More gain to high gain boogies with Stomp Boxes: Audio Clips

[AMP-BLACKOUT]

Hey guys, probably like most of you (maybe not), as a guitar player, one of the many reasons i got into boogies like a crack addict being handed the biggest crack pipe on earth, was simply because i could simply throw on my guitar, plug straight in, crank the boogie and get instant gratification (at whatever volume i wanted)...

Back in the 80's I got into this routine with the highest gain (out of the box unmodded) amp back then, the Laney AOR series, and simply could never understand why anyone would want or need to have anything plugged into the amp to get that high gain sound, on tours across the world (in the 80's obviously) virtually everyone I opened for, headlined with, or met had some sort of stomp box plugged into their marshall or fender etc..... obviously other than the Laney AOR, what revolutionized monster gain sound was mesa's rectifier series... but for some, even that much gain isn't enough... and i've even had some of these obviously alien imposed thoughts or more and more and more gain... but i can definitively say that since i recently put my rectos in an A/B config with my Laney AORs that for leads, the Laney's get a little more saturated like the stilletos.... but anyway, that's not the point... the point is that I started experimenting with some of the overdrive pedals i had custom made throughout the years... my personal favorite being a cross between the tubescreamer and the dod250 i have been selling as the ThunderStomp MikroScreamer because it's about a quarter of the size of any other pedal in the market (and also building some of these circuits right into some of the footcontrollers for mesa amps i make)... but that's also not the point....

the point i am trying to get to is: is it possible to add more gain to a recto without making the sound blurry, muddy or too compressed? In my experimenting process with all the possible variations of op-amps, resistors, capacitors, diodes, I think it is possible and will be posting several clips soon to demonstrate this.... one of the reasons i started trying this was that i also have an engl pre-amp i use for recording, and it definitely has way way way more gain than either my rectos or laneys, but has no chunk at the oblivion setting... I will say however that I felt like my tremoverb (i am not sure why there is more difference than with the dual recto head) specifically had substantially more gain with the mesa el34's than with the 6L6's, but i missed the gigantic bottom end and switched back to the 6L6's last year.... so if any of you guys have audio clips with pedals in-front of boogies, post them, and describe your exact configuration including what your settings were when you recorded, mic, and post eq etc etc...

PLEASE POST COMMENTS, THOUGHTS, ESPECIALLY AUDIO OR VIDEO CLIPS AND OFCOURSE:
ROCK ON !!!

AA

 

[fatboy135]

the point i am trying to get to is: is it possible to add more gain to a recto without making the sound blurry, muddy or too compressed? In my experimenting process with all the possible variations of op-amps, resistors, capacitors, diodes, I think it is possible and will be posting several clips soon to demonstrate this....

As far as I know the first answer is NOT. The tubes saturation becomes when you takes the input signal on the grid of the tube near 0 volts the tube begins to compressed the summits of the waveform in time domain, creating the classical thd on frecuency domain.
Adding an extra gain with some external stompboxes you are getting the input signal with higher amplitudes and it reaches the 0 volts before than if you are only using the amp without any extra puncher.
So talking about an extra punch and not extra compression is not an accurate term.
ok also you mentioned the capacitors, the caps are only used to acts as filters, they are not involved on extra punch. The Op amps matter that I could recomend to you is getting good op amps like burr brown with an extended dynamic range, the diodes you are talking about in pedals are usually used as rectifiers they rectifier the waveform when the waveform reaches the threshold ON of the diodes, so you could use classical rectifier diodes like 1n400* or even zener diodes with several ON threshold.
On the other hand I will never understand people that tries to get the highest saturate tone that you can imagine.
My personal goal in every amp I had or repair is to get the best articulate sound that I can reach, and totally gained sound.
I was using a ts9 and a rat with my triaxis to get some extra gain, at last I only use the rat for fuzz tones, I don´t want extra gain that could muds my sound.
And remember if you want an extra gain with a not compressed sound you will need to modify the grid bias point on tubes for a lower negative voltage, play the music and don´t loose yourself with extra gain experiments