Are Metal Distortion Pedals a Distraction?

It seems like all the Boss "metal" distortion pedals are memed and ridiculed extensively online, to varying degrees of course. But it is also doubtless that some of these pedals are legendary. If you're a fan of Swedish death metal, you've almost certainly heard bands that used the HM-2 or that were influenced by them.

The MT-2 Metal Zone and HM-2W Heavy Metal headline many a list of "pedals to avoid for metal guitarists." At the same time, there are clearly players out there who are skilled in getting a variety of tones out of these pedals. And they wouldn't be in production if they were universally useless, right?

And what about the Boss ML-2 Metal Core? I own one (at least at the time of writing this), but it's no longer on my pedalboard. It's not that I totally hate how it sounds, but it became redundant with subsequent purchases such as my tube amp, overdrives, and EQ pedal (Boss EQ-200). Now, my rig gives me plenty of gain staging and tone shaping, so the "instant metal" heavy distortion effect from the ML-2 adds less marginal value to my pedalboard (and can be distracting sometimes).

With the right combination of tools, I think owning a metal-specific distortion pedal is unnecessary. But since talk is cheap, I've prepared a playable demo that lets you plug in your guitar and hear what your playing sounds like through real NAM captures of my amp with and without an ML-2 in front of it.

Why I wouldn't buy an HM-2W

Perhaps more than any other pedal, the HM-2 is associated with one famous combination of settings. The classic "Swedish chainsaw" sound comes from turning all knobs all the way up. I think this makes it a classic case of a pedal that you can consider using solely in the form of a NAM model (a concept which I've talked about here before).

For example, here's a model from TONE3000 user jimbolodisc.

Why buy the physical knobs if you aren't going to use them? Of course, I think it's valid if you want it on your board for gigging or to get the real interactions with your amp and other pedals, but not everyone needs to naively jump there.

The MT-2 strikes me as being on the opposite end of the spectrum: potentially worth owning if you want to learn to utilize its powerful EQ. Lack of choice isn't the usual complain with the MT-2. And the ML-2 is probably somewhere in between.

Tone comparison

Use the player below to compare my DSL5CR + TS + EQ-200 setup against the ML-2 into the clean channel.

(The microphone used for capturing these setups was a Sennheiser e609 Silver placed at the edge of the speaker as described in this article)

I might use the NAM model with the ML-2 for a specific metal recording project of mine, but it ceased being necessary a while ago for me to get usable high-gain tones for day-to-day practice and songwriting at home. If you've got the right ingredients in your "recipe," the extra pedal might just be a distraction.