Overdrive as attenuator - Bobby's thoughts on practice volume

I live in a house which is one in a row of five, so I have 2 walls shared with my lovely neighbours - with no room non-adjacent to said walls. Reason dictates that I cut down on practice volume.

I have introduced you to my travel gear, and my practice gear is not much more sophisticated: I usually plug my guitar into my Zoom G3 or G1Xon and use headphones, or amplify via anything available, such as on of my DIY junkyard boomboxes, my home theatre amplifier, the line in of my digital piano, or the aux in of my Baltimore by Johnson 40W 2x8" solid state amp. I ain't no cork sniffer when it comes to guitar tone, for sure.

So, my guideline to setting my practice volume is the following: if I can hear and play along my phone running my favourite MetroDrummer drum machine app, I cannot be too loud. If I can do that with my laptop playing my favourite backing tracks, it must still be acceptable for my neighbours. Anything louder may awaken the music critic living in them.

Now, sometimes I use my son's Kustom Defender V5 combo upgraded with a Celestion 8" speaker to familiarise myself with the response of real tube amps, but it is difficult to set a good room volume along the guidelines above. The volume knob is very sensitive around that lowest setting and we know well that a non-cranked tube amp does not work anywhere close its sweet spot. So normally I turn the amp volume up to 40-50% and turn the guitar volume down to taste. Still no pushing the tubes into any sweet breakup but at least it is possible to set the volume more precisely than between the 0-15% notch of the amp.

However, internet wisdom says that without a treble bleed circuit in your guitar, turning the pickup volume down also alters your tone, killing off high-end frequencies. This is supposedly not a problem for Maria Juanita, my strat equipped with active Seymour Duncan pickups, but the passive beauties in my stable are affected by this tone loss.

My solution for keeping the tone high and the volume low is the following: I plug my guitar into the amp through my son's Mosky Golden Horse overdrive pedal. I add drive/gain on the pedal to taste, a turn up the amp volume to that usual 50% and the level down on the pedal. That way I can regulate volume with precision in the low registers without sucking the tone away with the guitar volume knobs, using the pedal as a clean or overdriven attenuator and tone control.

From Hungary with love,

BLC