so I just experimented again with crushstation, sculpt and pitchfuzz for a while. I’m going direct into my audio interface, no amp. I was only focusing on the gain, not the other features of the algorithms (gate, sustain, sag, eq; xover, compressor, filter; pitch/delay) The main things I notice are:
crushstation – with flat eq, no octave, no grit, no sag no gate – I can’t find a drive setting that sounds like I’m not inside a cardboard box. No eq tweak fixes it. moreover, when a note decays, the signal morphs into lots of noise in an unnatural way (as compared to a real pedal with similar amount of gain)
sculpt – the drive sounds quite good- there is no cardboard box feeling here. However, the crossover is not defeatable so, while it can be a cool effect, there is no way to just have a normal mono effect here which would be arguably more useful.
pitchfuzz- the fuzz tone itself is pretty useable, and can get pretty close to sounds from real pedals. however the noise floor seems a lot higher than real pedals with a weird sound like a helicopter inside a vacuum chamber (ok maybe that is a bit too subjective lol) and when you start or stop playing completely, there is a dramatic change in this noise as if there is a heavy gate and heavy compressor happening that you can’t turn off.
there are situations, and ways of managing with your play style and your fingers, to mitigate these issues. But the presence of these issues–and the fact that my real pedals don’t have them- make it so these are basically not going to get used except for a special effect in a certain part. Toward this point, of course the bells and whistles of each algo goes a long way in making them useable in a creative capacity.
in other words, they haven’t provided a bread-and-butter OD/distortion/fuzz algorithm yet. i think most people wouldn’t expect or need that from a digital pedal, and I don’t mind. However I believe they *could* acheive it. I wonder if they will ever try to, or if they do think any of the current algos meet that need.
just my opinion, and naturally that is specific to my ear and my gear. I’m glad the dirt algos are working well for the previous posters 🙂
