decent tube pedal

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to test how tubes sound?

one i can easily access to pop them in and out of, and preferrably, one that is equally 12ax7 - 12at7 - 12ay7 compatible


recently, i realized i was accumulating a lot of tubes, and i'd like to have an idea how they sound in front of the amp.

i was thinking one of the chandler tube drivers, or something similiar.
vtwin and bottle rocket come to mind, but, gonna pay over 300 for one of those probably, but they have the easiest access.
 
yeti":7igcny4z said:
to test how tubes sound?

one i can easily access to pop them in and out of, and preferrably, one that is equally 12ax7 - 12at7 - 12ay7 compatible


recently, i realized i was accumulating a lot of tubes, and i'd like to have an idea how they sound in front of the amp.

i was thinking one of the chandler tube drivers, or something similiar.
vtwin and bottle rocket come to mind, but, gonna pay over 300 for one of those probably, but they have the easiest access.
Click to expand...
I have an SIB Varidrive that uses one preamp tube...it is pretty cool for checking out a preamp tube's character.
The Mesa takes two tubes so it's not going to work the same.
 
that was the other reason i wanted to steer away from the dual tube ones.

i will dig up info on that. do you like it?
 
I have the blackstar DistX pedal. Pretty cool. Maybe a little too much gain for me. Does the marshall thing well, you can change the voicing accordingly - the "American" settings are crap, but the british ones are really good.
 
awesome input. i was looking at both the tonebone and the blackstar stuff.
i think what i want as little "voicing" or coloration as possible.

really want to get as clear a tonal signal from the tube, or representation there-of, as possible.
 
IIRC, the Chandler and Butler Tube Drivers run at 120v, so that should be a closer approximation of how a tube sounds than something that runs off 9 or 18v like the Blackstar HT boost.
 
i ended up getting the real tube bk butler pedal.

long story short, i tested 48 12ax7's in it. i recorded some basic guitar licks into my computer soundcard, using cool edit pro into one mp3 track about one and a half minutes long.

then saved the file as mp3 "clean guitar". sent it to my ipod. route my ipod output through the real tube pedal via a stereo to mono cord, and then back to the computer line input.

open a new session in cool edit. adjust levels, arm a track to record, put a tube in, let it warm up a bit...voila. ran down collection. it was pretty monotonous, and took longer than i wanted it to..but once i got down to a specific routine and science, it really went fast. the results are pretty neat. i didnt' treat any of the files with post processing at all.

im debating posting my results due to my own self hate ( lack of practice, old strings and general not caring how it sounded really) as i didn't originally intend it to be anything but for my own use. but, the more i thought of it, other people may gain use from my results based on what i used and how i did it.

i may cut them into 10 second samples, and then post them, with a pic of each tube (and tube tester results if i have them).. in the end part of each clip, i actually used the beginning riff for walking on the sun, or, what i interpret it to be...with my tone knob down all the way, then up all the way...just to see how each tube responded to the tone knob. it's pretty cool too, to actually see my own bias (no pun intended) that i had for certain tubes based on how they recorded..visually, in each track, you can judge signal strength/power of each tube, which, right off the bat is easy enough to look at and grab the best tubes for whatever application.

i'm going to do all my 12at7's and all my 12au7s too.
sorry so wordy.
 
I would love to see the results of this. VERY cool experiment.
 
i'm working on it. i got my pedal this past thursday and commenced testing that night...like i said, it took a while to get down to a science, and saturday is actually when i decided to record one dry track into the computer, the re-amp it with the ipod through the pedal. i checked to see with 3 different sets of head phones and scrutinized the original track vs the ipod reamped track... i really tried to scrutinze, and couldnt come up with any reason i shouldn't rely on my results using the ipod.
 
The only issue I see would be is signal degeneration/conversion changing the tone. Sending the track through the iPod could color the sound.
 
i truly didnt hear any difference.

3 different headphones - computer playing the track through windows media player and in itunes.

said headphones from ipod.

volume difference, maybe. tone was passable and it worked well enough.
 
dunno if this matters or not for valve testing since the valves character will still come through but i'm pretty sure the butler/chandlers have op amp clipping before or after the tube stage.
 
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