The Sonic Titan is a little different from your regular overdrive or distortion pedal in the sense that it actually uses its own power amp stage to create distortion.
How it works. The Titan’s first stage is a JFET (Junction Field Effect Transistor) pre-amp. This stage creates tube like clipping by slightly squashing your signal thus giving you superbly focused tone that will offer remarkable string clarity and dynamic overdrive tones. Picking styles become very touch responsive and tones can go from fairly clean to mild overdrive just from the strength of the pick attack alone.
The power amp in the Sonic Titan does all the muscle work and greatly amplifies the pre-amp stage. This is set up to have very high gain levels but just like with any power amp distortion needs to be pushed hard to create a heavily saturated tone. The headroom available on this pedal is very large indeed so running into a clean amplifier you will be able to achieve huge amounts of volume boosting. The Level control also governs the saturation of the power stage. If you run the Titan into an overdriven amplifier you will achieve a higher boost in gain with serious amounts of tonal saturation. The idea here is to achieve big power amp style distortion that you can actually use at slightly more reasonable volume levels than pushing a non master tube head it to distortion.
The Sonic Titan can quite easily fill the roll of any Tube Screamer style overdrive for boosting tube OD into blissfully smooth and natural bluesy distortion. It becomes a real monster when pushed hard with the volume fully open and can produce an obscenely heavy doom/stoner distortion tone. It is really excellent for dropped string tunings because of the bold string clarity under high saturation.
Fast or Bulbous?
As of June 2010 you can either obtain the Sonic Titan with either 'Blues' or 'Dark' tuning. Uh? What?
We've been making the Titan for 5 years now. As with the Meathead it's somewhat evolved over the years and spread its tentacles into different areas. I originally planned the Sonic Titan to be an all out king bastard air pushing dirt box. Sure, it would do subtlety but its main plan was to provide power and a very obviously engaged tone. The Titan ended up being a lot more flexible than I planned and its subtlety is actually one of its strong points. For the past year all Titans made have been the darker, more open bass heavy versions, so much so you can even use one with a 4-stringer and loose none of your lower frequencies. The older models have there place too. They gel and cut a little more efficiently and have a slightly more familiar behavioural pattern. Horses for courses really.
So, a bit of both in ranks. Basically, playing a 2006 Titan at the side of a 2009 model is quite a different experience. So much so that I feel the two are different enough for me to warrant and want to produce two versions.
Which is my size?
I'll keep it simple here. If you like the more standard overdrive sounds, mid-humped, TS-808 kinda thing, you want the 'Blues' model. If you want full frequency distortion and a more even tonal response you want the 'Dark'. The blues model would also be the choice for faster playing styles, the dark for dropped tunings and for bass or baritone use. You could actually think of the different models being 'fast' and 'slow' versions, if you dig.
The Controls
Level - sets the output volume and volume it has, this thing can get unhealthily LOUD.
Tone - this control is a Hi-cut tone control. Its main use is to help tune your instrument to the Titan's drive capabilities so at first may seem a crude way of shaping tone. Start off with the Tone maxed out to the full right and slowly reduce to the control as need be to round of the tone for a smoother overdrive tone.
Drive - controls the amount of Distortion and sustain available.
The Sounds
That was me. Crude set-up makes crude sounds. Fuzz & fuzz-wah tones are the Meathead, the bass is running an Ezekiel 25:17. Main crunch tone is the Sonic Titan (Blues model).
