Anyone using Crushstation, Pitchfuzz or Sculpt for their OD/Fuzz/Distortion?

[moderngiant]

Are any of you using any of these algorithms live (or in studio) as your dirt sound?  How have you liked it?  Has it gotten you the results you were seeking?

[camn]

Dude I get monster distortions with the crushstation.
Playing live, I map the down-octaves to the expression pedal, and ease it in every 4 bars or so…Things just get meatier and heavier until everyone’s head explodes.

It’s unreal.

[Boylston]

Yes, I use a variety of algorithms for bass.  Sculpt is wonderful… Use it for some SVT-like drive as well as full on Fuzz effects.  Still tweaking Pitchfuzz before I take it out to gig…

 

[BMW-KTM]

I’ve seen people comment that they can’t get enough gain from their H9s but I don’t find that at all.

I like the fact that I can go from very light, almost imperceptable OD to over the top high gain.

It’s all in how you tweak it.

[brock]

A little background:  I was as much of an analog(ue) distortion purist as anyone; especially after fighting those horrible digital distortions from ’80’s rack units.  Izotope’s Trash turned my head, but it was an ITB solution.  SA Multiwave Distortion won me over.  And that led me to giving CrushStation and Sculpt another hard look.

The three distortion algorithms are a progression, and somewhat related.  All three have that auto-gain Squeezer somewhere in the path.  But each one brings another unique focus to the table.  Sculpt for swept wah FX, ‘spectral panning’, & multiband capability.  CrushStation for fine-tuned EQ, that glorious Sag, & blended octaves.  Both have that parallel compression / dry feature, routing options, & wide ranges of distortion types.

PitchFuzz is its own animal.  Multi-FX, really.  You can use it alone for overdrive / distortion, chorusing, parallel intervals, dual delays … or in any combination.  There’s a huge range in that singular Fuzz control (especially the lower half).  And, in any of the 3 algorithms, I really like their sensitivity to input.   It’s possible to squeeze out a lot with technique, playing dynamics, pickup selection, and your onboard volume & tone controls.

The best part:  With a little work, you can make them sound close to any classic pedal.  One just has to get past the 3-knob mentality.  And if you have no desire to sound like everyone else, that capability is baked in, too.

[rorytheherb]

I haven’t spent too much time with them. For me, they sound really cool and I have fun tweaking them, until I turn them off and use an analog pedal and/or preamp channel distortion, which sounds more lively.

That said, now that you’ve got me thinking about it, I’m going to play around with the algorithms tonight and see what I can cook up

[rorytheherb]

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 🙂   

 

 

 

[st.bede]

I did run sculpt as my dirt pedal for a little while. It worked well enough for me. I really like the idea of having presets with the tone options of sculpt. I just could not dedicate my H9 for dirt in my chain.

[mistercharlie]

I’ve taken all other dirt boxes off my board. The fuzz, for instance, sounds better and badder than my real fuzzes, still responds to dynamics, and sounds the same into any amp. My germanium fuzz sounds terrible into a non-tube amp.

I have a blender pedal arriving soon so I can do analog dry through, and then I’ll be ditching two more pedals off the board.

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