Good lord, I've tried a massive, massive amount of distortion/overdrive pedals.
To name a few:
Boss DS1
Boss SD1
Boss OD3
Ibanez TS9DX
Ibanez TX9
Shannon Overdrive
Fulltone GT500
Fulltone OCD
Fulltone Full Drive
Fulltone Fat Boost
EH Big Muff
MXR Distortion III
Barber Direct Drive
Barber Direct Drive SS
Barber Small Fry
Barber LTD
Barber LTD Silver
Barber LTD SR
MI Audio Crunchbox V2
Xotic BB
Xotic RC
Xotic AC
And probably alot of other ones that I can't even remember right now.
My goal, in my search, was to find a pedal that:
A. Sounded as tube-like as possible
B. Sounded great at low practice volumes
C. Sounded even better at gigging volumes
D. Didn't sound like a DS1 or a TS9
E. Could go from crunch to saturated high gain.
F. Used primarily going into a CLEAN channel on an amp.
For me, that search ended with the Crunchbox.
The Crunchbox V2 is voiced very british, it's nice and articulate, yet thick and gainy. I can't think of a better pedal for this job of a good, 80's shred sound. The Crunchbox is great in front a Fender-voiced amp, to get a good marshall channel going on. It's not scooped at all, so it's not "nu-metalz" modern sounding. Sounds very organic. Some people call it compressed, but really, if you want LOTS of gain, you're gonna have to have some compressions somewhere. "Totally uncompressed high gain" is an oxymoron and does not exist. Tangent, but yea, the Crunchbox Rules.
That being said, I want to ask you what type of gain you're going to have the
SL MODULE set at. If it's for a medium gain breakup tone, there's a slew of other pedals that could drive and boost your signal to get you this tone. Basically, if your tone already has some tube breakup, you don't really NEED a high-gain pedal, per se, to achieve high gain. BUT the Crunchbox would probably work awesome there too...
I'll wait for more details before I make my recco...
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