Yep. That's another solution. But what makes me a headache is one schizophrenic song my band plays where I'm constantly changing clean to OD and back then OD to crunch and back. Like quick explosive changes so I have no time to tap 2 pedals in the same time, like booster and channel at once. I have only 2 legs and my monkey is not long enough to reach the floor.
For 25 years my gear setup was very simple: crybaby - boss rod10 (od/dist/fuzz mini rack from the 80's) – MKIIb. Eventually some delay or chorus. Then 2 years ago things became much more complicated with my latest band – instead of building huge expensive pedal board I bought GT10 and jca50h because of its serial loop and good price. Last year and until recently I was using GT10 in 4cm so performing schizo-song described above was not a problem.
But all these units like GT-8, 10, 100 or Line6 etc... are tone suckers whenever they mess with the input signal. I've spent a lot of time tweaking levels and never got any really good result. Not only tonal characteristics of the signal were eaten, it was squashed dynamically too. The worst thing of all was some weird feeling that there were some dead plastic or wooden strings under my fingers and not the steel ones. A few times on live gigs I caught myself thinking: is this sitar I'm playing? Nylon string guitar? People were saying: you have nice rocking sound, but my fingers had very bad experience. And there were no bump, oomph and woof from the speakers. Recommendation to anyone: don't even try to use these units in 4cm! There is no way that zeroes and ones can translate and lead any healthy signal into the amp input. Now I'm using GT10 only in the loop for time based effects with very good results. Bump, woof and ooomph got back, jca roars again. There is still some tiny tonal sucking from GT but resolved easily with EQ. Signal leaving preamp is already compressed but in the healthy manner and GT in the loop doesn't kill it anymore.
Well, back to my new problem. And yours Grimes as I can see
Maybe there is one solution. Not common one but... OD/gain pedal in the loop! That's in your case – one that can deal with +4dB line level, GT simulation of the same in my case. Not the one that acts like level booster, but rather one that acts like next gain stage after preamp gain stages!
I'm thinking like this: Mike Soldano is not a dumb, he designed hotrod50+ and now jca50h to be crunch/OD factory, it's not provided to produce nice cleans. This clean mod helps, I haven't heard it yet, you say clean becomes good and I believe you. But if it doesn't take gain pedal in front of the amp that means that this mod changes something not only with 1st gain stage but also with freq/dynamic relations of the input signal. So if you try to push it with something in front which is common and normal way to do, it destroys freq/dynamic continuity throughout overall frequency span. And it sounds like shit. But what if you add another gain layer after the preamp? That way what clean mod made stays preserved and you just upgrade gain stages further on.
I've never tried it but I guess any OD pedal will act completely differently in the loop and can easily end in buzz, fiss or fuzz. It shouldn't be any kind of high gain stompbox. More something like lo-gain, just to give a hair of more gain, with gain knob rolled off and volume knob set to preserve line level of the loop, not to make it any louder, you don't want too much of signal attack coming to PA tubes. You don't want your hard working PI tube to perform in constant state of break up.
So, something that will just cut slightly tops of phase amplitudes of the preamp signal to distort more.
Maybe OD pedals shouldn't have any problem with line level of the loop, like many other instrumental level effects do.
What do you think? You already have clean mod, maybe you can check it with what you already have. The only problem you could have is if your OD pedal doesn't have its own EQ. My old rod10 has but I don't have clean mod so I cannot check it. So you will need OD plus EQ in the loop just for a trial. If it works you can replace it with some OD/EQ unit.
If it works clean mod won't stop us to have 3 channel amp!
(Once again, sorry for my not native English...)
. I have already changed the power tubes, set the bias and I am about to order new preamp tubes to replace the cheap chinese stock tubes.
