Hey there, Reddit.

I’m writing this in case somebody out there is experiencing what I was, which is certain pedals mostly of the dfuzz and drive variety sometimes make amp sims sound terrible.

I have a favorite fuzz pedal, which is the Walrus Eons, and a few drive pedals, like the OCD, tube, screamer and Notaklon.

The walrus sounds absolutely glorious DI ‘d into a DAW or front of house. It is effing massive and full. Everything I wanted from a fuzz pedal. However, in a pedal chain, you can either put it before or after an IR box. Putting the walrus in a signal chain with the Tonex made it sound an absolutely terrible I mean completely neutered. no matter if it was in front of the IR or after it. I had to completely turn off the IR to get the Walrus in its full glory. That is in fact why I got rid of my Tonex. Well that and the interface, but that’s a whole another story.

I saw a bunch of people talking on YouTube about how drive pedals push the front end of amp sims and if it’s a light push kind of like the tube screamer, I see it working. But as with the walrus, most of my overdrives just sounded uncharacteristically, thin and terrible.

So cut to the IR –2. This was a very attractive pedal for me, based off of the effects loop, and the ability to swap out the impulse responses.

I initially set it up as you traditionally would with drive pedals in front and time based effects in the loop. And there was a marginal improvement with my time-based effects but my poor walrus still sounded absolutely terrible. However, I got this bright idea to put my walrus in the loop and low and behold, with a minor drop off bass frequencies. It returned to its glorious fuzziness.

Just having the option of throwing pedals in the loop makes the IR-2 worth a price of admission. I got a simple pedal that takes up very little real estate, that plays all my favorite impulse responses from York Audio and has that bloody effect loop. To top it off it doubles as a back up audio interface if it’s plugged into a computer which is pretty insane for the price .

I’m a total gearhead, but I’ve made it hard and fast rule now that I will not consider any new amps in a box with without an effect loop. It is just a non-starter for me.

I hope that helps because there’s a lot of disinformation out there but believe your ears and find the right piece of gear that makes your rig work