The Steel Guitar Forum

If you can find a used one the original ProCo Rat pedal is amazing for steel and work's well with solid state amps such as the Nashville 112 and tube amps.
It is a very warm distortion with a great level of control from mild breakup to as heavy of distortion as you will ever want.

One good test for any dist/O/D pedal is to see if there is a lot of bottom end lost when kicked on.

Dave Mudgett wrote:Naturally, the disadvantage of putting an actual Celestion in the NV 112 is that it fundamentally changes the clean pedal steel sound...

No doubt, but the clean sound is okay to my ears. I have Fender amps with Celestions in them and they sound okay clean.

b0b; When I'm playing my Derby, because; I can then use my Franklin Stereo~Pedal, I use a BossTone Unit in just one of my N–112 Amps. and leave the other Amp. w/o distortion. This allows me to obtain a “Clean”-Distortion, because; the Dry–Amp. helps to override the clash, when picking more than one-note at a time! Perhaps no one will understand this finominim(sp) until they try it!

I too am a fan of the Celestion 12"... but remember it is 8 ohms.. and the 112 stock Blue Marvel is 4... now back to our overdrive question....

Before I swaped out the 12" Blue Marvel in mine for a 15" Weber "Michigan", I always used a TS9DX, which has 4 settings for overdrive... starting with the original Tube Screamer...and progressing up through 3 additional layers of overdrive... I find the 3rd level "Hot" works nice, and I use it before my Hilton VP. With that said, I've only done western swing gigs since I started using the 15" Weber (no overdrive required with twin fiddles ).. but I would expect it will sound very nice when needed.

John, Voodoo Labs makes a Sparkle Drive stomp box that does what you do, but through a single amp. It splits the signal into two channels, keeps one clean and distorts the other. You can blend the two channels back together to taste before sending the signal to an amp. But I would imagine using two actual amps works even better.

Jerry Bull wrote:I have an rp150 hooked up to my nv112 in the pre amp eq patch on the front of the amp. all the clean effects sound great, but the distortion sucks. I have to stand on my volume pedal to get the right sound, but then it's too loud, if I back off the volume pedal, it cleans up and the distortion goes away. I must have things hooked up in the wrong place. I'm using a Hilton pedal, and I don't think I'm supposed to hook the rp150 between the guitar and the VP. any thoughts? anybody?

I am using a RP DigiTech 155 and find rather than going through the EQ patch I go from PSG to RP 155 input, Rp output to volume pedal input, volume pedal output to my Peavy Nashville 112.

Also wondering what the difference is between the RP 150 and The RP 155 which I just purchased.

I use a VooDoo Sparkle drive and seems Pretty good to me.
Some times I just crank up the gain on my walker SS and it gets pretty gritty.
Other times, I have played Tele through the nash 112 using my guitar pedal board .. Barber Tone Press parallel compressor.
same concept 2 channels one clean, Plus OCD drive.
Its a head tuner in Austin..Blues jams.
They say What kind of amp is that!!
Peavey logo removed and it has the Gator hide naugahide.
I play clean most of the time and get it as beefy as i can.

DigiTech RP-150. I use it with my Twin Reverb or the NV-112. It features Lexicon Reverb which I prefer to the spring reverb tank in the amp. Plus there are plenty of other modern effects available.

John Bauer wrote:

Jerry Bull wrote:I have an rp150 hooked up to my nv112 in the pre amp eq patch on the front of the amp. all the clean effects sound great, but the distortion sucks. I have to stand on my volume pedal to get the right sound, but then it's too loud, if I back off the volume pedal, it cleans up and the distortion goes away. I must have things hooked up in the wrong place. I'm using a Hilton pedal, and I don't think I'm supposed to hook the rp150 between the guitar and the VP. any thoughts? anybody?

I am using a RP DigiTech 155 and find rather than going through the EQ patch I go from PSG to RP 155 input, Rp output to volume pedal input, volume pedal output to my Peavy Nashville 112.

Also wondering what the difference is between the RP 150 and The RP 155 which I just purchased.

I believe the difference is the RP155 is a little newer model and has just a few extra additions that basically has no use whatsoever to the steel guitar player. If your playing 6-string, it has a input so you can plug an expression pedal to it. Other than that, not much. I have changed the way I hook everything up, much like the way you mentioned, but when I get off of my VP, the delay/reverb stops ringing, because I've killed it dead in it's tracks. the only way I can see to have the best of both worlds is to put a separate distortion pedal in the loop. ie. amp send>distortion>VP>RP150>amp return. Still don't like that way because I'm cutting power to the RP150 and at low volumes, the effects get cut, and I lose the effectiveness of it. I'm about ready to stop jackin' with all that stuff and stop dragin' everything around and just use the reverb in the amp and let the lead guitar player come up with him own distortion, that way everyone will leave me alone. But what fun would that be.

You can't get a good rock sound without a Celestion twelve inch speaker.

Yes you can.
But as for the original question. I only rarely distort the NV112 and never with pedal steel, but when i do i use my Profex II and to my "tube amp oriented taste" it sounds pretty decent.

I used a Boss Blues Driver for awhile. I don't use distortion enough to warrant toting it.