Appreciate the breakdown and the clarification of those terms. Been using those petals for years, but never really thought about the differences and what goes into it
A good overview showing the characteristic of each function: OD, Boost, and Fuzz. Love that axe; reminds me of the 60s Melody Maker I bought for $55. Thanks, Dylan!
Great explanation. That helps. The compression and volume drop you get between modes is dramatic in real life. I don't hear much drop on the video. I really like the boost, but haven't found good settings yet with the OD and Distortion modes. Not a transparent pedal at all outside of boost.
i was wishing for the final word on the distinction between overdrive and distortion, and that final word I got was "distortion shapes the tone even more"
I've always liked the blues breaker circuit so when this came out I was excited. I just finished a small board this with the MXR Timmy is a 1,2 punch for awesome low mid gain tones along with Nobles ODR mini for some higher gain. This little pedal is a power house once you figure out what you want to use it for or if it suites what you are trying to do.
With a clearer understanding of how the pedal works I think it is very useable. The tone with that Blackstar is impressive. I use a Keeley Workstation which takes up a lot more room to do the same things.
I get what your saying, however, my workstation is the only pedal I’ve ever bought that stayed on my board since the day I bought it. I really love all that pedal does.
This makes sense on several levels. The demonstration on the control is helping me understand my own setup. I can only picture the white board and the next time I power up! PICKUPS!!
Thanks man, really helping me piece together the electric side of guitar . . . another takeaway is having good electronics and pots, good pick ups, and not just a review but also how certain pedal features work and also how to dial not just this pedal but any with OD, boost, and distortion. Spent years in TGP or TDPRI forums and no posts one explained hows and why's like your channel (and also your friends like JIm Lil) . . .
@DylanTalksTone great video, one question though, if my style is going to be swifting between clean and overdriven, would it make sense to put a compressor pedal AFTER the overdrive in the chain to make the volume even? Your video made me think about that
Great review and explanation of how that pedal works. Next you should explore stacking pedals, you could stack two Duke of Tones, could be pretty interesting.
I have my Duke of Tone before a Tumnus Deluxe (Klon clone), then Pantheon (another Bluesbreaker derivative), then MXR Timmy (transparent overdrive with a bit of compression). With those 4 pedals and the potential to combine any 2 I can get thousands of sounds. The DoT is set in boost mode 90% of the time. Combined with a Pantheon I have a synthetic King of Tone.
Dylan, thanks for this. I picked up the DoT pedal Friday and had the same initial yuck reaction. Thought there were be a greater difference between the settings. But I saw Pete Thorn’s 2023 live rig pedalboard and he is running a DoT as a boost. I went back and watched DunlopUSAs product video with Analogman Mike in it. He does a great job comparing and explaining KoT, PoT and DoT. Goes over the circuit details and tone matching. He did offer a suggestion to the single-circuit issue: run two DoTs side-by-side and you have a KoT and balance out. After noodling with it over the weekend and now watching your video, I’m going to keep it and probably use it as a boost at the end of my gain pedal stack.
That's not an issue per se. You can use the Overdrive setting, just know that you will have to increase the level/volume. With the Distortion, the level drops a little less. The reason he says you will use 1 of these settings is because on a live setting you won't be able to switch from Boost to OD and then adjust the volume. But you can certainly be in OD with the volume adjusted and you just use the pedal to overdrive. Same applies to Distortion.
I've been running a JHS Morning Glory as a clean boost into the overdrive of the Duke Of Tone and like it a lot. I think many of us are struggling to dial it in straight out of the box.
I have 3 OD/Dist pedals on my board . Klon KTR , Marshall Guv'nor (Made in England) & MXR Duke of Tone . Last week I got to dive into the MXR DOT at sound check and it is a GREAT pedal . I can't believe it's a $150 pedal mass produced . I know most places are sold out of them but this first batch is killer . I have bought pedals on the 2nd round and they don't sound as good as the first . The pressure to make the 2nd batch causes them to rush making them and you get a lot of faulty ones . My Soulfood is a prime example .
Thoughts on the Xotic Super Sweet? I’m finding it to act more like a clean overdrive that will compress harshly at times. I just got a $30 TC Boost that’s simple and effective, tho, I like to think the SS has magic in there somewhere.
I'd like to know how good of a boost, overdrive, or distortion it is... and I guess if I played outside my little room in the house I'd probably find the settings I really like and just use one. Not sure I understood the whole thing, but it sounds like if I were to switch modes on it, like from boost to distortion, I might also need to turn the knobs to get the best tone for each setting. So I'd probably use it in one mode most of the time.
Ive owned this for a couple of days and I agree. I set my boost to a decent tone then when I switch to OD or Dist there is really no difference, so like you said I have to turn the knobs to get a different tone. So far to me its a boost pedal.
I can’t compare it to a KOT because I don’t have one. Yet. Haha. But as soon as I plugged in the DOT I loved it. Favorite being the distortion part. It also pushed other pedals great with the boost and od. Great versatile pedal.
Great explanation. The JHS guy did a similar video and basically debunked the "transparent OD" terminology, as you did. I have a Klon-a-like, which I set up the way Mr Finnigen recommended for the original - pedal at the cusp of dirty, amp at the cusp of dirty, with a little level gain from the pedal output. Works really well, IMO. Nice and... ya know, without being fizzy or harsh.
Good explanation. There's a few overdrives out there that I don't quite get and I think it's because I always use a bridge humbucker, and most of these drives are used with some flavor of single coil sound. I have a Nobels and an OCD and there's this bassiness to them that I think would sound different if I had a P90 or a Tele or Strat single coil going through them. But my default mode is humbuckers and that's not changing anytime soon. But also, this pedal in particular is designed to operate in different ways which you illustrated here. I think maybe some people just don't get it.
I use an OCD with humbuckers into a DSL20 my other overdrive is an SD1. I think what you are getting at is expensive OD are kinda pointless in a humbucker into high gain amp ? I have high output pickups in my guitars and I think that with a more vintage PAF HB the different drives would probably be more dynamic. My main guitar has a Duncan distortion in the guitar and I guess what I’m saying is an OD no OD can put frequencies into a PU it doesn’t have to start with.
Also if you don’t like the big bass on the OCD get yourself a Boss SD1 it cuts more bass than any other OD I’ve tried it’s the bridge HB into a Marshall boost in my opinion and it’s Cheap !
@@AzathothsAlarmClock I understand that. I see a lot of old timers having this issue. However, if you judge with your ears, rather than your brain, most sound pretty damn good these days!
There aren't that many guitarists left that understand how to play a tube amp and why a pedal like this is built for it. When you dial it in to deliver what you're looking for.
This is how I see it. Boost is clean amplification, what comes in comes out but louder. Distortion is short for "harmonic distortion" which means if you put in exactly one frequency, you will get multiple frequencies out. The ways to achieve this are two: Overdrive and Fuzz. Overdrive is when amp is gradually approaching it's amplification limit but not reached it yet. The top of the sinewave will get more and more squished but it is still a curve. Fuzz cuts the top of the sinewave and leaves flat horizontal line there.
What you're referring to is 'soft' vs 'hard' clipping, the former is similar to a 'soft knee' setting in a compressor, however the amplifier has still reached its limit as otherwise there's no overdrive, in fact it's acting sooner if the headroom ceiling is the same. If you're looking to maximise clean headroom then hard clipping is preferable out of the two. However when the limit is reached with hard clipping, it creates more harmonics compared to soft clipping. Guitarists tend to use quite a lot of clipping compared to everyone else, plus with huge amounts of filtering from amp speakers as well, which is why the difference between Overdrive & Distortion on the King/Prince/Duke of tone is not too obvious. Overdrive can mean anything though, just its come to generally refer to soft clipping circuits over time. Same goes for fuzz. Both are not technical terms, just guitar slang terms.
At first I was very underwhelmed with this pedal. But as I started using the pedal and using the three different modes I am starting to line this pedal a lot. It takes a bit of time if you work with the three different modes - OD, Boost and Distortion.
I'm not having that kind of luck I found the boost usable and some good tones but the OD and Dist are subtle changes and just not useful to me. So I have to decide is the boost alone worth 149 or should I return it.
Thank you, Dylan. This is a great explanation of the pedal. I guess you could always buy two of these and put them side-by-side to recreate something closer to the KoT dual-experience?.
Yo Dylan, tell me if you think I'm wrong but it seems to me that this pedal could be pretty damn helpful in achieving that sacred (Starbreaker-Judas Priest/Ted Nugent) sound. Just for shits and giggles.
Dylan, an unrelated pickup question. I have a tele that I love and almost always play on the neck pickup since the bridge is a bit spikey. I know you sell pickups but would you get tele set of pickups or keep the neck pickup, because I love it, and just change the bridge pickup?
I talked with a guitar playing buddy of mine that I play in bands with, albeit on drums, about this phenomena of the spikey bridge pickup in my tele, and he set me straight on the issue. He basically explained to me how he felt like that as a solo bedroom player but that he’d learned from a mutual late friend and one of the best players, that he uses it to cut through in a band situation. So I think I’m going to stick with what I’ve got.
Thanks, awesome video. I'll speak for others and say, being that you're not just extremely knowledgeable on pickups and audio signals, but also electrical and electronics, I'd love to see more pedal and amp deep dive/technical pedal and amp videos. Any dumb dumb like myself, can falsely claim to understand "tone." I notice nobody on TH-cam has done any type of video for someone like me, who recorded their guitar/metalzone/amp combo, into a boom box as a teenager, quit playing for 20 years, and also knows nothing about computers, electronics, and today's guitar related/recording technology. I can't be the only caveman out there, and there's some untapped views to be had, I think.
I hope this doesn't come off as mean, but it's atleast gonna be firm. With a channel called Dylan talks tone, you may....... Never mind I'm sure someone will just get offended and miss my point
Say your peace… I don’t get offended. I think it’s funny… you may get offended by my reaction… but if you think some rando I don’t even know is gonna offend me…. Lol.
Appreciate the breakdown and the clarification of those terms. Been using those petals for years, but never really thought about the differences and what goes into it
Great simple explanation of how to use this pedal for maximum impact
A good overview showing the characteristic of each function: OD, Boost, and Fuzz. Love that axe; reminds me of the 60s Melody Maker I bought for $55. Thanks, Dylan!
Great explanation. That helps. The compression and volume drop you get between modes is dramatic in real life. I don't hear much drop on the video. I really like the boost, but haven't found good settings yet with the OD and Distortion modes. Not a transparent pedal at all outside of boost.
Dylan…that white board explanation was on point…great stuff my man!!!!
Thank you for doing these kinds of instructional classes. I actually understand clipping much better than I did before watching.
Did you also get the education that you need a Dylan pickup to make the pedal work?
I appreciate the whiteboard and the explanation.
i was wishing for the final word on the distinction between overdrive and distortion, and that final word I got was "distortion shapes the tone even more"
I've always liked the blues breaker circuit so when this came out I was excited. I just finished a small board this with the MXR Timmy is a 1,2 punch for awesome low mid gain tones along with Nobles ODR mini for some higher gain. This little pedal is a power house once you figure out what you want to use it for or if it suites what you are trying to do.
This is a really useful practical vocab lesson, thanks for this!
With a clearer understanding of how the pedal works I think it is very useable. The tone with that Blackstar is impressive. I use a Keeley Workstation which takes up a lot more room to do the same things.
I get what your saying, however, my workstation is the only pedal I’ve ever bought that stayed on my board since the day I bought it. I really love all that pedal does.
Love your hat…!!!!
I just bought this pedal yesterday…
Looking forward to trying it
Mine is going to arrive any damn minute! I'm so excited.
This makes sense on several levels. The demonstration on the control is helping me understand my own setup. I can only picture the white board and the next time I power up! PICKUPS!!
Thanks man, really helping me piece together the electric side of guitar . . . another takeaway is having good electronics and pots, good pick ups, and not just a review but also how certain pedal features work and also how to dial not just this pedal but any with OD, boost, and distortion. Spent years in TGP or TDPRI forums and no posts one explained hows and why's like your channel (and also your friends like JIm Lil) . . .
@DylanTalksTone great video, one question though, if my style is going to be swifting between clean and overdriven, would it make sense to put a compressor pedal AFTER the overdrive in the chain to make the volume even? Your video made me think about that
Love this tiny little gem 💎
Great video and excellent performance! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
Great video. An oscilloscope would show people, in real time, your demonstration even better, yet it's far better than EE maths to nearly everyone.
Great review and explanation of how that pedal works. Next you should explore stacking pedals, you could stack two Duke of Tones, could be pretty interesting.
I have my Duke of Tone before a Tumnus Deluxe (Klon clone), then Pantheon (another Bluesbreaker derivative), then MXR Timmy (transparent overdrive with a bit of compression). With those 4 pedals and the potential to combine any 2 I can get thousands of sounds. The DoT is set in boost mode 90% of the time. Combined with a Pantheon I have a synthetic King of Tone.
Great pedal .. one trick to take out any harshness: turn DOT internal presence trim pot fully clockwise to match KOT tone.
Dylan, thanks for this. I picked up the DoT pedal Friday and had the same initial yuck reaction. Thought there were be a greater difference between the settings. But I saw Pete Thorn’s 2023 live rig pedalboard and he is running a DoT as a boost. I went back and watched DunlopUSAs product video with Analogman Mike in it. He does a great job comparing and explaining KoT, PoT and DoT. Goes over the circuit details and tone matching. He did offer a suggestion to the single-circuit issue: run two DoTs side-by-side and you have a KoT and balance out.
After noodling with it over the weekend and now watching your video, I’m going to keep it and probably use it as a boost at the end of my gain pedal stack.
That's not an issue per se. You can use the Overdrive setting, just know that you will have to increase the level/volume. With the Distortion, the level drops a little less.
The reason he says you will use 1 of these settings is because on a live setting you won't be able to switch from Boost to OD and then adjust the volume. But you can certainly be in OD with the volume adjusted and you just use the pedal to overdrive. Same applies to Distortion.
i bought one. i like it a lot. i had given up on overdrive but it sounds really good.
What do you think of Joyo's King of Kings? Love the explanation, btw - I found your channel searching for and understanding of this.
Can't wait to watch this video. I bought one and think it is terrible. Hope for tips.
What a GREAT video man! Truly a great great video. Thanks for your help man!
Is it true that you can't adjust the height of dog ear pickups?
Great explanation, sorry i missed the live chat m
Thanks for the explanation.
Nice SG!
I've been running a JHS Morning Glory as a clean boost into the overdrive of the Duke Of Tone and like it a lot. I think many of us are struggling to dial it in straight out of the box.
Pretty nice pedal. I haven't bought a pedal in a while. I'm interested in a good P90 too for a POS Hondo Explorer I am re working.
I have 3 OD/Dist pedals on my board . Klon KTR , Marshall Guv'nor (Made in England) & MXR Duke of Tone . Last week I got to dive into the MXR DOT at sound check and it is a GREAT pedal . I can't believe it's a $150 pedal mass produced . I know most places are sold out of them but this first batch is killer . I have bought pedals on the 2nd round and they don't sound as good as the first . The pressure to make the 2nd batch causes them to rush making them and you get a lot of faulty ones . My Soulfood is a prime example .
Thoughts on the Xotic Super Sweet? I’m finding it to act more like a clean overdrive that will compress harshly at times.
I just got a $30 TC Boost that’s simple and effective, tho, I like to think the SS has magic in there somewhere.
Wow I am going to have to check this out
I'd like to know how good of a boost, overdrive, or distortion it is... and I guess if I played outside my little room in the house I'd probably find the settings I really like and just use one.
Not sure I understood the whole thing, but it sounds like if I were to switch modes on it, like from boost to distortion, I might also need to turn the knobs to get the best tone for each setting. So I'd probably use it in one mode most of the time.
Ive owned this for a couple of days and I agree. I set my boost to a decent tone then when I switch to OD or Dist there is really no difference, so like you said I have to turn the knobs to get a different tone. So far to me its a boost pedal.
I can’t compare it to a KOT because I don’t have one. Yet. Haha. But as soon as I plugged in the DOT I loved it. Favorite being the distortion part. It also pushed other pedals great with the boost and od. Great versatile pedal.
This was great. Thank you.
Great explanation 👍
Excellent explanation and demo. Are there any Pedals that are made to shift a Pickup's frequency response, and adjust the Q width and height? Thanks
Not exactly what you asked, but I believe the tone control on a ts808 sweeps the Q across the midrange.
Good talk Dylan.
Nice and clear explanation. My first impression for that pedal was not worth the price.
I bought 2
….use it like a KOT
Great explanation. The JHS guy did a similar video and basically debunked the "transparent OD" terminology, as you did.
I have a Klon-a-like, which I set up the way Mr Finnigen recommended for the original - pedal at the cusp of dirty, amp at the cusp of dirty, with a little level gain from the pedal output. Works really well, IMO. Nice and... ya know, without being fizzy or harsh.
Good explanation. There's a few overdrives out there that I don't quite get and I think it's because I always use a bridge humbucker, and most of these drives are used with some flavor of single coil sound. I have a Nobels and an OCD and there's this bassiness to them that I think would sound different if I had a P90 or a Tele or Strat single coil going through them. But my default mode is humbuckers and that's not changing anytime soon.
But also, this pedal in particular is designed to operate in different ways which you illustrated here. I think maybe some people just don't get it.
I use an OCD with humbuckers into a DSL20 my other overdrive is an SD1. I think what you are getting at is expensive OD are kinda pointless in a humbucker into high gain amp ? I have high output pickups in my guitars and I think that with a more vintage PAF HB the different drives would probably be more dynamic. My main guitar has a Duncan distortion in the guitar and I guess what I’m saying is an OD no OD can put frequencies into a PU it doesn’t have to start with.
Also if you don’t like the big bass on the OCD get yourself a Boss SD1 it cuts more bass than any other OD I’ve tried it’s the bridge HB into a Marshall boost in my opinion and it’s Cheap !
Great description of what’s going on and the differences. Do you make a noiseless Tele pickup?
No. I can’t stand noiseless pickups. Just not my thing.
@@DylanTalksTone oh really? They are so practical though!
@@AzathothsAlarmClock I understand that. I see a lot of old timers having this issue. However, if you judge with your ears, rather than your brain, most sound pretty damn good these days!
I’m not a big SG fan but…I freakin love that guitar 😎
There aren't that many guitarists left that understand how to play a tube amp and why a pedal like this is built for it. When you dial it in to deliver what you're looking for.
Hi Dylan! Does your explanation of these 3 modes hold true for all pedals or specific th the Duke of Tone?
This applies to all pedals (that do either boost, overdrive or distortion).
This is how I see it. Boost is clean amplification, what comes in comes out but louder. Distortion is short for "harmonic distortion" which means if you put in exactly one frequency, you will get multiple frequencies out. The ways to achieve this are two: Overdrive and Fuzz. Overdrive is when amp is gradually approaching it's amplification limit but not reached it yet. The top of the sinewave will get more and more squished but it is still a curve. Fuzz cuts the top of the sinewave and leaves flat horizontal line there.
What you're referring to is 'soft' vs 'hard' clipping, the former is similar to a 'soft knee' setting in a compressor, however the amplifier has still reached its limit as otherwise there's no overdrive, in fact it's acting sooner if the headroom ceiling is the same. If you're looking to maximise clean headroom then hard clipping is preferable out of the two. However when the limit is reached with hard clipping, it creates more harmonics compared to soft clipping.
Guitarists tend to use quite a lot of clipping compared to everyone else, plus with huge amounts of filtering from amp speakers as well, which is why the difference between Overdrive & Distortion on the King/Prince/Duke of tone is not too obvious.
Overdrive can mean anything though, just its come to generally refer to soft clipping circuits over time. Same goes for fuzz. Both are not technical terms, just guitar slang terms.
At first I was very underwhelmed with this pedal. But as I started using the pedal and using the three different modes I am starting to line this pedal a lot. It takes a bit of time if you work with the three different modes - OD, Boost and Distortion.
I'm not having that kind of luck I found the boost usable and some good tones but the OD and Dist are subtle changes and just not useful to me. So I have to decide is the boost alone worth 149 or should I return it.
I want to buy that pedal from you, how do we go about that?
Thank you, Dylan. This is a great explanation of the pedal. I guess you could always buy two of these and put them side-by-side to recreate something closer to the KoT dual-experience?.
Yo Dylan, tell me if you think I'm wrong but it seems to me that this pedal could be pretty damn helpful in achieving that sacred (Starbreaker-Judas Priest/Ted Nugent) sound. Just for shits and giggles.
Thank you
Thanks
Boost all day!
I’ve had the duke for a few months now and I really like the OD…. But absolutely hate the boost and distortion channels…
Dylan, an unrelated pickup question. I have a tele that I love and almost always play on the neck pickup since the bridge is a bit spikey. I know you sell pickups but would you get tele set of pickups or keep the neck pickup, because I love it, and just change the bridge pickup?
Don’t change what you love …. Unless you want to experiment… it’s reversible;)
I talked with a guitar playing buddy of mine that I play in bands with, albeit on drums, about this phenomena of the spikey bridge pickup in my tele, and he set me straight on the issue. He basically explained to me how he felt like that as a solo bedroom player but that he’d learned from a mutual late friend and one of the best players, that he uses it to cut through in a band situation. So I think I’m going to stick with what I’ve got.
Thanks, awesome video. I'll speak for others and say, being that you're not just extremely knowledgeable on pickups and audio signals, but also electrical and electronics, I'd love to see more pedal and amp deep dive/technical pedal and amp videos. Any dumb dumb like myself, can falsely claim to understand "tone." I notice nobody on TH-cam has done any type of video for someone like me, who recorded their guitar/metalzone/amp combo, into a boom box as a teenager, quit playing for 20 years, and also knows nothing about computers, electronics, and today's guitar related/recording technology. I can't be the only caveman out there, and there's some untapped views to be had, I think.
Dude…you described me perfectly 😳
Go Phillies. Oh, sorry, Dylan wrong channel.
I hope this doesn't come off as mean, but it's atleast gonna be firm. With a channel called Dylan talks tone, you may....... Never mind I'm sure someone will just get offended and miss my point
Say your peace… I don’t get offended. I think it’s funny… you may get offended by my reaction… but if you think some rando I don’t even know is gonna offend me…. Lol.
@@DylanTalksTone put your best tone forward