Members Wolfboy1 Posted June 20, 2009 Members Share Posted June 20, 2009 I saw Robin Trower Thursday night and was blown away by the sound scapes he creates with his RTO and Dejavibe. I have been considering a new overdrive to try out and looking for one with a lot of sustain. I wondered if anyone herer has tried the RTO and opinions of it compared to the OCD and DLS. Thanks for any feedback. I play a US Strat into a Mesa Express 5:25 most shows....using a bad monkey at the moment and no complaints just curious. By the way a poster named Ninjaaron had this most excellent response in another post that bears reading about overdrives: "Three basic types of overdrives: 1. 90% of all so-called "overdrive" pedals out there are variations on the TS circuit. You can swap a few parts out of a TS for other parts, and you will have totally different beast (in terms of sound). OCD, Timmy, and all the pedals that sound like a TS, they all use diodes from the output going to the inverting input of an opamp. 2. A few that are called overdrive actually have a circuit that looks a little more like a RAT. The DOD OD-250 is one of those, as is, surprisingly, the Klon (though it has other tricks up it's sleeve). This means clipping diodes to ground. Similar effect, but I feel it has a slightly more compressed, jagged sound (Klon gets out of this by mixing it with a clean signal). Most of these pedals (the kinds that use diodes) only have one "gain stage" per se. Opamps can generate quite a lot of gain, and those pedals that have less are generally just limiting the amount you are able to turn it up (there can be good reasons for doing this). 3. The current trend among botuiqe builders is FET based overdrives. Box of Rock, DLS, Brown Sound in a Box, Fetish, and others. Many of these look similar to Fuzz circuits, because they often just use several transistors in series to create clipping. The difference is FET transistors have a harmonic signature and distortion characteristics very similar to tubes, and in skilled hands can be great for emulating the sounds of classic tube amps. DSL and Brown Sound in a Box use a little different circuit called a "mu-amp," but in the end, they still takes advantage of the tube-like characteristics of FETs to get their sounds. These pedals will have multiple gain stages, and the number may vary from one design to another. Box of Rock has three gain stages, DLS has two (but still offers quite a bit of gain because the stages are designed very differently), I think the Barber Dirty Bomb has four, but I'm not sure. there is a site, runoffgroove.com, where they publish designs that are mostly FET based tube amp emulators, and they sound damn good. Some, relatively few, builders are combining several of these things into a single design. The Boss OD-3 uses 1 and 2, for example, and there are some really interesting DIY designs I've seen that use opamps to drive FETs (not sure if any of the botiuqe builders are doing this yet... Wampler, maybe). I've actually played around with using diodes to ground between the gain stages of a FET based design, and that sounds pretty cool too. Anyway, the rest is pretty much EQing. "Transparency" comes from EQing, and sometimes mixing clean signal in. "Touch Sensativity" has mostly to do with the components you use to create distortion (ie for diodes: LED's, vs Small Signal, vs rectifier, vs Zener, vs FETs wired up to function as diodes...), and the way you generate it, though buffering also, arguably has some effect on the dynamics. So yeah: three basic kinds, the vast majority being #1, and the rest is EQing." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members tokyo jo Posted June 20, 2009 Members Share Posted June 20, 2009 u should check out wampler pedals.they r great.simple.i got the fulltone clyde deluxe wah.thats great too Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members TruthSyrum Posted March 31, 2011 Members Share Posted March 31, 2011 The RTO has a jrc 4558D chip... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Hiwatt Bob Posted March 31, 2011 Members Share Posted March 31, 2011 for Trower, you're going to want a Dumble. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Timmylikedthing Posted March 31, 2011 Members Share Posted March 31, 2011 for Trower, you're going to want a Dumble. TGP'd. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted March 31, 2011 Share Posted March 31, 2011 To me, the OCD (V3) and the DLS sound different from each other, and both sound different than a Tube Screamer. The OCD is voiced more like a Marshall JTM, and the DLS more along the lines of a hot rodded JCM800. Both are very cool sounding pedals IMO, but they really do have different voicing. As far as methods of creating distortion... yes, I agree that there are relatively few methods that you can use to do that with a pedal... Opamps, diode clipping, FETs (not to mention tubes)... but remember this: A Marshall tube amp, a Vox tube amp and a Fender tube amp all use tube clipping to create their distortion, and yet they don't sound the same. Just because two pedals use a pair of clipping diodes in their circuits does not automatically mean they're going to sound the same either - there's much more to it than that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members booher Posted April 1, 2011 Members Share Posted April 1, 2011 Old thread is almost two years old Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members King Rat Posted February 7, 2014 Members Share Posted February 7, 2014 booher wrote: Old thread is almost two years old so what? I still wanna know about this pedal. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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