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Hi, I'm Stan with Fender, and we're here today with Josh
Smith looking at the Fender MTG:LA tube distortion pedal.
The MTG:LA is in our MTG series.
We designed it with Bruce Egnater
and it features a vacuum tube that runs at high voltages.
The high voltage part is important
because it gives the pedal amp like dynamics
where you can turn your guitar down and it cleans up nicely.
Feature wise it has treble and bass controls,
it has an additional tone control
that affects the very highest frequency
so you can dial in clarity or help to tame fizz on an overly
bright amp.
It has Bruce's tight control.
The tight control effects the gain on low notes.
So how articulate or tight something
is versus how tubby or complex or how much bloom
it might have.
There's a foot switchable boost.
The boost circuit gives you more drive
or more output level or both.
They're each individually adjustable.
It's a true bypass, all analog pedal.
And like all the pedals in this series
it features illuminated knobs.
Before we get into the tones, Josh what are you playing?
JOSH SMITH: I'm playing an American Pro HSS Stratocaster,
straight into a 68 custom deluxe reverb.
Cool.
Let's hear the bypass tone straight up.
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Let's get back to that tone we had at the top of the video.
Right now the pedal's set about mid gain.
Josh, why don't you play through?
See what you can do with it.
All right.
At the top I was exclusively on the bridge pickup,
but I go through all the positions
now and roll my volume up and down.
So here's neck pickup, volume down a little bit.
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Here's neck middle.
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Middle bridge.
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Then back to the bridge.
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Cool.
Let's see what happens when we turn the gain down.
I'm going to turn the level up a little bit
and see what those tones are like.
JOSH SMITH: All right.
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Cool.
There's a lot of tones in Josh, and also
a lot of tones in the pedal.
JOSH SMITH: Is really versatile and dynamic.
It cleans up really well and responds to all your pickup
selections and volume and tone changes, and the way
that you play.
You know, the different inflections
that you put into it.
It kind of reacts very well to that stuff.
STAN: Awesome.
Hey, let's get to the other end of the spectrum.
Let's crank the gain on it and see what
it'll do at high gain settings.
JOSH SMITH: All right.
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Still cleans up.
JOSH SMITH: Still cleans up.
Awesome.
All right.
Let's look at the tight control does.
I'm going to turn the gain down a little bit.
And maybe for this if you just play like a palm mute low E.
Just chunk.
Chunk chunka chunk.
STAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Maybe if you could do some single note stuff
around the middle of the neck?
JOSH SMITH: Yeah.
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It kind of sounds like a different cabinet.
Like you're changing speaker cabinets a little bit.
Yeah.
What you heard in the chunk stuff,
you heard to kind of get a little flubby at one end--
JOSH SMITH: Absolutely.
STAN: But then it got a little tighter and prettier, kind of.
But then on the single note stuff,
I actually liked it where it was a little bit fatter,
because it gets a little more complex or a little richer.
JOSH SMITH: Yeah.
Absolutely.
Why don't we walk through some of the tone control settings,
just to get an idea of what they do?
All right.
STAN: You play.
I'm going to go ahead and sweep the tone control back.
This is actually a low pass filter,
so it progressively removes high notes.
High frequencies.
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This control is really useful if you
have an amp that has a built in bright switch
function or something where the amp is really bright.
It allows you to tame fizz and make it sound more natural.
That's great, because then you can
have a super clean bright clean tone,
but when you kick on the drive it can still be warm.
Let's look at the boost now.
So the controls on the boost, there's
an additional gain control that adds to the first gain control,
and then there's a separate output level control.
So when you kick the boost on, both of those controls
become active.
With the output level controls you get one or the other,
so an odd thing about the boost is
you can actually make it be quieter if you
want to make it quieter.
But you can actually make it a bit gainier.
So I'll set the level controls about the same,
so the volumes about the same.
And then I'll just kick it on and off while Josh plays.
You can hear the additional dry.
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Now we'll go the other way.
I'll turn the additional gain off
and I'll just give it more output level.
The output circuit is exactly the same.
So the tone isn't going to change at all.
It's just going to get louder.
JOSH SMITH: It's nice.
It's almost like you can have a clean boost or a gain boost,
and it doesn't matter where it is in your chain.
Yeah, yeah, or both at once.
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Sounds good.
So that's the MTG: LA.
It's a high voltage tube bass distortion pedal.
Has amp like dynamics, has crazy broad range of tones,
has a foot switchable boost, so a lot of flexibility.
Visit fender.com for more information on this pedal
as well as the full line of Fender pedals.
Josh, you want to play us out?
Yeah.
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