I prefer playing through extremely clean, loud amp with a lot of headroom, and controlling overdrive (and everything else) via pedals.
I agree entirely with this part - my main amp is an SWR SM-500 bass amp, stereo 250 watts-per-channel. I've actually knocked the drywall off the wall of a house with that puppy... :toothy10: However, there's an old adage - "You get what you pay for" - that has been reverse-engineered into a marketing scheme whereby a finite value and amount of capacitors, resistors, op-amps, wire, boards and whatnot have been ridiculously overpriced in order to trick people into buying "the best." Around December or so, Guitar Player magazine had a special issue with the setups of "20 of the Top Stars" or some such thing. There were plenty of Keeleys and Moogerfoogers and all, but a surprising number of Boss, Electro-Harmonix, even old Arions (!). I'm partial to the old DOD pedals, the company has morphed into Digitech (still great, IMO). Their old stuff was made with top-notch op-amps & parts, highly
musical engineering, assembled in a secret Utah cave by polygamous vision-seeking Mormons*... get 'em for $25 on Ebay.
As David Gilmour is fond of saying, he can go into any decent music store in any city in the world and buy what he need to get "his" sounds; as New Yorkie jazz assassin Oz Noy has said, there's ten or a dozen octave fuzzes he can tweak to get what he wants, ten or more rotary-speaker sims that'll work, ten or more of this and that.... it's most emphatically not rocket science, and it's not secret magic mojo, not anymore. Price point is a marketing tool, on both ends of the scale. I'm real, real sure that if I got on stage with Oz Noy or David Gilmour, me armed with a freakin'
$1200 Cornish stompbox, and them armed with a couple of $30 Behringers, I know how it'd turn out.... you try it, huh?
*(I made that part up)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUf8TGiIwiU&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpSbe8IxH9Y&feature=related
(BTW - Oz Noy on Effects Part 2 & 3 goes way into the use and function of his toys)