Zonkin' Yellow Screamer, Mack GEM & blueSky Reverberator

[Robert]

Nice little rig, guys... ;)

That sweet little yellow thing? Looky here - http://www.duhvoodooman.com/miscimages/musical/zys_mkII.htm
Our friend DVM makes these things! Awesome.:dance

The amp is from www.mackamps.com 4 watt / 0.4 watts EL84 tube goodness.

www.strymon.net makes this excellent reverb pedal.

KHwyivtKdFY

[Tig]

Nice!
I think we should rename you "The GAS Pimp"!

[duhvoodooman]

Nice tone & playing, as always, RR! :thumbsup But I just can't understand why your ZYS sounds better than mine?!? ;)

For those who might be interested, just a couple of comments about the settings on the ZYS as shown at about 3:50 in the clip:

I think the pot settings are pretty straightforward for the OD level and tone, though I should mention that the gain is set a bit higher than you'd get from a TS-808 at the same setting, because I configure the pedal with twice the available maximum gain. So 11 oclock on the ZYS would probably correspond to somewhere around 1 o'clock on a "typical" Tube Screamer.

Of more interest are those two toggle switches on the lefthand side, because they offer additional control that TS pedals generally lack. The top one changes the EQ characteristics of the pedal by reducing the usual TS "mid-hump" and bringing up the bass and lower mids. It's a 3-position toggle with the stock EQ tone in the middle, a "Full" setting to the left with added bottom end, and a "Fat" setting to the right with even more. I tend to leave mine on the "Full" setting where Robert has his, which works well with both single coils and humbuckers. The "Fat" setting can get a little muddy with humbuckers or darker sounding guitars, but still works quite well with brighter guitars like Strats and Teles.

The bottom 3-way toggle switch changes the clipping diodes and alters the character of the distortion. To the left is the stock TS clipping, using a pair of silicon diodes, which gives a nice, edgy overdriven tone. The middle is a "diode lift" setting that bypasses the clipping stage and sends unclipped output from the pedal's opamp (the "gain" source) through the rest of the circuit. There's still distortion from the gain increase, but it's noticeably cleaner and quite a bit louder than the clipped signal, since nothing is being bled off to ground. To the right side, clipping is provided by a pair of BS170 MOSFETs, which produce a somewhat smoother and warmer tone than the silicons, and are my favorite setting on the ZYS. Looks like RR may agree, since that's where he has it set for this clip.

We now return to your normally scheduled forum postings.... * CLICK *

[Katastrophe]

Beautiful, Robert!

Sounds great, as always.