Burlap and Blues, The Blues Blog

In my quest to find the best overdrive and distortion pedal for my tone, I found that the Visual Sound Jekyl and Hyde was a fairly good pedal. Being a double pedal, I found myself only using the TS clone side of the pedal and very rarely if ever stomping on the distortion side. When I found out the Visual Sound was releasing a pedal with 2 TS-808 clones side by side I thought this could be one of the elusive pedals that I have been looking for.

What makes this pedal more useful is the ability to stack two vintage chip model tube screamers. I have liked setting the first in the series at more of a slightly gainy clean signal boost with some added high end, and the second one full gain with the bass boost circuit on. What this gives me is the ability to have a slightly clipped signal that works good with my strat tones without loss of picking styles, and one that is a real creamy distorted sound that has good sustain. If I need more sustain or more sustain with more high end I will kick both of the sides of the pedal on to get that.

Follow up:

Some of the designs of this pedal that make it one that will be on my board for quite some time is a low-noise generating circuit. Without using an actual noise gate, this pedal some how senses noise and reduces it without giving you that odd sound of in and out that a low end noise gate or suppressor can give.

Another great design feature is the buffered bypass circuit. The Visual Sound pedals all have a signal buffer that works to prevent signal chain loss without coloring the sound. I have A/B'd a Visual Sound pedal at the start of a long chain and I am surprised that there is a noticeable change in the tone of the signal going to the amp. Although this is very subtle it is noticeable.

There are some downfalls to the Visual Sound Double Trouble pedal. This, like many other analog pedals seems to have less ability to recreate a tube tone with any solid state amps. The EQ section seems to usually need to be at the last 20% of the high end of the tone to be useful. Anything in the first 80% on the bass end seems to be very muddy. The last thing is that even with the gain full on, there seems to be less gain than an TS-9DX which does to some extent limit it's usefulness.

What would make this pedal perfect would be to continue to use the dual TS-808 circuitry, add dual 5 band EQ's and a turbo switch for both channels. This would allow for better EQ definition and higher gain possibilities in the same unit.