I did the unthinkable today

cdwillis

cdwillis

Well-known member
I plugged straight into my amp and played guitar for a while. No pedals at all!

Ok, that's a lie. I did have my Boss tuner and an MXR Studio Compressor between the guitar and the amplifier. I was messing around seeing how much difference small amounts of compression made with the lead channel on the amp and the clean channel. I'm not a compressor guy and it's always been something I've struggled to understand. I think I have a 1% increased understanding now. :D

I go through spurts of building or breadboarding without much actual playing. So this is a reminder to go play your guitar.
 
I go through very long periods of only building. It takes a really good pedal to get me to actually play for more than a few strums. The gristleizer had me entertained and playing for a few hours recently. Before that was probably the PPCB ultimatum and parenthesis mini. I should play more often…
 
I just finished my JTM45 (my replacement OT finally arrived), so I've been playing the amp as a chassis into my 5E3's cab and have been astounded how few pedals it needs. If I need dirt, then sure - it's as loud as hell without a dirt pedal. But the clean sounds are so beautiful I can get lost in just guitar and amp. It really amazes me how a classic design built well with great transformers and a good grounding scheme can sound better than anything in a store.

Now I have a cabinet to build...
 
For decades i played my Les Paul strait into the amp, just adding some onboard reverb. This changed when i got a single coil Strat and a standard Tele, which are ‚needy‘ guitars imo.
 
I just built my first tube amp a couple weeks ago and I'm convinced there seems to be a difference. All these years I thought it was just hipster propaganda. I play a strat and the difference in the pickup tone selections feels much more pronounced and I've found myself using the pedals less and less and just playing and "feeling" more. Crazy.
 
PunchySunshine said:
I just built my first tube amp a couple weeks ago and I'm convinced there seems to be a difference. All these years I thought it was just hipster propaganda. I play a strat and the difference in the pickup tone selections feels much more pronounced and I've found myself using the pedals less and less and just playing and "feeling" more. Crazy.
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I started playing in 1967 and of course I had a tube amp. When solid state made it's way to guitar amps I got one and stopped playing the tube amp, I was thrilled that I didn't have to wait for it to warm up. After a year or so I became frustrated that nothing I played sounded good. I turned the tube amp on and was FLOORED at how much better my playing was.

Gave the solid state amp away.......
 
Unpopular opinion: there some modern solid state amps that sound better than a number of tube amps. It is possible to design a poor sounding tube amp… and there are quite a few of them out there!
 
Giorfida said:
Unpopular opinion: there some modern solid state amps that sound better than a number of tube amps. It is possible to design a poor sounding tube amp… and there are quite a few of them out there!
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HERESY! lol....

Actually, I can hear dog whistles and ultrasonic sounds. Freaked the audiologist out when I pegged the hearing testing machine at 21khz I could 100% tell which ear the sound was coming out. When he said "which side" and I said "neither", he really freaked.

I have never heard a solid state amp that has the multiple harmonics that I hear in tube amps.
 
Oh there are plenty of atrocious tube amps out there! And there are some pretty good SS amps too. For a long time transistor amps didn't sound as good as tubes but then tubes have been around a lot longer so there was some catching up to do. Tubes aren't as good as they used to be, although you can still get a great sound out of JJs and others. You might have to replace them more often but I don't mind too much.

Back when I used to work in a guitar store guys would insist on buying a tube amp and then stick a heap of Boss pedals in front of it, obscuring any tube-ness the amp might have had. At the time Fender had just come out with a pretty decent range of SS amps with red knobs called thing like "Stage 185" I think. They had a sound to rival any amp that you stuck a bunch of Boss pedals in front of. Marshall had the JCM900 amps which weren't a patch on the early JCM800s or JMPs. A lot of players would buy the tube amps trying to get it to sound like what the SS Fender did. It all seemed madness to me.

Whenever I saw a band where I thought the guitar sounded particularly good it was inevitably some older Fender or Marshall tube amp. Occasionally a Boogie but they were rare here. I had a Musicman which sounded good if I used a big Boss 10-band EQ in front of it!

Current Fender and Marshall tube amps are pretty bad. They could be so much better if they changed just a few things in their manufacture. A couple of years ago I bought a brand new Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb RI and the reverb was so noisy it was unusable. I had bought it knowing that I would want to work on it so tried a few simple things which made it sound better. Then I gutted it and completely rebuilt it in the original style. It didn't sound light years better but it did sound more like an original. All the noise, hum and crap was gone. It sounded sweeter and clearer. less brittle. And it will require far less maintenance for the new owner. It cost more than it should have but it was fun.

Have a look at Psionic Audio's youtube videos about RI Fenders. If you can build a pedal you can fix your Fender amp to sound a lot better.

(edit) Found a pic of the gutted DRRI:

Deluxe Reverb int.jpg
 
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HamishR said:
Oh there are plenty of atrocious tube amps out there! And there are some pretty good SS amps too. For a long time transistor amps didn't sound as good as tubes but then tubes have been around a lot longer so there was some catching up to do. Tubes aren't as good as they used to be, although you can still get a great sound out of JJs and others. You might have to replace them more often but I don't mind too much.

Back when I used to work in a guitar store guys would insist on buying a tube amp and then stick a heap of Boss pedals in front of it, obscuring any tube-ness the amp might have had. At the time Fender had just come out with a pretty decent range of SS amps with red knobs called thing like "Stage 185" I think. They had a sound to rival any amp that you stuck a bunch of Boss pedals in front of. Marshall had the JCM900 amps which weren't a patch on the early JCM800s or JMPs. A lot of players would buy the tube amps trying to get it to sound like what the SS Fender did. It all seemed madness to me.

Whenever I saw a band where I thought the guitar sounded particularly good it was inevitably some older Fender or Marshall tube amp. Occasionally a Boogie but they were rare here. I had a Musicman which sounded good if I used a big Boss 10-band EQ in front of it!

Current Fender and Marshall tube amps are pretty bad. They could be so much better if they changed just a few things in their manufacture. A couple of years ago I bought a brand new Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb RI and the reverb was so noisy it was unusable. I had bought it knowing that I would want to work on it so tried a few simple things which made it sound better. Then I gutted it and completely rebuilt it in the original style. It didn't sound light years better but it did sound more like an original. All the noise, hum and crap was gone. It sounded sweeter and clearer. less brittle. And it will require far less maintenance for the new owner. It cost more than it should have but it was fun.

Have a look at Psionic Audio's youtube videos about RI Fenders. If you can build a pedal you can fix your Fender amp to sound a lot better.

(edit) Found a pic of the gutted DRRI:

View attachment 65632
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That looks great, but I want to repeat for everyone here, I heard Leo Fender with my own ears say "Cloth wire, I only used that CRAP because I got a million feet of it for $1000 military surplus, it cost more to rent the building to store it in"
 
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