Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Amptweaker: Tight Metal (Part 3)- Control knobs/ switches scrutiny

Let's take a look at what the Tight Metal has to offer...
  • A: Battery switch- turns your battery on/ off. If you own this pedal & find it dead one day, check if you actually turned the battery power off... Happened to me but that was on Day 1.
  • B: Volume- One of two distortion-affecting knobs. So in addition to raising/ lowering volume, this one acts like an amp's master volume control, shaping your distortion as you make yourself heard. It gets frustrating if you wish to retain the higher volume aggression at lower volume settings- not quite available.
  • C: Tone- A universal understanding; counter clockwise for more bass, clockwise for added treble. The sweep on offer is healthy, this is the other tone-affecting knob. In addition to a variety of voicings, the tone knob lets you have more aggression towards the treble end but it's what I call a frequency illusion; we tend to 'hear' more aggression this way but it's actually the top end being more sizzling. Towards the bass pronouncement, you can achieve a smooth, fat tone; one of the best supplements for fluid legato licks.
  • D: Gain- From very tame to very ferocious, nothing new, yes? But the distortion here is saturated enough if you couple it with the right volume level, eliminating the need for an additional distortion booster. The Gain voicing is also very amp-like, at upper levels it sounds more like an angry amplifier than an external distortion provider.
  • E: Tight- Simply put, it is the 'scooper' knob, dial in your preferred midrange levels accordingly. This is best tweaked with the tone control (naturally); too much bass from both sources & you're in for some ill-definition but some of us would like it for its pseudo-fuzz properties. I find the Tight control affecting my lower-strings chugging more than the Tone counterpart.
  • F: Mid-Thrash switch- The other scoop activator but the difference here is that this switch doesn't accentuate the bass when you reduce midrange; you hear more midrange or less.
  • G: Gate-Chomp- We, humans, call it 'noise gate'. As it is a flick feature devoid of any other offerings, you set it to an extreme threshold upon activation. This means, if your pickup's output is wimp-grade, your signals won't go through as easily/ notes picked with lesser intensity would be abruptly cut off. Maybe that explains the 'Chomp' level.

No comments:

Post a Comment