What follows is a customer review submitted by Bob Cisternas

email: erkle_clapton@msn.com




Next, my thoughts on the Siegmund Micro Tube Double Drive...you might want
to REALLY pay attention if you play an amplified acoustic!


So along with my Midnight Blues breaker I also ordered the MicroTube Double
Drive as well. There were a few reasons for this. First was that aside from
the TS I didn't have any real tube over drive. Second was that since what I
wanted was the ability to step up the gain & drive through the single
channel MBB. Third was that I figured that since the same man that created
the amps created the DD I could be reasonable assured that the DD & the MBB
would be a tried & tested combo. I wasn't wrong!

Firstly the DD is built like a tank, seriously heavy duty stomp box. It has
from left to right, Volume, Treble, Middle, Bass, Drive & Gain knobs, 2
switches led's that show Drive/Boost and By-Pass. There's a pre-amp out & a
power amp out. The 110v power supply has a trim screw on it that can affect
the overall tone of the pedal, & its proprietary connector means you'll need
to be near an a/c outlet. (I drive it off the a/c socket on the Pedal
Power.)

The tubes are 2 of these REALLY tiny military spec tubes that have an
obnoxiously long life to them, and the sound is rather unique, yet strangely
familiar.

I plugged in & hit the first stage & the sound immediately got fatter &
darker. The tubes give a rather tight tone to the sound, and this tightness
can be adjusted by the trim knob on the power supply. Turned down it's a
looser warmer more relaxed sound. Turned up it's more along the Fender tight
punchy coarser sound, though all the while remaining tighter than a typical
12ax setup. 

Prepare to spend a lot of time with your tone control knobs, as they affect
a wide range of sound, have that overlap to them, and need to be adjusted
with some patience. As I said, the sound is thick & dark & if you're wanting
a little brighter sound out of it you'll find the treble knob almost buried.
I already have a great deal of mid-emphasis in my rig, so it wasn't that
bad, but you might want to be careful with the Mid adjustment as with the
overlap it's got a pretty solid effect of the darkness of the sound. Like
his amps, it's probably the most effective & flexible eq section that I've
ever used on an effect.

With the Drive activated sustain increases, and the distortion begins to
take on a bit of a character that I would say is almost fuzz face like. This
"fuzziness" can be fine tuned with the power supply trim screw once again.
The place where it differs from a classic fuzz tone is it sounds more
"organic" more component to the sound than what I would describe, not at
metallic as a fuzz. 

Driving harder & harder gets you a pretty healthy amount of distortion,
thick, rich, dark as you like. Bridge pickup on my strat with the DD Drive
cranked and the tone down some is a pretty classic haunting "slide" sound
I've come to like A LOT!

Using the DD with the MBB means I can have the amp set with less drive or no
drive even, set it up for a clean sound, then punch it up with the DD. The
only downside to that is that I do love the sound of the amp itself being
cranked rather hard, so there are times that I just use the DD as a one
stage boost & have the amp running a little hotter. 

My point here is that once again, any reservations that you have about using
a single channel amp should be re-examined. There is more flexibility here
than I've ever have with any lower quality multi-channel amp, with a sound
quality they could never touch.

One thing that was not to my liking however was the fact that when I first
got the DD, it wasn't giving me any real volume boost unless the volume &
drive & gain were buried...and even then it was a slight boost. 

So I entered into my first "customer service" issue with Chris. I thought
there was something wrong with the pedal & sent it back to him after talking
to him a bit. He checked out the pedal & confirmed that it was working the
way it was designed, just wasn't doing what I thought it would. So I was
screwed right? Wrong. After an email back about what I was looking for/
expecting, Chris modded the pedal & sent it back to me! 

We decided to try about 50% more gain on it...and he loved the sound, so he
sent it back to me & voila! It probably could have gone to around 75% & been
even better, but I'm playing it now as is & its doing exactly what I want,
and also too it seems to give me the ability to even more finely tune the
gain & drive at that first stage. 

Once again, I can't stress enough that this level of service, custom tuning
& creation, just doesn't exist that much any more, and certainly not at this
budget level. Chris' comment to me was that the pedal was working as
designed, but as that wasn't what I needed that he would get it working the
way that I needed it too, and that is exactly what he did. 

In fact, he liked the overall results of the mod that he is now shipping all
if his DD's that way.

Now if you play a plugged acoustic...pay attention C A R E F U L L Y...

You WANT a MicroTube Double Drive! 

The about of depth, harmonics & just plain LAVISH sound created playing
though the DD with both My Martin & My Ovation is AMAZING. Start out with
the EQ on the middle for all 3 bands, flat eq on the guitar, and play, then
dial in from there. I use the tone controls on my Ovation to adjust on the
fly, & usually have the DD just a little brighter side. 
(My Ovation is already a pretty dark sound...not the wirey jangley sound I
was used to from them.

For some reason (which I'm sure Chris knows) having my amp set to max
headroom & using the DD gives the acoustic a more harmonic, richer, fuller
more vibrant tone that any 12ax I've heard. Just HUGE overtones & harmonics
as if there were strings between the strings filling in more tone. Vary the
amount of reverb here & you can get some wild echoing 12 string/choral type
effects. 

Turn up the drive on the double drive though & something amazing happens...a
seed of rawness appears, and you can grow that seed into massive amounts of
vintage saturation type overdrive. The only word I can even think to
describe it is "urgency." It's as if the sound is driving off your fingers &
trying to get out of the speakers harder & harder. 
It's pretty wild.
 
So that's the experience with the MicroTube Double Drive...as always any
questions feel free to drop me a note!