I’ve finally come to my senses.
See, when I was a kid just getting into playing guitar, if there was one symbol that summed up everything I hated about guitarist culture, it was the Ibanez Tube Screamer. Even back then, when you could buy a Roland Juno 60 for $150, Tube Screamers cost way too much for what they offered. I’ve never been a shredder, kinda am disabled from shredding, and the shredder kids always made sure I felt awful about it. I was never against being proficient at guitar, I desperately wanted to be at least impressive at it, but somewhere along the way, I became an anti-guitar guitarist. Everyone I’d see had a Tube Screamer & a Metal Zone on their pedalboard. I took to Big Muff’s, Fuzz Faces, & ProCo Rats instead. Any way I could muffle what I was playing while also making it sound as huge as possible, that was my jam. I was all about meshing shoegaze & doom metal with punk rock, so I had no use for transparent boosts or mild overdrives. I’ve always been drawn to the aesthetics of TS9’s, though, so I tried a friend’s… I fucking hated it. He had an original 808: the holy grail, supposedly. I thought it took every aspect of guitar tone I loved and trashed it for the muddest midrange grumble I could never imagine because my mind would never want to visit that sonic place. It was that bad, sorta. Actually what I really hated was that the effect itself sounded like it was lightly layered over the uneffected signal, like a mosquito buzzing faintly near my ear. Of course, I was playing straight into a totally clean blackface Fender, and with a poorly set-up Strat at that. I’ve always balked at guitarists who have to defend a pedal’s worth by disclaiming, “You have to know how to use it!”. What good is a pedal that you can’t just get right down to making sick-ass rock music with as soon as you plug it in? You have to understand its purpose, know something about the science of sound? That didn’t sound very punk to me at the time.
Obviously, that’s actually about as truly punk as it gets. Knowledge is power, so having knowledge behind your power chords? It’s exponential power! Maybe there’s something in the psychology of someone snagged in the vector of having strong personal beliefs and being reviled for those beliefs that makes a person double down on counterintuitive stubborn stupiditiy… but I think getting picked on by shredders for not being the next Yngwie Malmsteen to eventually languish as a nobody in a small town made me double down on hating guitar culture signifiers like Fender guitars or Tube Screamers or even tube amps. It took me til much later in life to realize, hey, maybe all that stuff is considered cool because it is, at its heart? Now a Strat, a Jaguar, & a Jazz Bass are my sole instruments. I play tube amps alongside my old solid state ones. Now I’m going to Guitar Center to buy a Tube Screamer.

So, I did it. I bought a Tube Screamer. I shelled out my hard earned (& entirely too scarce) money for one of those fucking things. And man, I love it. I am so happy with this purchase. Guess what? It turns out, you do have to know what you’re doing. It helps to know *how* to use an effect. I’d been just ramming my guitar through a Muff or Rat straight into a fairly clean amp all my life, I didn’t know there was another approach or an order you have to chain FX in to achieve actually good tone. Or that “good tone” wasn’t just an arbitrarily defined marketing term. No, there is such a thing as good tone; it may have a bazillion different faces, but you know it when you hear it and you definitely know it when you don’t. It’s the difference between a sound that just works for what you’re trying to achieve musically versus one that simply does not do the trick. If I were going to play blackened shoegaze, I’d get something that does the op-amp Muff sound, not a Blues Driver. Conversely, if I were going to play jazzy blues for a dinner party, I wouldn’t let a Muff anywhere near my setup, but a Blues Driver might be just the thing for solo’s. Even for noise music, there are don’ts, and I found that out the hard way recording an afternoon of FX loop noodling into Ableton with the audio device settings all wrong. Everything is created for some purpose, so even though they may be few in some instance, there are rules for everything. The Tube Screamer circuit was designed back before amps offered gales of gain, back even before Master Volumes were completely & utterly the norm. It was made specifically to push an already cranked amp over the edge. If you like your guitar sound, but wish it had just a little bit *more* you could wring from it, Maxon could’ve just called this pedal “More *More*”. It gives you more of that “more”ness, but not too much, only just enough. It achieves this zenith through exactly the mechanism that made me hate the pedal as a kid: that dadburned clean bleed.
“Clean bleed” is the phenomenon of still being able to hear your damn unsullied virginal guitar signal through the distortion. It’s a strangely disconcerting effect, and it’s hard to pinpoint why, but it’s universally avoided as a standard. Don’t believe me? Listen to Bad Brains’ Black Dots album, focus on the guitars in the mix, tell me how you feel about them. See? It’s terrible! Well, maybe it sounds cool on that record, but it usually doesn’t. It’s like Thanksgiving dinner getting in your pumpkin pie, it just doesn’t mesh. The earliest channel switching amps were prone to malfunctioning in ways that meant you could still hear the distortion channel in the background of the clean channel & vice versa. That was considered a problem! You want your cleans to be clean, your dirties to be dirty, and your in-betweens perfectly in-between. Right? But then life throws guitarists a curveball: the invention of the Tube Screamer.

When you stomp a Screamer on into a totally clean amp, what you hear is that clean signal still, but with these like, mold sprouts of distortion over top. It sounds wrong, queasy even. It’s gross! Turn it off! Now, take that same clean amp, crank it til it’s just shy of howling. Now stomp that Screamer on! Holy Shit, right? Notice the difference? It sounds awesome when the amp’s already goin’ off. How about as a boost after other dirt pedals? Try an overdrive. Uhhhh…. Not too terrible, but it sounds like it has a cold or something, right? It has an unpleasantly chalky texture to it, and if you crank the gain on the Tube Screamer, it sounds like a hiss or a sneeze. There’s a lid for every pot and there’s a song for every guitar tone, but that’s not a tone you’ll be bursting into song with anywhere anytime soon. Maybe you’re just having bad luck so far. Try something more unhinged, like a Rat or Muff. How’s that? …I’m sorry, I tricked you. It sounds like the worst ass in the world, right? Total ass hell? Well, now try switching the order of the pedals. Now that overdrive harmonizes with the Screamer, now that Muff sounds like a completely different effect, something creamier & more refined. That’s because the real utility of a Tube Screamer is as a mid boost, but also a slight low-pass filter and a very pronounced high-pass filter. The standard Tone control, like the one on a Tube Screamer, is usually a low-pass filter: it removes highs from the signal as it’s turned down. A high pass-filter removes the lows. So when your Bassman is jacked to highest hell and it sounds like a mudslide, kick on the Tube Screamer. It’s not a completely different sound, but it’s more manageable now! Or you can wring more sustain from it! That’s the power of a Tube Screamer. It’s a master sculpter for the uncut marble of your tone. They were originally used by metal dudes back in the day to take a cranked JCM800 over the top. A cranked JCM800 don’t need any help with highs, but the lows can get flubby, like cruisin’ on blown-out tires. I’ve heard it said that Tube Screamers are great for “tightening up the bass”, and having used one through a Randall RG series amp for slash metal greatness, I can vouch. I totally get it now. I can’t believe I was missing out on that this whole time.
See, even a lows-hound like me can benefit. Sure, the op-amp Muff I built myself sounds incredible in the room with me, but if I try recording it? All I get is a wash of highs gnashing at my ears and bass swirling around my feet. Get a Tube Screamer in front of it, though… It doesn’t sound as good in the room now, but in the mix? It actually complies! It’s audible, yet the notes can be distinguished. The character is still there, but now any of the other elements of the song aren’t drowned out in tonal pandemonium.

I have to confess, I did try modding my TS9 to please my teenage standards. It’s well known that upping the 0.047uf capacitor before the 4.7k resistor can give you your bass signal back, but the mod I was interested in was getting rid of the clean bleed once & for all. Imagine being able to ever use the gain knob on a Tube Screamer, and not just setting the Level & Tone high to use as a boost? Imagine the pedal finally getting to stand on its own as a distortion! Maybe you don’t have an imagination that’s as divorced from reality as mine, maybe you can already guess what’s coming: I figured out how to mod a TS to only (well, 90% mostly) pass the clipped signal through. It involves swapping the pinout of the 4558 op-amp, switching pin 3 with pin 2 so that the non-inverted input of the 4558 gets shunted to ground while the inverted input, clipped by diodes, gets all the input signal. I succeeded in my mission and did what would have pleased teen me to hear, but… It ruined the pedal. Sure, yeah, do the “No clean” mod and dime everything straight into a clean amp, you finally hear that glorious clipping section of the Tube Screamer all by itself. Was it worth it? You can get the same damn sound a myriad of ways, it actually probably sounds better coming from just your amp! Now try all the uses we found for the Screamer, see how those go. As a final push into a teetering-on-the-edge amp? Man, it sounds choked up & sweaty! As a pre-input boost for other pedals? Now it sounds even worse than if you put the Screamer afterwards! It just simply does not work for its intended purposes anymore, and all you’re left with is a very underwhelming overdrive for totally clean tones. Remember how much ass it kicked pushing your amp’s gain at 2 o’clock over the edge? Remember how much it altered the Muff so it fit harmoniously in a mix? Undo the “No clean mod”, get that shit back to stock. That’s better, isn’t it?

The Tube Screamer ciruit is a feat of pure alchemy. As a gear tech, I know the exact principles that make it true, but it still seems like magic to me. I even had to undo the bigger capacitor mod, because I got too greedy with my low end and ended up with a horrid strangled in filth sound that not even noise musicians would dig. Turns out just under 0.1uf is perfect for keeping your bass but keeping the effect, so Maxon got it 99% right the first time. I got it all wrong the first time. I gotta cede this one to Maxon. The Tube Screamer is brilliant. Mine will probably be used in some way on every recording session I do from here on out. It’s taken my tone from, “You could see how this was going for a sound I would think was cool when I was 14” all the way to “This is absolutely a sound I would’ve loved when I was 14”. If I’m being honest, there really isn’t any higher honor when it comes to guitar.