Scott Henderson Discussion

[peter]

Hey Scott,

So I have the SH RC Booster first in my signal chain and it's awesome, totally clean boost and gain without affecting tone. I use the clean channel of the amp and turning it on just makes it louder on Gain 1, louder and more saturated on Gain 1+2.

SD-9 is stacked second in line for distortion above and beyond the RC Booster but here is my problem:

I find that there is some tone-sucking compared to the RC. While it has a nice fat and warm sound and sustain, there is this degradation of signal it seems. It almost sounds like one of the over drive presets on the Boss SE-70, if you know what I mean.

The setting is DIST @ 2 o'clock, TONE:0 LEVEL:Max. I use batteries and have tried different cables. It still feels like as if Im wearing a condom!

I'm wondering if I have a bad pedal or it's just the nature of these so called high gain pedals?

Peter

PS: Enjoying the podcasts immensely!

[countandduke]

That sounds odd because Scott has done video examples of his rig and there isn't any degradation. What exactly is your signal chain? From guitar to amp... Be as specific as you can. I imagine you've already tried obvious stuff like new batteries and maybe even new cables. Does the SD-9 sound good into an amp by itself? It MAY be as simple as adjusting the tone knob up a little bit because I think with it in the completely OFF position it sounds like a blanket over the speaker. Try fringing the tone knob to more like 10% or so and see if that opens things up a bit.

Best,
Chris

[Scott Henderson]

What Chris said. The tone knob on 0 doesn't sound good - there's a big difference when you turn it up to the first "black square", which would be equal to about 1. Also, make sure you're using a carbon battery - that pedal hates alkaline even more than wall wart power. Believe it or not, there's actually a difference in tone between Eveready 9v batteries and other brands. Eveready's are the best (with the cat jumping through the 9).

If those two things don't fix the problem, you might have a bad pedal. Make sure you try it all by itself so you can rule out problems with cables and other pedals.

[peter]

I've been tweaking with the setup and found out this:
There is no problem with the pedal by itself.
It's when I stack it with the new RC.

I watched the Godlyke vid again and realized that Scott had the old RC booster set at "volume all the way up and gain all the way down", just a clean boost.

But alas I had both channels of the new RC on with the Gain set both around 10 o'clock. This plus the SD9 DIST at more than 2 o'clock seemed to have too much saturation and hence the fuzziness and muffled tone. (I couldn't have described it better than blanket over speaker, Chris)

So I simply switched off the Gain channel on the RC and just used channel 1 as clean boost. The amp volume has to be high enough to clip but that kind of solved it!

Thanks guys!

[peter_heijnen]

[Scott Henderson]

Batteries make a huge difference, and even more so with fuzz pedals. Anything with germanium transistors won't even work with an alkaline battery. In a normal distortion pedal, alkaline batteries make it brighter and fizzier - much less warm and musical. Wall wart power is somewhere in the middle - it's not as good sounding as an Eveready carbon battery, but doesn't sound horrible like alkaline. The battery box is a great idea - I'm not sure who invented it, but it's great to leave all the pedals plugged in and just turn the box off. Also much easier to change batteries.

It always makes me laugh when I hear the SVC described as an "invention". That term might apply at a second grade science fair... Whatever, it gets the job done, and I think traditional volume pedals are pretty much useless for controlling master volume in any kind of subtile way. You just barely move your foot and there's a huge change in volume which everyone can hear. I started using my foot in a circular motion with my first distortion pedal, the MXR Distortion +. It had a rubber sleeve which fit on top of the volume knob so you could control it with your foot. When I changed to other pedals with smaller knobs, I just put a potentiometer in a box and used it at the end of the pedalboard to control the master volume. Later I discovered it works better between the amp's preamp and power amp - that way it only controls the master volume but not the gain, which I control with the guitar's volume. The SVC is actually designed to go in the FX loop because it's a low impedance 25k pot - high impedance volume pedals which go into the preamp are about 100k.

The Midi Mouse is powered by a One Spot, and the Looper isn't hooked up - like all Boss pedals, it's not true bypass and will ruin the tone. I only use it at sound check to EQ my tone in the PA when we don't have our own sound man.

[countandduke]

The battery topic is certainly interesting! Eric Johnson said he could tell the difference in batteries in his pedals too and I think lots of people laughed that off but it's interesting to hear Scott give a bit more detail in the differences other than, "I can hear a difference".

Thanks again Scott for the input.

Chris

[peter_heijnen]