2 NEW VIDEOS! Amp in Box Pedals

I have been quite obsessed with what I believe to be the coolest tone shaping tools available to guitarists today.  These pedals work extremely well with any clean amp (fenders blackface or SF, roland jc120, even my little blackstar ht1 practice amp--- great amp btw!)  They work with other amps as well, but they really can turn your clean fender into another amp at the stomp of a foot.  the pedals I am referring to are collectively known as "amp in box pedals".  These circuits actually take the schematics- tone stacks, gain stages, bypass... etc- and scale them down into pedal sized proportions.  Instead of using tubes as gain stages, these pedals use JFETS.  now jfets have been around for a while, so nothing new there, but some men smarter than myself have figured out how to really use them well.  The jfets take the place of tubes in gain stages and they actually do a really good job of it.  It is best to run these pedals into a tube amp, so you can get the warmth and fatness of the tubes in your signal, but they do well with quality SS amps too.  I have built a fender tweed, ampeg v4/svt (kinda a general ampeg sound as they all used similar layouts- same with fender- the real difference in different models of fender and other amps was just output tubes, transformers and speaker cabs)

Anyways- these pedals have a number of uses-
-Master volume- these pedals get better realistic cranked amp tones at low volume than anything I have ever used... forget your master volume, yes even the london power scaling or the PPIMV's.  forget the attentuators those things do not sound natural to me at all.  These pedals sound great at every volume.  The videos I recorded here were with a 1 watt amp with an 8" speaker at very low volume.
- Getting a sound that you can use at any gig.  Let's face it- there's a sweet spot on your amp.  that area between breakup and clean.  You play at different venues, different sizes, different shapes, you're not going to be able to put your amp at the same volume everytime unless you're playing stadiums and can have whatever stage volume you want.  If you have a good loud clean amp you can use these pedals always on and get that perfect breakup sound at any volume.

- they take pedals like none other- each amp in box pedal will take all of your other boost and overdrive pedals like that amp (whatever particular amp in box pedal you have) would.  For example an ampeg gets super compressed when you hit the front end really hard when its cranked.  And fender's get that nasty cutting, biting top end with that squishy low end that has dirt for days... each amp in box pedal you have will maek all your other pedals sound and react uniqueley.  You place the amp in box (from now on AIB) at the end of your boost, fuzz, distortions and overdrives- and put your modulation and time based effects afterwards- this gives you an effects loop type effect- so your delays come after your main sources of breakup now that you're running your amp clean (you dont have to run your amp clean either btw)- you know how fuzz pedals sound so much better and get so much dirtier when you're running your tube amp cranked up and distorting on it's own already... these pedals give you that same effect.  You can really change the characteristics of your fuzz and other dirt pedals while keeping the exact same volume by working with the gain adn volume controls on the AIB pedals. 
-These pedals make your guitars onboard volume control work better.  The high input impedance and low output impedance of these pedals really makes your volume control useful for cleaning up the dirt.  Roll back and your sparkling clean, put it on 8 for some hair, to 10 for all out crunch.

- recording- besides the obvious noise and volume advantages- these pedals can be used to record completely silently- they work amazing going direct into a mixer, hard disk recorder or sound card.  also if you have an AIB pedal that is based on an amp that is known to work well for bass as well as guitar- it will definitely pull double duty as a bass pedal.  The ampeg in a box, blackface fender, and marshall superlead circuits sound bad ass on bass.  The ampeg can take a modern low beam bass sound and turn it into that round, bouncy and punchy clean motown bass sound- to slightly hairy stones punch all the way to HUGE stoner metal bass sounds.

This description is way too long. enjoy the videos- $90 recorder, MIM strat, and a 1watt $135 amp with an 8" speaker- all at nighttime bedroom apartment with paper thin walls volumes- i think it's sounding damn good considering