This weekend I went to a friend I mentioned here before who has some nice gear. He had a bunch of guitars and a cool Fender amp (Hotrod deluxe 3 factory modified) and started to buy some pedals.
-We had only one distortion pedal which was a boss DA-2. All knobs cranked (except level) gives a really good solo or modern-ish metal (say mix of a mesa and marshall amp distortion) like rhythm sounds, lower settings are still cool and has a nice feel of modern classic sound sort of thing. The level knobs boost gain is insane, I have no idea why someone would need so much output from a dist. pedal which can already get pretty aggressive.
As have tested a few, digital distortion pedals (these days) are way more versatile than analog but the only downside is you start to lose the guitars original tone pretty quick. They react just like analog pedals in a chain, also though being digital they sound and feel waaay better than any processor or guitar plug-in one can demo these days.
The fun started when we chained overdrive pedals before it,
-First the classic TS9; That famous low-mid bump gives really nice warmth to a distortion pedal and helps preserving its tone (unlike using it as pure overdrive). Even driven hard, it complimented the drive very nice/organic and didn't add anything extreme to the tone which can be a good or bad thing
-Ibanez JD9; Personally hate it as an overdrive, but this was the most fun while testing
Its an extreme version of the ts9. The drive can make a dist. pedal very amp-like, the mid knob can give (increased) endless sustain or (decreased) cool tonal variations. Its hard not to like it for this usage but the expense of cranking it is the tone starts to get "fake" with extreme settings and the build quality of these pedals aren't good.
A must try for extreme distortion users who uses overdrive as booster, specially if they like but want more from a ts9. If gonna buy used (can be very cheap) be careful when testing to see if it works properly.
-Boss OS2; First time I ever played one and is definitely interesting. Its very versatile but has a learning curve, the knobs strongly needs compensating each other while adjusting and this makes it harder to fully understand what it can do. Both overdrive and dist. settings are nice but between knob settings were the best. As an overdrive pedal only driving the amp its can be very useful, just not sure yet if my kind of pedal.
It overall attacks the distortion pedal with more brightness at most settings, it was the only one among them to be able to make the DA-2 sound thrash-metal like. It can definitely do warmth too, not as organic as the screamers though and not with such power.
I still feel I didn't test it enough so won't comment further, if I ever get the chance to play with it again and feel more certain of its character then will make a separate topic about it...
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This post has been edited by Mertay: Jul 26 2015, 08:07 PM
Mertay Tested Adaptive Distortion (boss Da-2) And More... Jul 26 2015, 07:54 PM
