Strat neck pickup, compressor up front, transparent-ish drive before the amp, edge of breakup amp.
- First clip below is a comp into the Greer Lightspeed into a Deluxe Reverb normal + AC20 in stereo, one of my go-to combinations for a wide variety of stuff.
- 2nd clip I just played some basic chords straight into the amps with everything turned off so you can hear what they sound like alone, pretty standard edge of breakup sound tbh.
- 3rd clip is the exact same comp, lightspeed, and amp setup as the first clip, just with a different guitar, klon into the lightspeed, and delay and verb.
- 4th clip is again the identical comp + amp + lightspeed setup, just a tele and 1/8th note delay.
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/vrnx...AC20.m4a?rlkey=djpymudm747vkjk69ubqqtnpx&dl=0
I added the extra clips just to show that once you have a good "neutral" edge of breakup amp tone you can really cover almost anything with a creative selection of guitar / technique / drives / fx, and these clips don't even include any clean stuff, mod fx, or uniquely voiced drives like Mashall-in-a-box type pedals or RAT for example.
Also 100% of the amp settings are on their Fractal defaults, except for the drive, input trim set to 0.5 to simulate the "low" input on the amps, and Bass/Treble (and high cut turned up a bit on the AC20). Honestly the mids are both set to 5 too, I just turned up the bass a bit and turn down the treble. The amps are just accurate on this platform so it's just effortless to dial in tones.
You really could do this type of sound with any edge of breakup amp that isn't Marshall-voiced or like a modern high gain amp's clean channel. Examples: DR, Twin, 5F8 twin, Dumbles, AC30, the Dr. Z amps, any Matchless, any of the bassmans, princeton, CJ11, Lonestar, Vibrolux, etc.
The real key for me is a compressor. I can't live without it for this type of "pedalboard" setup and more modern "produced" tones. It really just cleans up the transients and "professionalizes" or "modernizes" the tones. Playing without a compressor for anything clean/edge of breakup is just a much more "vintagey" or "less produced" type of sound where there's this big transient and little decay/sustain.
