Scronk wrote:
To my ears, many Stick tracks with distortion don't sound nearly subtle enough. I want a nice smooth blues crunch but that seems to evade the Stick? Would love to hear opinions and advice on this.
I too like subtle, nice and smooth blues crunch; a vocal-like tone without too much lower mid. Much like you get with a Fender STratocaster. When distorting only the melody side a subtle cut of lows is essential to avoid leakage of the bass strings stirring up mud in the clear waters. I have two tricks to achieve such a melody tone. First I like to set the PASV4 to "dual pickups out of phase" on the melody side, to get rid of the lows and have a little extra overtones to make the lines cut through what I'm playing on the bass side. I also generally use a low-cut filter before the melody side amp. Here's what that may sound like (distortion starting at three and a half minute into the track):
Here's another distortion piece using the same setup. This example is educational since it is recorded totally live, so you can clearly hear how (little) the bass side notes go into the dist of the melody side (entering dist mode on melody side by half the song):
When distorting both the melody and bass side I may go with just the neck pickups or bridge pickups (no need for low-cut there) but I have no recorded example of this.
(edit:)
To compare Stick vs Guitar, here's a Fender Stratocaster using about the same amp setup. This shows how a Stick "does not sound like a guitar"
