Guitar Gear Forum

i'm helping a friend put together his first 'proper' pedalboard this weekend. i've set him up with some nice pedals and switching system so he can achieve a nice simple setup, but he likes to stack a high gain distortion with an octave fuzz and it's apparently a bit of a cacophany!

i'm trying to find a solution that doesn't involve getting a noise gate since (when i had a Boss NS-2 at least) they tend to fuck with the tone a bit too much.

i was wondering if i can convince him to swap his Dano French Toast for a naturally-gated type of fuzz.. might cut out the noise without losing the ROAR when he needs it.

thoughts?

It all depends on the particular pedals and how you have them set, really.

Is he running them into a completely clean amp?

FWIW I have an ISP Decimator noise reducer on my board and I don't notice it screwing with my tone, unless the threshold is set too high of course.

A gated type of fuzz is probably the only way, or a distortion pedal that has a built in noise gate (Zvex Box of Metal, MXR Fullbore, Ibanez Smash Box, WMD Acoustic Trauma, Soundblox Pro, Line6 Uber Metal, etc).

Zvex Loop Gate to the rescue!

My method when stacking high gain like that is a bit old school but keeps things simple- I hover over one of the pedals, and just turn it off any time my lack of playing would result in screams of feedback.

Cirrus wrote:My method when stacking high gain like that is a bit old school but keeps things simple- I hover over one of the pedals, and just turn it off any time my lack of playing would result in screams of feedback.

This is what I do.

i sorted his new pedalboard for him.. ended up without the French Toast because it sounded like balls anyway.

went with high gain pedal in loop A and overdrive in loop B. no need for.octave fuzz leads with what he was doing.

thanks for the suggestion guys

for one thing if your power-supply is adding or picking up noise of it's own, switching to a better power supply(or using batteries) will help some. using single coil pickups? switching to noiseless pickups, shielding the pickup cavity, making sure wiring on guitar is correctly grounded are additional things that can help cut down noise.

it should also be noted that some gain pedals aren't as noisy as others. my amt p-drive pedal which has tons of gain available (i don't usually go higher then 10 oclock on gain knob which is plenty)and it's not a noisy pedal. it handles low gain boost/overdrive in front of it well. by contrast, i have a carl martin drive n boost pedal that i mainly used to only use the boost side as clean solo boost. the drive side other going any higher very light amount of drive would get noisy fast.