Alan Ratcliffe wrote:
I was more interested in the combo of the BB and Tim. To my mind that should be a near-perfect combination to get a wide variety of quality tones from a two pedal setup without messing with the basic tone of the guitar or amp. From mild drive through crunchy rhythm to higher gain lead tones plus a volume boost. Amirite?
I actually put a lengthy bit on the BB and the combo of the two in my initial post but then deleted that part as I thought my post was too long... Oops... ?
I found the BB Preamp to have much more girth/ thickness and punch to it if you wanted it, with a fairly strong midrange and very effective treble and bass controls (lots of cut and boost available). You can actually get the Tim and BB to sound very similar to each other, except that the BB will always have quite a bit more mids than the Tim. The BB at low/ mid gain into the Tim doesn't really seem to up the gain much, but just imparts some of the BB's extra mids to the Tim's sound as well as injecting some of its extra thickness into proceedings. When stacking drives, I don't find that the Tim is a great pedal to be second in the chain being pushed by another drive (although looking at a lot of TGP pedalboards I'm not sure they would agree with me). It seems to work far better driving another pedal. I only tried the BB into the Tim, not the other way round, but I did try it that way with my Green Rhino and it seemed to work better with the GR getting extra saturation and definition from being pushed by the Tim. The GR is quite similar to the BB in a lot of ways, so I am confident in saying Tim first, BB second if you are stacking them for better results- at least IMO if the objective of stacking is to get more drive/ saturation. If you want to stack them for a tonal change but not much extra drive, BB into Tim works well but is not what I preferred. I would definitely say a TS/ BB Preamp type of pedal with some extra mids pairs well with the transparent Tim.
