How to cook a tube amp?

I recently read a great article on the Barber Electronics forum entitled "How to cook a tube amp". It describes how to use a clean boost pedal to "cook" the front end of your tube amp. A clean boost pedal provides up to 30dB of clean boost which drastically increases the touch-sensitivity of your amplifier's preamp section, making both clean, rhythm and lead sounds much fuller and more responsive.

Barber makes the Launch Pad specifically for this purpose (plus the added A/B switching capability). There are other pedals out there which do basically the same thing, such as the Fulltone Fat Boost, MXR Micro Amp or Jack Orman's Mini-booster pedal. I'm currently building a clone of the Mini-booster and am anxious to try it out.

While I was reading a review of clean boost pedals on the AMZ FX site I noticed that they listed the Voodoo Lab Sparkle Drive as a great clean boost pedal. I own the Sparkle Drive and have used it as a high quality substitute for the Ibanez Tube Screamer, but I never thought to use it as a clean boost pedal. I'm always one to experiment with new ideas, so this weekend I was playing a gig with my trusty Fender Blues Deluxe and decided to try "cooking" the amp. I placed the Sparkle Drive at the end of my signal chain just before the amp and cranked the Clean and Volume knobs on the pedal (which disengages the Gain and Tone controls) and adjusted the amp's volume accordingly. WOW!! I was so amazed I almost lost my cookies. The touch sensitivity was unbelievable. I had a friend play my guitar while I felt the cone vibrations on my Eminence Red Fang speaker and I gotta say, it felt like a cat waiting to pounce. The amp was set dead clean with the volume around 2.5 and I could feel the speaker responding to his every move. Even if he wasn't playing notes, just sliding his hand lightly up and down the strings the speaker responded to every minute detail. This is what I've been looking for forever! Anyhow, I recommend that you give this a try as soon as you can. You'll be amazed at how different your amp sounds. Have fun...