 Hello everyone, and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name's Lee Fuge, and I'm here today with mjamusic.com. And in this video, we're gonna be talking about stacking gain using your Blackstar amp. So the amp I'm gonna be using in this video today is the Blackstar Studio 10 6L6, which you're hearing mic'd up with a Luit Audio LCT 440 condenser microphone. So in this video, what we're gonna be talking about is stacking gain. Now, as you start to dig deeper into the tones that you're trying to create using your Blackstar products, you may want to pair some of your favorite effects pedals with the amp to get some different textures. Now, many players, when they first start using different types of gain pedals, they're often unsure where to start and how those type of pedals will react with the amplifier. So in this video, we're gonna look at just that. So to my left here on top of the amp, I've got a small pedal board with four different types of drive pedals, and we're gonna see how each one interacts with the amplifier. So I've got a clean boost here from TC Electronics. I've got an overdrive here from Blackstar, the LT Duo, which is two different overdrive types in one. I've got a distortion pedal here from Cooltone called the Screamer, and I've got a fuzz pedal here from Tate FX called Raise the Dead. Each of these drive types are very different from one another. So we're gonna look at how a clean boost, an overdrive, a distortion, and a fuzz all react with the Studio 10 running at a couple of different settings. So there are two main reasons why you would want to stack gain pedals with your amp, first of which is purely for gain. So to start off, I'm gonna be running the amp completely clean. So there's no gain coming from the amp. We're gonna need to get our gain from the pedals. So let's say I'm in one of these situations. I've either got an amp that is only clean and the only way to get it to distort is to turn it up full, not always practical. Or secondly, the amp I'm playing through just doesn't have enough gain. So in either of these scenarios, I'm gonna need an overdrive or a distortion pedal to give me that extra push that I need. The second reason is a tonal reason. So imagine you have a great amp with lots of drive, but you don't quite like the way that drive sounds or you wanna take that drive one step further, you can use a drive pedal to shape that tone. Different drive pedals will shape this differently. Some may tighten up the amps distortion sound. Some may add extra harmonics or extra sort of gain to that. Some may make it brighter or darker. It's all subjective to the rig you're trying to build. So obviously all the tones you hear in this video are built up around the studio 10, 6, 6, 6, but whatever your Blackstar amp is, this concept will apply. You won't always get the same results pairing certain pedals with certain amps. It's all a trial and error process, but here is a bit of a concept as to how you can do that and why you may choose different types of drive pedals for different purposes. So let's start with a completely clean tone. So I'm just plugged straight into the amp. The tone on the amp is set to five, so it's straight up the middle. The reverb is set to about three and I've got both the master volume and the gain at this point on two. So the amp is running completely clean. So here's how that sounds. So we're gonna start off with a clean boost. So at this volume and this gain setting, all a clean booster is gonna do is make my guitar louder. If I was running this amp super, super loud, but still clean, the clean boost would probably just tip it over into a slight breakup. But at this volume, what we're gonna get is just a volume boost. So if we now look at an overdrive, I'm gonna use the Blackstar LTDual. I'm on this side here, the first side. I've actually got the gain set just below halfway and the volume set just above halfway. So this is gonna be a very low gain overdrive, but what you're gonna hear is all the drive coming from the pedal. It's gonna boost the amp a little bit, but it's still gonna be fairly clean sounding because the amp isn't working too hard at this point. If I now go to the second side of this pedal, which I've actually got set up with a bit more gain, we're gonna get a slightly more saturated sound. So again, this is just hitting the front end of a clean amp harder. So all the drive is coming from the pedal. Now one interesting thing I could do at this stage is if I was using that light overdrive sound you heard firstly and I wanted to give that another kick, but I still had a clean amp and it wasn't quite giving me enough. I could actually use the clean boost there into the front of the drive. So what we're getting then is this sort of double gain staging. I've got the clean boost boosting the signal of the guitar. That's then hitting the front of the overdrive. So it's boosting into the overdrive. So the signal going in there is a bit harder than what it would be normally. And then obviously the overdrive coming out of that pedal is even harder again. So here's how that's gonna sound. So let's kick on the light gain overdrive. So stacking two types of gain in front of a clean amp is also a great way to give it an extra kick. Now if we look at a distortion sound next, a distortion sound is what is known as a harder type of clipping. So this is a harsher overall sound. Overdrive is a smooth and warm type of clipping, whereas distortion is a little harsher, a bit more sharp around the edges. So what we're here with this tone is a bit more gain and a lot more bite. Now we can apply all the same principles of gain stacking to this. So if I'm playing with that distorted tone and I wanna shape that further, I can stack other gains with it like so. So you can see how each one of those other pedals had an impact on the sound and the amount of gain that pedal was creating. But yeah, the amp is still completely clean. So right now all the gain structure is coming from the front end, from those pedals. The most extreme type of drive pedal you can get your hands on is a fuzz. So I've got a germanium fuzz here, which means it's a very warm kind of 60 sounding fuzz. Now fuzz is kind of like a cross between overdrive and distortion. You do get some of those harsher artifacts, but you get a lot of warmth and a lot of depth to the tone as well. So again, when we kick on a fuzz we can blend that with other drive sounds. But in the front of an amp like this, which is completely clean, the fuzz is gonna be very prominent. So here's how that sounds. So as you can hear, the fuzz has a lot more gain overall. So it's much gainier, much sort of warmer and fatter sounding than an overdrive or a distortion. But we can blend those other gain types with a fuzz as well. So each one of those has a different impact on the overall tone because we're stacking different amounts of gain into the front of a clean amp. Now obviously, the more of these you stack, the more gain that's gonna occur and the more the tone is gonna shift. So now we'll go through those different types of gain stacking again, but now I've got the amp set to a medium overdrive sound. So I've got the gain control on halfway. So here's how the amp sounds with nothing else in front of it. So now that we've got a bit of pre-amp distortion from the amplifier, what the gain stacking with the pedals is gonna do is hit that even harder and saturate it further. So here's how it sounds with a clean boost. So the clean boost adds volume as you hear there, but also it adds a little tiny extra bit of saturation because we're just hitting that pre-amp slightly harder. So let's do the same thing again with a light overdrive sound. So when you kick on an overdrive, even though it's light, you can hear the tone shaping slightly there. It actually gets a little tighter. It sort of limits the frequencies of the amp slightly. It actually calms away a tiny bit of the low end and also it just shapes the upper frequencies a little bit more according to what the pedals tone control is set to. It does add a little bit more gain, but also it adds fatness. So we should see the same thing if we use the higher gain side of that overdrive, but it'll add more gain again. So as expected, we get volume there, we get gain, and we get fatness. You can hear the tone shaping in action as the tone shifts just slightly. If I had this tone control here set extremely high or extremely low, we'd get an even more prominent tone shape. Obviously I've got this set just subtly as you would in a real situation. You'd use your overdrive pedals just to tighten the amp up a little bit. So now we'll do the same thing, but with the distortion. So the amp is actually producing soft clipping here because it's a natural overdrive. The distortion's hard clipping is going to hit that pretty harshly. So let's try this. So because I'm using a distortion pedal, which is hard clipping, which is going into the front of an amp doing soft clipping, I actually get a little bit of compression there because I'm actually working the preamp really hard. This kind of simulates that power amp sag that we get if we're running the amp on full. So where we're going to see the most extreme difference is when we kick the fuzz on. So we're going to add a lot more gain to the signal and a lot more compression. So the fuzz is the biggest difference there because it's the most amount of gain. So obviously we get this super, super compression because I'm running a fuzz which has a lot of gain of its own into that distorted preamp. I then start to get this little glitchy sort of thing going on as well. This is the sort of the gain structure almost collapsing in on itself, but it's a really cool effect if you want to get into that 60s vibe. Now these principles can be applied whatever your rig. So if you're running a super high gain rig or a really low gain rig, all of these gain stacking principles apply to whatever level you put them at. If you are running a very high gain rig, you're probably not going to use the overdrive as much for adding more gain, but you'll probably use it for tone shaping. But if you're using a low gain rig, you might want the additional boost of having more gain at hand. So I've cranked up the gain of the studio 106R6 now up to full. This isn't a super high gain amp, but this will give you a little bit of an idea of how you can use a low gain overdrive to shape a higher gain tone. So here's how the amp sounds on full gain. So using the Blackstar LTDual, I'm going to show you how this works in practice. So I've got the gain set pretty low here. So we're not going to see a huge amount of gain added. And I've got the volume pushed up to just below 3 o'clock because obviously running the gain bag is going to reduce the output volume. So on the whole, what this is going to do is we're not really going to add any gain. It might add just a touch of volume, but we're going to control the tone of the amp using the tone of the pedal and also the ISF. The ISF is obviously only a Blackstar related feature, but if you've got a pedal with any sort of EQ section, this principle applies. So what we're going to do is we're going to dial back the tone all the way and the ISF all the way up. So what we should get now is a dark British sounding tone. So once I've got the amp running on full, I'm going to kick this on and we should hear a big shift in the tone spectrum. Music So what the pedal actually did there was it tightened the tone up a little bit. You could sort of cut a few frequencies out that the amp was producing and just give us a bit more of a focused mid-pushed tone. Now we can do the same thing if I push the tone all the way up and I take the ISF over to the American side. This is a bit more of an extreme setting. You probably wouldn't use it, you know, these sort of all-or-nothing settings. You're probably going to refine this a little bit more within your own rig, but just for demonstration purposes, we're all the way. Music So that time you would have heard the tone get brighter. You wouldn't necessarily hear it any more saturation, maybe a slight little volume boost, but the overall brightness of the tone increased and there was a little more focus added in the upper frequencies. So any overdrive pedal can be used in the same way. If you're running a high gain amp, you can use the overdrive pedal to, number one, hit the front end up a bit harder and also number two, to shape that tone like I just did there. So there you go guys, there is a bit of a run-through over how gain stacking works and how you guys can take your favorite pedals, stack them with your Blackstar amps on whatever settings you want and really shape the tone that you're chasing. And remember, like I said earlier, this is going to be different. Whatever Blackstar amp you're running is going to have its own characteristics. So if you're running something low gain like the Studio 10 6R6 or something on the high gain spectrum like the Series 1, there's going to be a huge difference in how pedals react with different tones. Amp volume and headroom also play a big part in this. So if you're running a 100 watt amp versus a 10 watt amp like I am in this video, you're going to see differences between how the pedal reacts with the amplifier. A 100 watt amp is going to have a lot more headroom so that that breakup is going to come a little bit later. So you're going to have to push the pedals harder, push the amp harder to get the same breakup. On a lower wattage amp like this one here, that breakup is going to come much easier because it doesn't have as much headroom. So you're going to get those overdriven sounds from the amp much sooner by hitting the front end with pedals. So it's all trial and error, experiment with different combinations of drive pedals, different settings on the amp, put them in different orders because different overdrives react differently into and out of each other as well. There's a lot of different possibilities with this and it's a really great way to really take your amp, take that sound you love and refine it even further using some other gear that you might have in your collection. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you've enjoyed this video. If you did, please let us know down below in the comments how you got on with your first step into gain stacking. And if you guys have already started doing gain stacking, we'd love to hear your favorite combinations. What Blackstar amp are you guys pairing with what overdrive pedal and how are you using it? Let us know down below. We can't wait to hear about it. And don't forget to check out the Blackstar Amplification YouTube channel for more videos just like this. If anyone out there is searching for a guitar teacher right now, please head over to mgrmusic.com. Check that out. There's a network of great teachers all over the UK waiting to help you guys go to that next level. Thank you guys so much for watching and we'll see you very soon.