Who else never really uses the drive block(s)?

Tremonti

Tremonti

Fractal Fanatic
So many amps and have 2 amp blocks with 4 channels means 8 amps available in one patch. With an unreal amount of amps that Cliff has blessed us with, I typically have to try and place a drive block in, just to do it sometimes. Just for the hell of it. So many parameters to goose anything with amps, that drives just don't make it to the table for me personally. Not saying to rid the unit of them, just my perspective and opinion. Great for many things and people.
 
Some of my presets have two drive blocks, neither one with much gain, one for fat and one for low cut, more or less bridge pickup and neck pickup.

Sometimes I use those as above, sometimes neither one, sometimes drives that aren't either of those.

Most of the time though, my base tone is in the amps, drives for variations, or different flavors. Or off.
 
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mr_fender said:
I don't use it much. I've always preferred amp gain to pedals.
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Same here.

With my pedalboard into a tube amp it was fun to push the front end hard so it’d go insane, but with the modeler it’s so simple to use the ideal and pre-amp controls and push the modeled amp that I don't see the point, especially since most of those pedals were designed to imitate the sound of a distorting tube amp originally. And the odds are good we have a model of that type of amp too.
 
Depends on my mood, mostly — colors on a palette. I do, however, really enjoy twisting the amp settings into places that would cause the Magic Smoke to escape a “real” amp. 😈
 
no need for them. amp gain is the king. any level of saturation or pre eq can be set in the amp block.
fuzz drives are of course exception.
 
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A real bassman and similar real amps come with way too much low content and they even start to fart when you play harder because they drown in lows. That's where a drive that boosts highs or cuts lows solves a problem.

To have it the same way, you'd need to dial in that too bassy amp sound first, then add the drive to clean the lows up, and that can make some good combinations. But the way to that is counter intuitive, who wants to start with a farting bassman?
 
I almost never did, now i like to have for example a Rat in to a TS9 in to a cleanish Marshall for lead. Just another flavour, everything is welcom i quess as long as it sounds good to me.
 
666was999 said:
A real bassman and similar real amps come with way too much low content and they even start to fart when you play harder because they drown in lows. That's where a drive that boosts highs or cuts lows solves a problem.

To have it the same way, you'd need to dial in that too bassy amp sound first, then add the drive to clean the lows up, and that can make some good combinations. But the way to that is counter intuitive, who wants to start with a farting bassman?
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I use the input EQ in the amp block for this a lot of the time.
Sometimes it's way higher than I would have guessed, even the default settings.
Doing that with a drive instead can just get different feels.
Some of that also comes more from a place of replicating the chains of our favorite players and recordings.
 
Fuzz, klon, buxom boost, ts9 , fet , shimmer, shred. Use all of them with amps from clean to high gain.

There’s nothing else that can replicate a fuzz pedal. Pushing a clean ODS with a klon for a solo, is amazing. Adding the buxom boost to a med gain amp to push it over the top is great as well. Chaining two drives ( AC / RC with another) sounds great too.
 
The first few years after switching to modeling I thought the same thing. Why use drives when I have access to all these amps? And to an extent I still agree for any higher gain amps, aside from the typical fuzz up front, or 808 to clean up the low end for example.

However, not all amps sound great cranked up (i.e. using a control switch on the drive parameter), the low end can tend to fall apart on some amps, I generally don't like dramatic changes between my cleans and drive tones (i.e. using channels for 2 different amps), and most importantly there is a type of sound that is created when running drives and wet effects into the front of an edge of breakup amp that is difficult to describe but is obviously missing when compared to wet effects run after the amp/cab.

Here's an example with a ton of wet effects just to make the difference obvious. First half has the wet fx hitting the amp, second half has the wet fx after the amp+cab. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/sgz0...-amp.m4a?rlkey=9t7ji1ubheql0nyzk9yve7dw8&dl=0

The first one is a single cohesive sound, sounds exactly like what I used to do with real edge of breakup amps. The second sounds way more clinical, the dry and wet are very clearly separate like it was tracked dry and the wet fx were added later. Fractal is the only platform I've found that really nails the former, other modelers' amps don't take wet fx into the front accurately so I always just ran them after.
 
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Maybe it's my insatiable 80's-ness, but I'll usually just go for an Arredondo (Saturation switch) instead. I don't know if it's because of its placement in the circuit of the amp instead of before it, but to me it just sounds more badass. I was a boosted Plexi guy for a while, loving the OCD and Butler, but when I went Arredondo, I instantly was kicking myself for not doing it sooner.

Once you go Arredondo, you never go back.
 
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