Quote from: J M Fahey on March 15, 2013, 12:00:20 PM
Not much.
Definitely not a "compressed" one, nor long sustain or attack squashing.
"Clean" channel gain is *usually* set to an "average" guitar, played by an "average" guitar player, starts clipping around 6 or 7 on the volume control.
Why? : so a weak player/pickup/thin_strings still have a little extra gain available to compensate (7 to 10 ) while a loud player will still have clean sound up to, say, 5 .
That with a true Audio/Log volume pot, of course.
So in practice you can overdrive a Clean channel by 6 to 10dB, not much.
My son wanted 4 channels. The two clean channels should be allowed to overdrive, softly, based on the "gain" control. The two distortion channels should start from overdrive all the way up to hard distortion. By "soft overdrive" my son wants to be able to hear every note clearly, but does not like it when the "distortion" falls off and a clean tone then remains. For example you strum the low E, you hear two or three seconds worth of overdrive and another four or five seconds of cleaner tone. He expects the same "overdriven" tone to become progressively more quiet but without losing its tonal characteristics.
Therefore I will tell my son that he cannot have everything