-du-jour is this:

LP --> Barber Silver LTD --> Analogman Prince of Tone --> Mad Professor Sweet Honey OD --> Marshal DSL-15C
(For a softer more compressed sound I might replace the SHOD with a BBE Green Screamer, a well--tuned TS808 clone.0

P.P.S. An earlier favorite stack was:
Barber Tone Press --> Wampler Hot Wired ver 2 --> MP SHOD

The Tone Press is a parallel compressor with a Blend control to select any setting between 100% unprocessed to 100% processed. Great for adding compression and sustain without losing the bite of your attack.

The Hot Wired v2 is itself a stacked pedal with an initial Fender-like channel feeding a Marshall-like channel (it has a Blend control on the first channel to blend in the unprocessed signal.)

EDIT I just rec'd a second Prince of Tone today- with 2 of them I have the equivalent of the Analogman King of Tone (with a few added bonuses.) I set one (A) for a light overdrive and the other (B) for a more distorted sound. I tried running A into B but was underwhelmed with the results. I checked the website and saw that they recommend running the heavier OD channel into the lighter one (B into A) and it worked a lot better.

As for the advantage of having 2 PoT's instead of a single KoT the PoT has an external toggle switch to select between the Boost, OD and Dist modes while you need to toggle internal switches to accomplish the same with the KoT which makes it more difficult to reconfigure.