D*A*M Sonic Titan - Power Amp Distortion

D*A*M

The Sonic Titan is a little different from your regular dirt box in the sense that it actually uses its own power amp to create an earth moving amount of distortion. The Titan's first stage is a JFET (Junction Field Effect Transistor) system that is designed around a rather famous and expensive high end Tube amplifier's input stage. This section helps to create natural highs giving superbly focused string clarity and a highly responsive and dynamic overdrive tone. Picking styles become very touch responsive and tones can go from fairly clean to mild overdrive just from the strength of the pick attack.

The power amp in the Titan is set up to have very high gain levels but just like with any power amp distortion needs to be pushed hard to create a heavily saturated tone. The headroom on this unit is massive so running it into a clean amplifier you will be able to produce huge amounts of volume boost. The Level control also governs the saturation of the power stage so if you run the Titan into an overdriven amplifier you will achieve a higher gain boost with serious amounts of tonal saturation. The idea here is to achieve big power amp style distortion that you can actually use at slightly more reasonable volume levels than pushing a non master tube head it to distortion.

It can quite easily fill the roll of any Tube Screamer style drive box for boosting tube OD into blissfully smooth and natural bluesy distortion. It becomes a real daemon when pushed hard with the volume fully open and can produce an obscenely heavy doom/stoner distortion tone. It is really excellent for dropped string tunings because of the bold string clarity under high saturation.

The Controls

• "Level" sets the output volume and volume it has, this thing can get unhealthily LOUD.
• "Tone" this control is a Hi-cut tone 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 Distortion and sustain available.