I recently formed a drone band with a longtime collaborator, and we’ve been killing ourselves trying to find rad tones. I had decent results with a Big Muff but found it too loose for the more defined riffs, and the Boss Metal Zone was tight enough for most of it but I hated the fizz. Also, I’ve never been able to capture that stoner Muff roar – something was always ‘off’ in the sound, there was a strange lack of ‘oomph’ or it was too trebley, or crackly, or Lord knows what else. I thought it was my amp but the cleans sounded great so I just dealt with it.

I’ve been playing a Twin Reverb for a while and had just resigned myself to lo-gain; I have some fuzz pedals that I keep for leads but I was always disappointed with the way they sounded, and every medium-to-high gain distortion I’ve ever owned has left my collection nearly immediately. Nonetheless, I went optimistically high gain shopping and settled on the Box of Metal, the finest sounding device that Long & Mcquade had in stock that day (no 3-band Metal Muff, unfortunately). When I got it home, the pedal sounded boomy and lame, so I re-EQ’d my amp until I found something passable and headed off to band practice.

We were getting really frustrated because his rig (Les Paul -> Boss ODB-3 -> Holy Grail -> Fender Hot Rod Deluxe) sounded a million times better than mine (Jazzmaster -> Box of Metal -> Sixteen Second Digital Delay -> Twin Reverb). Now, I have tried near every combination of the tone knobs on my amp but I’ve only ever been satisfied with the clean or mildly overdriven tones. In a last ditch effort, I checked his settings thinking that since they were both Fenders, the tone controls might have a similar voicing. He had set his tone Treble: 6 Middle: 6 Bass: 6 (without realizing it). We got a kick out of this, but when I tried it I was stunned… Not only was my clean tone better than ever, but my amp sounded incredible no matter what I had in front of it. My Muff sounds like a Muff and the Box of Metal sounds like the finest high-gain tube amps, yet my cleans sparkle in the way only a Twin Reverb can. My Strat’s neck pickup is finally bright enough but the bridge pickup has enough warmth to thwart the icepick-tones I’ve had so much trouble avoiding as of late. Has anyone else ever tried these settings and had similar results, or is it just us?

I’m honestly considering starting my own sect of the “Committee to Keep Music Evil” because of this.