The Sonic Titan is a little different from your regular overdrive or distortion pedal in the sense that it actually uses its own power amplifier stage to create distortion.
How it works. The Sonic Titan’s first stage is a JFET (Junction Field Effect Transistor) pre-amp. This stage creates tube like clipping by slightly compressing your signal thus creating a superbly focused tone that will offer remarkable string clarity and dynamic overdrive tones. Picking styles become very touch responsive giving the player the ability to go from a fairly clean guitar tone to mild overdrive tones just from the strength of the pick attack alone.
The power amplifier stage in the Sonic Titan does all the muscle work and greatly amplifies the initial pre-amplifier stage. This stage is built around a miniature low voltage power amplifier chip configured to have a high gain output level, but, like with any power amplifier distortion it needs to be pushed hard to create a heavily saturated tone. The on-board Level control along with the Drive control will greatly affects the saturation of the power stage.
The amount of output volume and gain available from this pedal is particularly ample but will vary depending on the choice and type of amplifier you decide to pair with the Sonic Titan. Placed into the front end of high output clean tone amplifier you will be able to achieve a good deal of volume boost from the pedal alone. On the other hand, running the Sonic Titan into an overdriven amplifier you will achieve a greater boost in gain and saturation levels as the Sonic Titan is engaged. The idea here is to achieve big power amplifier style distortion that you can actually use at slightly more reasonable volume levels than pushing a non master tube head it to distortion.
The Controls
Level - Varies the degree of output volume and power amplifier saturation.
Tone - This control is a Hi-cut filter 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 overall Distortion and sustain available.
The Sounds
Sonic Titan page sound clips written and performed by David A Main. Copyright 2013 D*A*M Fuzz & fuzz-wah tones are the Meathead M-13, the bass is running an Ezekiel 25:17. Main crunch tone is all Sonic Titan. Please click below to play.
