Distortion on mandolin

[Claj123]

Does anyone know of any good distortion pedals for mandolin?

[Timbofood]

Pedal? I don’t need no steenkin’ pedal! It’s just how I play

[mbruno]

Most mandolin players I know are purists. Plugging in your mandolin and using pedals are a big no-no (IT KILLS THE TONE!!!!). Personally, I plug in at nearly all my shows out of necessity - I play in louder / non-bluegrass bands where using a mic is not possible at all. However, plugging in direct doesn't sound as good as a mic so I use a pedal board to both help clean up the sound and add some cool options (if you haven't tried using a Q-Tron or Mu-Tron on your mandolin - you're missing out on some fun!!)

There are currently no mandolin specific pedals I'm aware of - if there are, they aren't super popular haha. For the most part you can just use acoustic guitar pedals which are good - though probably not "tuned" correct for mandolin frequencies. Personally, I mostly use the standard Tube Screamer as a boost only - not as a distortion (I turn the drive off). Sometimes I add a bit of dirt to that pedal, but not much as I think it's a little too tinny. I saw the Fender Smolder Acoustic Overdrive recently though and that might be a good fit (https://www.guitarcenter.com/Fender/...00000285841.gc). If you do give that a try, LMK how it sounds

What other pedals are you using on your mandolin? Do you have good EQ and compression pedals? If not, I would recommend looking at those to help balance out the tinny sound distortion pedals can have on acoustic instruments.

[urobouros]

I enjoy using my Fulltone OCD

[TonyEarth]

I just use my electric mandolin like I would an electric guitar, but it is a single string solid body...

...for context, I don't actually play guitar, and I just use an amp with built-in effects because pedals are expensive and I don't actually play for anyone but myself. But it is a "guitar" amp. If I did have pedals I'd probably just plug it into a regular electric guitar pedal and hope for the best.

As for plugged in acoustic, I've not ventured there much.

[Dave Hicks]

I always feel that distortion is kind of shrill with an electric mando, but I like chorus, vibe and delay.

D.H.

[Ranald]

Yank never needed no newfangled pedals!

If the links don't work, search YouTube for "Yank Rachell and Homesick James 5-28-93 Chicago Blues Fest".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yfYM...shortiebighead

[MikeEdgerton]

One of my favorite mandolin pedals:

https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/t...l=1#post991105

[SRNassif]

Does anyone know of any good distortion pedals for mandolin?

Do you mean acoustic or electric mandolins? If you are looking for a pedal to use with an acoustic mandolin, I would recommend a pedal that does not have too high of a gain. I have used an EHX CockFigh (combined wah and Fuzz), a TubeScreamer mini, a FuzzFace germanium, and a Fender Pelt (fuzz). I also use an EHX Soul food with a low gain setting on my pedal board immediately after the preamp. The Soul Food fattens up my sound and has a treble control option. I love the sound of a distorted acoustic instrument. I think it's an under explored field. I hope this helps.

[journeybear]

Going out on a limb here, assuming the OP has a serious issue to address, which quest is not aided by joking or scoffing ... I'd have to agree that frequency response is a bit of a hurdle to overcome. I knew that going in, but really ran up against it with wah-wah pedals, which are very much affected by frequency range. I ended up discarding most of the guitar pedals I acquired along the way, eventually settling on a Yamaha REX 50 Multi-Effector - not a pedal, but a stand-alone unit with 30 effects built into it, which you can dial in via setting the parameters correlating to each, alone or in combination - and then save as a customized effect which you can access later. I settled on essentially two settings - a distortion + reverb which was my main sound - a little distortion for "fattenening" and reverb for sustain (something I'd learned from Tim O'Brien, actually, and then ran with it), and distortion + delay, which was just the thing for an echo-y rocked out sound. That first one worked very well for acoustic as well as electric. I could give it more oomph for the electric by adding gain and reducing volume accordingly.

Somewhere along the line the unit bit the dust. And Yamaha stopped producing them. They show up on eBay, though.

I gravitated toward a Fender Super Champ X2 amp, a tube amp with a raftful of solid-state effects built-in. This is the sort of thing TonyEarth mentioned. The effects aren't customizable, though there are typically three settings for each, generally speaking enough to manage. So for the song on which I use that distortion + delay sound I mentioned, I have to adjust the song's tempo so it synchs up with the effect's tempo. That sort of thing. But for the vast majority of applications the amp is massively suitable. These days that's all I use, plus a wah-wah, more for sound sculpting than weirdness.

[JeffD]

I play an electric four string. It is guitarish enough that most of the advice given by electric guitar players on pedals seems to apply.

My experience with eight string electrics is that managing distortion is a major effort. Unison courses really go nuts.

I can't imagine distortion on an acoustic mandolin, but it might be interesting.

[journeybear]

I can't imagine distortion on an acoustic mandolin, but it might be interesting.

One of my points was it can be a coloration, not an all-out defining characteristic. In one of my old bands, I used the distortion + reverb as my go-to setting, just to make the sound "meatier" in general, but would kick it up a notch for some songs when called for, like Steve Earle's "Copperhead Road," for instance.

Here's a great example, if rather noisy, from a bar gig. For Little Feat's "Dixie Chicken," I used the electric. But as you can see, I had some sort of technical difficulty, which I discovered after the lead singer had already launched into the song. So I had to switch to the acoustic and sort out whatever differences there were between the two before the classic riff came up, about a minute in. If you can follow my activity, you'll see I managed to get there just in time.



When it came time for the solo, I believe I provided an appropriate amount of wailing. Hope you can hear. I apologize for the overall sound quality, or lack thereof; this is just meant to illustrate that, yes, indeed, one can rock out on an acoustic.

[Bill McCall]

One of my favorite mandolin pedals:

https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/t...l=1#post991105

I had one of those. It burst into flame as my first notes passed through it. Sad

[mandroid]

Your sub group to chat about rock & distortion , effects pedals & whatnot, is further down the page..

https://www.mandolincafe.com/forum/f...ring-Electrics

[Alex Orr]

I loved when Jeff Austin would put the distortion on his mando. No #######' clue how he got that sound.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2pMzgIQCJI

[Daniel Nestlerode]

I have a couple thhoughts...

1) There is a part of the forum called Four, Five and Eight-String Electrics devoted to this type of topic, and this is at least the second thread in the general section that I would have thought belongs there...

2) Distortion pedals and overdrive pedals are different beasts. Distortion pedals push the signal from 'clean' to 'dirty' immediately. Overdrive pedals let you play with the gray area between clean and dirty. I prefer overdriving to distortion, I get a bit more control of the dirt and to my ears, there's a bit more tone retained in the sound.

I have used overdrive on a solidbody 8 string mandolin with magnetic pickups, and it works fine, much like the tone Jeff Austin got in the video posted by Alex. I also use it for color on my 5 srtring electric mandolins where the tone is more 'guitar-like".

I don't use distortion or overdrive on my acoustic 8 string (I have one with a Schertler) mostly because I have other instruments that do 'dirt'.

Daniel

[Charlie Bernstein]

Yank never needed no newfangled pedals! . . .

'Zackly! Slam it like Yank did when he was young, and you're there.

[Charlie Bernstein]

Assuming your mando is hollow-body, I'd try a Klon clone (e.g. a Soul Food) or a Barber Gain Changer dailed to its old LTD setting.

That way it might still sound a little bit like a mando.

Personally, I love pedals for electric guitar, but I like my acoustric instruments to sound like themselves.

Let us know what you end up with and how you use it! (Extra credit if you give us a link so we can hear it.)

[j. condino]

I run my mandolin through a pedalboard on a regular basis. I may not have a gig use for it, but it makes for some fun afternoons here. If you are using an electric style pickup, start with a tube screamer type and go from there. Two tube screamers stacked in a row are significantly more gain than most big muff type pedals and you can fine tune them. My current favorite starting point is the Earthquaker Plumes pedal.

If it is with a peizo style acoustic pickup, the only overdrive that I have ever used that plays well with them is a Voodoo Sparkle Drive. It is a very similar circuit to an old TS808, with the addition of a clean blend. Combine that with an octave pedal and you have a LOT of diversity in your electric mandolin rig.

For a brief while earlier this year, I ran a giant old original tall front Russian Big Muff- it was like Darth Vader playing heavy metal mandolin...the serial number on the circuit board was 666!