Fulltone Fulldrive II
I understand this is the (or one of the) ultimate TS-808 type pedal. It’s very good, that’s for sure. I’ve finally come around to grasp the subtlty of some of the effects pedals out there, and the Tube Screamer is one of them. That’s still not entirely my thing when it comes to effects, which is a little ironic since I don’t use very much in the way of effects. When I use ‘em I don’t usually want subtle. Truth is almost all of the effects I use these days are strictly to mimic what’s happening on some cover tune the band is doing. Other than that I tend to stick to either nothing or a little delay and maybe chorus. I’ve been getting into compression more too – there are some nice sounds in there.
The Fulldrive is a funny thing. I could almost not use it at all, and I could almost keep it on all the time. I can get crunch without it – although not as easily, and I can play clean with it by backing off on the volume knob of the guitar and playing lighter. Between the Fulldrive and the Amp there is a lot of wiggle room for getting clean to overdriven sounds.
The Boost function could go away on the Fulldrive and I wouldn’t miss it. I always set it, and on rare occasions I’ll kick it in, but not very often. Only those times when volume creep has set in with the band and I don’t have as much reserve volume for a lead as I expected, so I’ll kick it in. Even with the way our band increases volume over the course of the night, I find I rarely need it.
Right now I use this pedal most often for overdrive duties. I swap it with an HBE PowerScreamer from time to time. The HBE sounds similar, but not the same. Just a slightly different flavor. Sometimes I’ll set the pedal board up with both the Fulltone and the HBE, and both together provide quite a bit of boos and gain.