 Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and I'm here today with MusicTeacher.com and in this video we're gonna be talking about gain stacking using the St. James plug-in suite. We're gonna be looking at the differences between using an overdrive pedal into a clean or an overdrive amp and why you would want to do any of those things. So we're gonna be using the St. James suite for this. The only thing I'm gonna be changing is the two different amp types. So I'm gonna go from the EL34 amp that you see at the top here to the 6R6 amp. Everything is gonna be left as it is with all the EQs just running straight up at midnight. The only thing I am gonna change is I'm gonna go between the clean and drive channels of each amp. The compressor is switched on just to give me a bit of an even balance sound. Not gonna be changing anything else other than turning the drive on and off as I go as well. So there are two main ways that we could think about using overdrive pedals into amps. One of which is into a clean amp and the other one is into an already overdrive amp. Now there are pros and cons of both of these things and really the correct answer to which one you should do is completely down to the sound that you're chasing. For a lot of players, especially gigging musicians who like to have a huge palette of sounds available, going into a clean amp is probably the way you're gonna go. But if you have an amp that you really love the sound of and you only need to slightly change the gain structure and the gain character of it, then you may wanna consider going into an already overdrive amp. But again, there's no right or wrong answer with this. It's all down to what works for your sound. So if we start with an EL34 amp, I've got this running clean, which sounds like this. If I put the overdrive in the TS mode into the front of this with these settings, what it's gonna do is it's gonna just give me a little bit of drive into the front of the amp because it's not a high gain drive pedal but I've got a very clean sound. So it's gonna do this. There's enough gain there if you're playing blues or some classic rock stuff, but maybe if you wanna play harder rock, that's not enough game for you. In which case you can change the gain on the pedal. But that gives you all the gain from just the pedals. We're not actually adding any of the amps on gain there. What we are doing is we're slightly pushing the front end of the amp. So you're gonna get a little bit of compression from the amp and a little bit of kind of tube saturation but you're not gonna get a ton of it because the amp itself is not in overdrive mode. Now if I go to overdrive mode by turning this switch here, this is the sound I get. So the EL34 amp is predominantly a lower gain amp. So this is kind of like a just off clean sound. It's a bit of crunch there, which again you can play some classic rock stuff with. But if you wanna go harder and heavier that's not gonna be enough. If we now turn the overdrive on, what's gonna happen now is it's gonna not only give it's own overdrive levels and character to the amp, but it's also gonna push the existing gain level that the amp is outputting. It's gonna sound like this. So that is much more of a sort of classic rock, hard rock sound. And again we can crank the gain if we need to. What you will notice is when I put the drive into the already overdrive amp, I'm actually creating a thicker sound because we've got this gain stacking going on. We've got the gain from the amp and the gain from the pedal stacking up. The pedal gain actually goes into the amp. So you can start to hit the pedal, pedal hits the amp, so you've got this cascading gain stage going on which creates a much fuller sound. Now obviously if you want to change the tone, you can use the EQ and you can use the tone on the pedal to taste. You can also boost the amp a little bit further if you want, if you wanna do this for a lead boost for instance, or you just wanna hit the amp even harder you can boost the level on the pedal and that's just gonna give you a little bit more front end kick. By doing that you're actually making the amp work a little bit harder and not the pedal because you're actually taking the level from the pedal, cranking it up and you're hitting the front of the amp even harder. So that's gonna give you a bit more of a compressed, little bit more sag to the sound as well. Great for, again, classic rock kind of stuff for the Neil 34 amp, just pushes the amp a little bit more. But you can also use this as a lead boost if you really crank this you get a noticeable volume lift. Now we're gonna do the same thing into a 6L6 amp. The 6L6 amp is very, very clean. So into this amp, what we're gonna get here is we're not actually gonna get as much gain as we did from the EL34 even though the pedal settings are exactly the same. The reason for that is the EL34 amp has a lower headroom. So the actual point where the clean sound breaks up into an overdrive from being pushed is much lower than a 6L6 amp. This particular 6L6 amp is insanely high headroom on the clean channel. So this pedal will add gain, but not as much. You'll notice that's a very clean sounding gain. You can hear all the notes, it's very, very clear. There's a lot of clarity there. Now again, we can crank the gain if we want more into the front. And that's gonna give us a real fat gain sound but still retaining all of that clarity. Now the 6L6 amp is a much higher gain amp. So even with the gain on halfway like it is here, I go to the gain channel. There's way more gain on tap there. So putting the drive into this is gonna boost that even further. We're gonna get even more gain. I'm also gonna show you a really cool quick thing you can do to tighten up the sound of a high gain amp. So let me just set the gain a bit higher and go on to the higher gain voice like so. So that's a great high gain sound and that sounds great in isolation. But if I'm in a band mix or a track mix, all of that low end content that you're hearing can sometimes be a little bit overbearing and I'm also in standard tuning today. A lot of the time if you're playing heavier styles of music you may be in a lower tuning or you may be using an extended range of guitar like a seven or an eight string. So there's gonna be even more low end there. What you can do is take a TSL drive, put the gain to zero, put the level up full. What that's gonna do is push the front of the amp a little bit but it's not really adding much gain. You can use the tone control here to taste depending on what you've got your overall EQ set to. But what this is gonna do is it's gonna shave some of that low end off and just tighten up the overall sound. That's a great way to just free up some of those low end frequencies in a mix. You can adjust that to taste, you can use the tone control to make it match whatever you're doing. So there you go, there's a quick guide on how to use overdrive pedals with clean and overdriven amps. Let me know down below in the comments how you guys are using your overdrive with your St. James amps in the St. James suite. I'd love to hear which combinations of things you guys are doing to get your tone. Don't forget to check out Blackstar Amplification on YouTube for more videos just like this. If there's anything you'd like to see us do or talk about with this plugin, let us know down below in the comments. Don't forget to head over to musicteacher.com. If you're looking for a great guitar teacher, check out their website. There's a bunch of teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out. Thank you so much for watching as always and I'll see you very soon.