First and foremost let me introduce myself: my first name is Alex and my last name is Saraceno and yes, my son is guitarist Blues Saraceno.
I guess it was time to face the music, in a sort of way. Loud amps were no longer accepted in most small venues, which is where many players get to display their talents. Also, with smaller amps you don't need roadies to move the gear and you can operate out of a small van rather than a full size truck. The difficulty was on how to reproduce the sound of a loud amplifier without actually being loud. Let's let the P.A. do the work if we can produce the right sound or tone, if you want express yourself in that manner.
After some experimentation and quite a bit of money, I found that some old vintage pedals had captured the desired sound and also I noticed that a lot of players still had powerful amps but were unable to find a use for them at low volume. Then it became clear, let's use a good sounding pedal with really cool distortion and stick it into a non-master amp at a reasonable volume, and let's work with that. Now, I never had been a fan of pedals before, mainly since the one that were available were just horrible sounding. But this was all about to change.