V Twin, Bottle Rocket and Fulltone OCD

[Bolanos]

Hi, Im new to the board.

Im gonna star using the V twin and Bottle Rocket live. Both as guitar pedals. Basically Im looking for a heavy crunch type sound but not Marshall like, so the Vtwin and Bottle rocket are it. They sound phenomenal.

My question is: Can the Fulltone OCD be placed first in the pedal chain to serve as an overdrive to kick the tubes of both pedals in high gear for solos or would fe Fulltone Fatboost be better after both pedals to boost the signal?

Also, Anyone have experience gigging with these pedals. They are expensive, so having back up is very unlikely. How realiable are they? How long do the tubes last?

Thank You for any advise

 

[eyesonly]

Hi,

I registered just to answer you because nobody else had.

To me clearly the order is OCD -> Bottle - >Twin

This is because the Twin is a preamp with overdrive if needed, the bottle is a tube overdrive and the OCD an overdrive also. The reason for placing the OCD before the bottle is that the tube overtones added by the bottle will not be harshly clipped by silicon diodes in the OCD. Basically as you have said you can use it to drive the tubes in youe Mesa products harder.

I am wondering if you need to use anything other than a single unit of the three you have to achieve a 'crunch' tone. I would imagine all 3 running at once would give a ridiculously distorted hash of sound that would be far from crunch-like.

I suggest a carefull tweaking of the gains of all three devices to achieve a range of drive levels and tones. That way you can perhaps blend one, two, or omg even all three devices to achieve different things.

Myself I use an MI Audio Crunch Box into my lead channel. The lead channel on it's own is a crunch, and the CB adds a helping of extra drive to give either a differently toned overdrive when the guitar volumes are lower, or a soft lead with more volume or something like a liquid sustained lead tone at full guitar volume.

Basically whatever you find works well for you is what you should go for.

 

[MasterTrax]

Eyesonly makes a lot of sense.

What kind of amp are you playing through, BTW? And I assume you're setting the amp clean for this front end assault?

If I want to get really outrageous heavy tones and for whatever reason I wanted to use overdrive and gain stages in front of the amp to do it rather than letting the amp do it by itself (or for that matter even using a distortion pedal), I would use the OCD into the V Twin and forget the V1 since of the three it tends to smear the signal, particularly the bottom end, the most, and in the context you descibe it would misbehave in that way, I'm almost certain. By itself, however, I have found the V1 to be a great OD which robs less low end than a tube screamer and can smooth out a brittle-sounding combo like nothing else. I've owned a couple of Bottle Rockets and a V Twin and have tried things like you are describing. I always come back to the volume and gain knobs on my amps with a good OD in front - sometimes - for that over-the-edge stuff.

If you do want to try all three, then I agree that the OCD> V1> V-Twin arrangement would be the logical choice to try first.

But do tell us what kind of amp you are using to do this with, and how it is set, and what guitars and pickups you use if you want to discuss this in more detail, then we can possibly make more informed suggestions

 

[Bolanos]

I wanted to use the OCD as a boost to get more gain and harmonics out of the V Twin and Bottle Rocket, but only for solos. I keep the gain half way on both and I use the V Twin for rythm heavy stuff like Dream Theater and the Bottle Rocket for more classic sounds like Zeppelin. I run an MXR six band EQ after both of them.

Basically I want to use the OCD like you would use a Tube Screamer with a tube amp.

 

[nomad100hd]

Bolanos,

The vtwin has a jfet input gain stage, so i don't know if boosting into the vtwin would be a good idea. Now the bottle rocket basically the gain channel off a tube amp. Being that if you need more gain / different tone out of it just mode it. The Bottle rocket actually should be able to give you more gain and a better tone than the vtwin going into your amp. put the OCD in front of the bottle rocket.

Get a schematic of the bottle rocket, and your favorite tube amp and change the preamp to match the gain channel, with 2 tubes (4 gain stages) you can get almost any sounds. The Mesa Dual Rec / Soldano has 4 who could need more gain than that.