LoCo Pedals Motive

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LoCo Motive is a little bit of study over a modified Dumble amplifier tone stack, a good amount of love for the 70's and 80's rock sound of Trainwreck and Soldano amps, and a whole lot of lessons learned from my SENSEI preamp. Three cascaded Class A transistor amplification stages with the gain limiter working in parallel after each of the first two. This allows the circuit to be louder with higher headroom before it would break up in clipping, and a more even overdriven sound at higher gain settings . Yes, it is a loud pedal! More of a pushing than self overdriving. With the three band amp style tone stack, two character switches and a footswitchable voicing option, gives a lot of tone possibilities but it also keeps its own personality.

Controls

Knobs

All the control knob functions are described in their name and they act just like on a tube amp. High Gain and low Volume sounds darker, low Gain and high Volume will be brighter, but you have the Treble knob plus the Presence switch for fine tuning. That's all we want from a good drive pedal right? A balance. To smoothly overdrive a bright clean amp, or boosting some more sparkle in an already driven but dark amp. With everything at noon I was careful to balance the sound as transparent as possible, and from here you can tweak the tone stack knobs to your liking.

Presence switch

Besides the Normal, two more options to balance the overall treble content of your sound with the character of the amp and the pedals is used with. Glass is boosting treble content for the dark sounding amps, and Smooth can be used with a bright sounding amp to avoid shrill sound when boosted or overdriven with the Motive. Fine tune it with the Treble knob.

Channel switch

It is rebiassing the second amplification stage with two more options that I like. The Bright is more cutting through, good match for humbuckers, and the Boost is just right for fattening up single coils. Hint. When playing with higher gain and looking for a good rock tone, give the Boost to the Raw to go totally train wrecking or Smooth out the Bright and you have sold an overdrive crunch.

Voicing footswitch

With all the knobs at noon, Channel on Warm and Presence on Normal, JAZZ (Blue) is the tight bass, high headroom sound for the seekers of the holy grail D amp tone. With the same settings, the ROCK (Red) is a more even and slightly more powerful sound, with more body and sparkle that breaks up quicker. Switching between the two, can also take place of the boosting or taming function of a dual channel amp that shares the same tonestack.

Always have a Motive for Music