Gear Snob Alert! You Want Good Tone???

  • Thread starter Thread starter ametth
  • Start date Start date
yea but it goes with the territory. how can something be so flexible and adaptive, yet be simple and fast to dial in? the level of sophistication is directly related to its versatility, unless of course these amps happen to be preprogrammed with exactly the sounds YOU want, which just isn't possible - too many people to please. that's my opinion anyway. but I have found that once you have some basis sounds, say like a great clean tone that you might use on many songs, it is generally easy to add a desired effect (e.g. phaser/chorus, whatever). Same goes for the dirty channels: all I usually do is vary the gain for different tunes.

I hope we can have a conclusive shoot-out of the "artificial" digitally generated tones versus "pure" analog tube generated tones. Although ametth was the instigator of this subjective debate, he was nice enough to offer to post some samples that I'll provide to make the point that today's DMAs are hardly discernable from tube amps, at least on decent recordings. There have been shoot-outs on this forum before which included different microphone types and guitar cables I believe, but to my knowledge there haven't been any A/B comparisons between DMA and tube amps. Correct me if I'm wrong. I'm sure many of us would like to hear how this pans out (no pun), so I encourage others to help out and post some samples.
 
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dabluesman said:
ametth, how did the Cyber-Twin audition go?
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I didnt get a chance to audition one. I really was planning to this weekend, but just could not find the time. I will by next week though.
 
psmith66 said:
Tweaking is for achieving variations in tone. You shouldn't have to tweak extensively to get a good tone in the first place.
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There's some truth to that. Then again, I mainly play through a Mesa/Boogie Quad. Each knob on the pre affects different characteristics of the gain stages. While the knobs are labeled bass, mid, etc., they don't just boost the freq's like an EQ. They adjust the frequency characteristics of gain stages in between other gain stages. Each knob on its own subtly affects the tone of the amp. Also, there is a subtle interaction between one knob and the others. In combination, different combinations of settings obtain different tones. However, certain combinations do not obtain the tone qualities that others do. For example, just setting all the knobs at "10" or all the knobs at "5" usually doesn't reult in a good tone.

Yet, the designers did provide great foundation settings in the manual. Unfortunately, how many guitarists want to read a manual when auditioning an amp? Not many.

For my purposes, I generally use one of the foundation settings with a couple of tweaks. Interestingly enough, I stopped by a local used music equipment store that had a Mark III head (same preamp as the second channel of the Quad). However, I couldn't get a decent tone because they didn't have the manual and I didn't have mine for reference.
 
MegaBooger said:
Unfortunately, how many guitarists want to read a manual when auditioning an amp? Not many.
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Guitarists can read these days?? <g>
 
BBB- you have a Sansamp PSA-1 don't you ? I was totally confused the first few weeks I had mine. Some of the names they use for the control knobs are crunch, buzz, etc. It didn't make a lot of sense to me even though it's really a very logical interface and there are no hidden parameters....it's all right there on the front of the unit. In fact, I can take a totally clean Fender-type sound and turn it into a Marshall stack in seconds just by turning a few knobs. I love that interface. :)

I have a Bass Pod that has a confusing interface. To adjust many of the parameters you HAVE to have the manual in front of you or have an extraordinary memory (which I lack). I wish Line 6 would come out with the next version of the Pods having a huge LCD and more knobs. It probably won't happen.
 
Yeah, Wide Awake. It took a little bit to fully understand the interaction of the knobs on the PSA-1. Yet, you can dial up some incredible tones. Also, the knobs make sense after a short amount of experimentation (the manual helps a bit too... manual?... what manual?). SansAmp also did a good job with the GT2.

Regarding the present discussion, the great thing about the PSA-1 is that the presets sound good to start with. You don't have to experiment with lots of tweaking just to dig for an elusive good tone.

I could go on about the PSA-1... ;)
 
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