here's one of my sound experiments ..... just got to thinking about what it might sound like with buncha gits in unison.
So I threw together some drumbs and used a song I used to play like, 40 years ago to track 6 or 7 guitars to .... this is from memory and I'm actually a little surprised at how well I remembered it .... in fact , the bass part is the first thing I did after the drums and this was only the second time I attempted it .... tried once and screwed up and then did it all the way thru.
As usual, I'm interested in the sounds and don't care that much about being perfect musically.
The rest of the parts are 2nd and 3rd takes except the lead which is a first take.
I decided I wasn't gonna try singing anything so I needed to put something over it and I remembered minerman had asked me to post a clip of the Rocktron Banshee so I said, "I'll use that!
Haven't touched the thing in a year or so ..... couldn't get it to sound right.
All my mics are ball mics and those don't work well with the tube because the ball pushes it way off to the side and it sounded like crap.
So I tried a SDC which is a stick but that overloaded the poor thing.
So I ended up mounting the Rocktron talkbox tube about 6 inches in front of a MXL V67 ..... by then I was tired of the whole enterprise and played it and took that. By the end of the track I was getting some interesting sounds outta the talkbox and surely could have done something better but I was done at that point.
I threw down a mix and here it is.
I mixed in my studio where it sounds pretty big on my good system which usually translates well to my 'puter speakers but this one seems to have the kick overloading my speakers a bit.
Dunno why .... if your speakers are wimpy it might do them too so be aware you might have to tweak the bass.
Haha, that sounds pretty good Boob. Nice talkbox for doing it in a non-traditional way. The layers of guitars work together. Sometimes the effect almost resembles keys underneath the guitars. So that song is called "Black Dog"? It's funny, I've heard that song, and pretty much every other Zep song a million times....I don't know the names of any of them. Maybe like two or three.
#1 actually sounds pretty badass to me. Much more gain than I've heard from you, but would work well in a raunchy hard rock song. The "chug" on the low palm muted notes is tight even at this low master setting. That's rare from my experience.
#2 is pretty much where I like the tone from this amp. It's just past that point of breakup, and lets the guitar speak for itself. I'd add an overdrive from here if I needed more sensitivity or saturation.
#3 sounds kind of thin, but still has some hair on it. I don't think that it sounds bad, and would totally work in a mix where there's a bass guitar to pick up the lows. But #2 beats it for me, just because it has more body.
I would use #1 and #2 if I could put them as presets on an amp and recall them at will.
Fun to hear how different the JMP 2204 sounds than the JCM 2204. You've certainly got yours figured out, it sounds great. I'm still fiddling with mine. There is a surprising range of tones in this simple amp, and I'm honing in on a few that I like a lot. With such different pickups as '65 Jazzmaster single coils and a shit-hot modern Gibson T500, it's going to take me a while to find "that" setting for my tastes and my guitar of the moment.
Thanks dude. It is a different amp from your 2204 even though they are the same circuit. When I got this thing, I knew it had some issues, but I had no idea how deep I'd go to fix them. It sounded good, but it was dark. It was kind of flubby. It also made noise due to the filter caps being original and worn out. I just started picking at it, studying it, comparing pics and specs online, doing routine maintenance, and one by one I'd find little things that were modded or just done wrong as repairs over the years. Each fix would bring it closer and closer to what it's supposed to be. There were three very important fixes that really whipped this amp back into shape - 1) I put the fucking bright cap back in. Why people remove this thing is beyond me. 2) replaced the filter caps and bias caps. That got rid of the constant hum and noise. 3) corrected the EL34 conversion which was done all wrong. This was a big one. My amp is a US version, so it originally came with 6550s. Someone at some time popped EL34s in it without doing any of the resistor changes on the board. How it even biased up is a mystery to me. I could have just put 6550s back in it and called it a day, but I want the EL34 sound. Getting that right made a big difference. The rest was just going resistor by resistor and cap by cap making sure the values were correct and rewiring the input jacks to work as they should.
The biggest revelation I had was learning about the power supplies. Even though JMP and JCM 2203/2204s are the same circuit, the power supply voltages are very different. The JMP era amps have much lower B+ voltages, like in the 350-400 VDC range. Around the time the amp became the JCM, the power supply went way up. The JCM era amps run in the mid 400s VDC, some almost as high as 500 VDC. These lower internal voltages are what makes the JMP era amps a little warmer, a little "browner", makes them break up a little different from the brighter, edgier, more aggressive higher voltage JCM era amps.
So after all that, my JMP 2204 is now just right, just as it should be, I think it sounds killer, and it's probably my most often used amp for practices and playing live. I love it. It's so simple. I get a lot of nice compliments about my live tone.
I ordered a new set of tubes (just so I KNOW what's in it, rather than the hodgepodge of who-knows-how-old tubes that are in it now) and a bias probe so I can at least settle a few variables. If you never hear from me again, assume that I died from electrocution while doing my first bias job on a running amplifier. Let my epitaph read "don't touch that!".
Awesome. It's really quite easy, but be careful. I'm not gonna say you'll die, but you can get a motherfucker of a shock even from an unplugged amp. You're gonna need to figure out your plate voltage to calculate your bias figures. Don't just shoot for a number. Figure out what number you need and set it to that.
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