Guitar amp Vs PA?

  • Thread starter Thread starter tigerflystudio
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Ever gotten a chance to hear the SRV/Albert King duet album? It's fucking incredible, for one, but you also get to hear Stevie more-or-less being himself (he holds back a little at first) playing with King for about half of the album, and then they start playing "Blues Before Sunrise," and after telling a story about how he once played that live with Jimi and Janis Joplin at the Filmore, he asks SRV to give him his best Jimi impression.

It REALLY drives home just how different the two guys played - they both played amped up blues, but Jimi was much more Delta/Chicago and SRV was almost pure Texas with a smattering of Jimi here and there. Vaughan drops Jimi-ism after Jimi-ism into the couple choruses he takes there, and it really sounds strikingly different from everything he's played on that record before.
I'll check it out.
 
Like Lt Bob, I hear Jimi everywhere in SRV's playing. Jimi was obviously not Stevie Ray's only influence but it is integral in almost every piece of music he plays.

(It's why I never came around to SRV's version of "Little Wing" - it's almost a parody of Jimi's tune, which is short and sweet, and not nearly as self-indulgent as SRV's version.)
 
(It's why I never came around to SRV's version of "Little Wing" - it's almost a parody of Jimi's tune, which is short and sweet, and not nearly as self-indulgent as SRV's version.)

Oh, man... I love Jimi's original too, but that's one of my favorite guitar instrumentals (and I listen to a ton of instrumental stuff). I LOVE that tune... I always thought SRV was one of the few guys who could cover Jimi and do it justice, because he could take a Jimi tune and somehow make it his own, too.
 
(Meshuggah, for example, has been recording and touring with modelers direct for quite some time, but their super low tuned percussive guitar sound actually in my experience works BETTER with speaker modeling than through a real amp.

Possible explanation: the free air resonance of a lot of 12" guitar speakers is around 100Hz, whereas any PA is going to use at least 15" drivers with a resonance of ~45Hz. When you decide to play in drop C, your lowest note is 65Hz.
 
Oh, man... I love Jimi's original too, but that's one of my favorite guitar instrumentals (and I listen to a ton of instrumental stuff). I LOVE that tune... I always thought SRV was one of the few guys who could cover Jimi and do it justice, because he could take a Jimi tune and somehow make it his own, too.

I'm with Zaphod there, that version is painfully exaggerated, especially the 12 bars of trills. Makes me wish for death . . . :eek:
 
Oh, man... I love Jimi's original too, but that's one of my favorite guitar instrumentals (and I listen to a ton of instrumental stuff). I LOVE that tune... I always thought SRV was one of the few guys who could cover Jimi and do it justice, because he could take a Jimi tune and somehow make it his own, too.

I do like it, Drew, but it just goes on and on. For a SRV instrumental I'll take Riviera Paradise any day of the week. So beautiful. :)

(Edited to correct my addressing msh instead of Drew. Sorry.)
 
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I do like it, MSH, but it just goes on and on. For a SRV instrumental I'll take Riviera Paradise any day of the week. So beautiful. :)
and the worst part of that version is when I pick up a bass gig with a local guitarist who's really an fucking unbelievable player, but he does SRV's style of 'Little Wing' and it's just over and over and over and over 'till I have tunnel vision and want to taker a grinder and just remove those notes from my bass altogether.
:D
 
Possible explanation: the free air resonance of a lot of 12" guitar speakers is around 100Hz, whereas any PA is going to use at least 15" drivers with a resonance of ~45Hz. When you decide to play in drop C, your lowest note is 65Hz.

That's probably part of the reason. I think part of it too, however is that PAs are much more full-frequency than your average guitar cab, and not only are you getting better low end replication, you're also getting a crisper high end. When you're tuning as low as those guys do (and these days they're generally in F or E an octave below low E), a lot of getting a clear, idenitifiable tone is really in how you handle the presence and attack - not oversaturating your tone and dialing in a fairly bright sound, so you really get the sound of the pick on the string to come through. It's sort of like how modern metal kicks are almost all click and low bass - the idea is to get it to punch through percussively.

Of course, speaker sims are designed to compensate for this sort of stuff, but my sense is they're just not that good, so it's probably still happening. :)
 
and the worst part of that version is when I pick up a bass gig with a local guitarist who's really an fucking unbelievable player, but he does SRV's style of 'Little Wing' and it's just over and over and over and over 'till I have tunnel vision and want to taker a grinder and just remove those notes from my bass altogether.
:D

Oh, yeah, that's an exciting tune from the bass player's perspective. :D
 
and the worst part of that version is when I pick up a bass gig with a local guitarist who's really an fucking unbelievable player, but he does SRV's style of 'Little Wing' and it's just over and over and over and over 'till I have tunnel vision and want to taker a grinder and just remove those notes from my bass altogether.
:D

You know, as much as I love that song.... You have my condolences. :lol:
 
Actually I don't mind the tunes where I get to sit on one note the whole time. I played too many notes in my youth, and I'm tired :o

The tunes I don't like are the ones that force me to change notes for no reason, like octaves or something. "Free Falling" comes to mind :mad:


Hey, first rehearsal for a new band tonight, my first band in . . . oh . . . seven years now :o
 
Just to further confuse the issue, I just read an interview with Jeff Beck and he said that on his latest album he did some songs with a JCM900 but a lot of it was done with a POD because they were all kinds of textures and sounds he couldn't get with the Marshall since they kinda do one thing.
Now that's not live and I've ALWAYS said that it's live where I find POD's lacking.
I use 'em for recording all the time.

But still, here's Jeff Beck, who certainly is a decent player, who's saying that he preferred it to the Marshall for a lot of his guitar sounds on the album.
 
But still, here's Jeff Beck, who certainly is a decent player, who's saying that he preferred it to the Marshall for a lot of his guitar sounds on the album.

I don't really know his newest album...

...but I used to own a Johnson J-Station. It was awesome for those 4AM recording sessions in college, it was convenient as hell, and as far as modelers go I actually thought that one wasn't too bad.

I stopped using it when I grabbed a Marshall TSL100 because I thought it's emulated out was better than the J-Station's modeling, and then when I sold that for a Mesa Nomad, I was so happy with the tone from it mic'd that I never bothered to go back to the Johnson, even though the Mesa didn't have an emulated out.

That said, I kept the J-Station for a couple years after that. It couldn't match my Mesa for "guitar" sounds, but I had a couple pretty cool ambient-ish patches saved - my favorite was a distorted patch with a noisegate with seriously slow release times and tons of delay for "swell" effects - that the Johnson was better for than my actual amp plus software plugins. If he was doing something like that on his last album, I TOTALLY understand where he's coming from.

Hell, this is the patch I had in mind - this was all Johnson, and recorded, um... eight or nine years ago, so it's pretty rough. But that swelling effect in the background was the reason I held onto this thing for as long as I did.

Click me!

The patch comes in at about :27 - ideally, I'd have been tracking in stereo so I could get the delays to move around too, or even better recorded dry and added the delays, but, well, this was maybe 2001, so it was pretty low tech. :p
 
Well, there's clipping and then there's clipping; tube amp distortion comes from clipping. But to the OP, you do not want to clip the PA.

Gunn
There is a big difference between clipping a PA system and overdriving an amp
overdriving an amp does not damage equipment but clipping the sound reinforcement system can do any number of things from shutting down the board to blowing voice coils out of the mains and that does not entail pushing the main faders or a single channel fader for that fact all the way up out of its head room range that can be done by simply having an idiot behind the board who does not know how to correctly use the gain knob or where the faders need to be set when EQ'ing. clipping can also cause really bad feed back as well;

(just a side note about feedback: if you know that your gain is not set so high that it should not cause feedback lower the 5K frequency on your graphic EQ, this should eliminate of any feedback. especially need to reduce the 5KHz when using any ambiance/reverb or echo effects if you experience feedback when using the effect and don't when the effect is muted. FYI if you cannot eleminate feedback with the 5K slider down then your gain is set too high. this note is in refrence to VOX settings but does not exclude instruments)

I have never seen a guitar amp speaker destroyed by dimeing the volume and Gain unless the speaker was under rated to begin with.

Like I said clipping the system and distorting a guitar speaker are two different things entirely In my own opinion
Please don't give me the definition of clipping:D
 
Gunn
There is a big difference between clipping a PA system and overdriving an amp
overdriving an amp does not damage equipment but clipping the sound reinforcement system can do any number of things from shutting down the board to blowing voice coils out of the mains and that does not entail pushing the main faders or a single channel fader for that fact all the way up out of its head room range that can be done by simply having an idiot behind the board who does not know how to correctly use the gain knob or where the faders need to be set when EQ'ing. clipping can also cause really bad feed back as well;

(just a side note about feedback: if you know that your gain is not set so high that it should not cause feedback lower the 5K frequency on your graphic EQ, this should eliminate of any feedback. especially need to reduce the 5KHz when using any ambiance/reverb or echo effects if you experience feedback when using the effect and don't when the effect is muted. FYI if you cannot eleminate feedback with the 5K slider down then your gain is set too high. this note is in refrence to VOX settings but does not exclude instruments)

I have never seen a guitar amp speaker destroyed by dimeing the volume and Gain unless the speaker was under rated to begin with.

Like I said clipping the system and distorting a guitar speaker are two different things entirely In my own opinion
Please don't give me the definition of clipping:D


??? Did you somehow miss that I was agreeing with you? Like I said, there's clipping and then there's clipping. That wonderful sound coming from a quartet of EL34's pushed to 11 is clipping, too. But you knew that. :D

Roguetitan right. Guitar amp clipping good. PA amp clipping bad.
 
??? Did you somehow miss that I was agreeing with you? Like I said, there's clipping and then there's clipping. That wonderful sound coming from a quartet of EL34's pushed to 11 is clipping, too. But you knew that. :D

Roguetitan right. Guitar amp clipping good. PA amp clipping bad.

OH Ya I knew that you were agreeing however I thought I would throw out some more info for the uninformed to soak up. this post was not meant for you as much as it was for greenhorns.
I was just using your post as refrence point basically:)
 
Well, i really love my vox tube pedal: http://www.voxamps.com/pedals/tonelable/ I would play it thru a PA any day and be happy with it...IF...the PA was good and there was nice wedge monitors in front of me and the sound guy was able to give me enough juice in my mon. The main thing to me is that if youre going to just go thru a modeler, you've got to have PA capable of actually pushing as much air as an amp would.
 
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