Tag: Two Rock

Getting ODS Tones from the Bloomfield Drive

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If you’ve followed Two-Rock or been interested in their amps for a while, you’ll know that many of their amps are Dumble inspired. The Bloomfield Drive is no exception, taking inspiration from their ODS-style TS-1 and adding a lush reverb. In theory this should be the best of both worlds, but owners have been finding that they can’t quite get the ODS tones they’re looking for from it. So is some magic sauce missing, or is it user error?

Goals

I have owned a Bloomfield Drive combo now for more than a year and it has been exactly what I originally wanted. An amp that can do beautiful cleans similar to a Classic Reverb but with a drive channel that lets me get some breakup at reasonable volume levels. Setting the drive channel just on the edge of breakup gave me two “clean” channels that I could stack pedals in front of.

However lately I’ve gone back an watched Joey Landreth’s demo again, as well as checking out some videos of other actual Dumble amplifiers. I found myself wondering if I could get the ODS tones from my Bloomfield Drive. Turning up the gain on the drive channel didn’t really get me where I wanted, and remembering the Josh Smith video of the TS-1 reminded me to turn up the gain on the clean stage first as it cascades into the drive channel to push it further.

Revelation

Well turning the “clean” gain up to 3 o’clock didn’t really get me there either, leaving me a bit cold and bewildered as to how Joey got those sweet tones. Was it due to some really pokey P90s? Maybe my combo is set to lower gain levels, or I needed to roll some tubes. Well the answer was none of the above, and once again came from thinking back to a Matt Schofield video from when he was on “That Pedal Show” explaining how he sets his amps, pedals, etc.

He describes listening to the pots as you turn them and to listen for the point where the have the most impact. When doing this you usually find a couple points on the rotation of the pots (short for potentiometers or “knobs” for the non-technical) where they have a lot more impact. Doing this on the first gain knob through the whole range I found two interesting spots I didn’t notice before. They are at around 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock, or on a 1-10 scale they’d be about 8 and 9. At these two points the gain jumps up by a lot, giving those sweet overdrive tones I had been looking for.

One bonus tip if you’re looking to really up the gain on the Bloomfield Drive, the mid boost switch gives a good boost to the gain that can push it over the edge. This is especially good with certain guitars such as a Strat that is naturally more lacking in the minds.

Can you Dumble?

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The Dumble Overdrive Special is an amp of legends. Smooth and creamy with nicely pushed mids, yet so tightly defined that individual notes ring through even with massive amounts of gain dialed in. Of course, this is what I’ve been told, or read on the internet so it must be true. There is no denying however that the sound you hear from various artists that use these holy grail amplifiers is alluring and inspiring for guitar players to listen to.

Now I can’t afford an ODS (yet! one day… ) but I do have a Two Rock Studio Pro 35 which is, through some levels of relation, based on the clean sound of a Dumble, and does do a very nice job indeed. A great “pedal platform” amp, it takes anything you can throw at it and makes it sound very good, but one thing I hadn’t tried until just now was mimicking the gain structure of an ODS. You see one of the things that sets apart the ODS is the fact that the overdrive happens after the tone stack of the clean channel, basically putting it where the effects loop of most other amps is. This got me thinking, why not put a gain pedal in the loop and see how it goes.

Now of course conventional guitar tone wisdom says that this would never work, but conventions are always being rewritten anyway so I might as well be the one to give it a show. My first try was a Paul Cochrane Tim, thinking the transparent nature of the pedal would help blend it into the sound of the amp and let me add just some hair to it as I do with the pedal going into the front. Strike 1, this did not work very well at all, it somehow wasn’t compressing in a way that felt right, now was it leaving the clean and clear overheat of the amp in tact. Maybe convention was there for a reason.

Attempt number two was much better. Much, much better. A tanabe.tv Dumkudo in the loop set to Dumble (green) mode and we are off and running. The Dumkudo offers a lot of volume and gain on tap with a mid boost that can be dialed in just right to get the amp singing. Turning the volume knob down on the guitar cleans up nicely, but loses a bit too much volume at the same time. Add a Keeley Compressor Pro before the amp input and the volume level stays more in the sweet spot while letting me adjust the gain with my guitars volume. The results speak for themselves, with high dynamic range (actually too much before the compressor was added), touch sensitivity, excellent sustain and works very well with additional pedal going into the front of the amp, it really is an all around win.

So some things to test in the future; I need to A/B the Dumkudo in front vs the loop as this pedal does just sound incredible all around so it may be that there isn’t that big of a difference wherever the pedal is, but I do need to try it out so I can see differences in sensitivity or dynamics. Also my testing was all done at semi-home levels, not bedroom but not live either. Turning up the amp and having the power section work harder may eliminate the need for the compressor and may yield different results. Lastly, I have only tried those 2 pedals so far, but I have many gain pedals so I should run through all of them and see which ones seem to work best to try and draw some conclusions as to guessing which other pedals may work well (I am looking at you Kingsley).

For now, how a listen and give it a try on your own amp if you have an effects loop. Worse you can do is learn what not to do.