Distorted things..

[deccard]

nothing beats hardware for distortion but there are pretty good plugins out there. the afforementioned soundtoys stuff, ohmicide, d16 decimort are all good. and the good stuff is the easy integration if you mix itb. gives you a lot more possibillities than working with hardwaredistortion and having to recording it again.
but still hardware gives easier good results. so i use an old guitar tube preamp http://www.adadepot.com/adagear/gearpag ... A-MP-2.htm
a moogerfooger pedal and a ehx 2tube. all not so expensive.

for me the problem with hardware is as long its not a dedicated distortion unit like niio trackthickener, thermionic culture vulture, evol fucifier etc....the distortion types and options are a bit limited (the ehx 2ube only has a drive control for example). that´s why i want, no i need, a culture vulture in the future. just so expensive that fucker.
but any small distortion pedal can improve your sound.

[steevio]

my mates got the culture vulture, its absolutely amazing...

in my dreams

[oblioblioblio]

I don't know how much it's worth it to spend £1250 + vat on a distortion unit.

You can get a whole synthesiser made of tubes for that price.

About distortion being too simple... I dunno... if you look at a good fuzz pedal, you can generally set it at one level and leave it there as playing a guitar needs 2 hands... if you play softly or strongly it will respond differently. Good distortions will give you a wide range of different behvaiours depending on input level. You could change settings before the distortion to change the sound going into it.

Another good kind of distortion is wavefolding, I've only seen it in synthesisers... it's fantastic.

[deccard]

i´ve been looking for new tubes for my compressor. a fitted pair of quality tubes alone cost about 100€.

[oblioblioblio]

i just bought enough tubes for all my tube synths.. a drum machine with 4 voices and onboard preamp, an oscillator, a dual filter, a ringmod, a waveshaper a distortion and a vca.

Alltogether I have 12 tubes, and I bought 3 spares for each, so 48 tubes altogether, enough to last me 100 years. It cost $70 including postage from USA.

[deccard]

depends on what you want...a cheap standard sovtek 12ax7 (12 € each)ofcourse can do the job. but if you want a bit more sound you have to pay more. i want to run whole mixes thru my tubes. so i want a certain quality. the sovetk are in my 2ube but the lowend suffers a bit or lets say doesnt sound how i want it.

[oblioblioblio]

all the tubes i bought are very high quality american or european made NOS... they're just ones which don't have high demand, and so are available very cheaply.

[deccard]

which ones you got?