Harvey Gerst- bass god

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mandocaster

mandocaster

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I have heard rumors that Harvey was one of the chief engineers for the Acoustic Control Corporation, makers of amps used by Jaco, Zep, etc.

I recently bought an Acoustic 140 bass head. It really produces the thick meaty bass sound despite its low wattage.
 
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Harvey, advice on the 370?

Hey Harvey,
I use an old Acoustic 370 head with a Fender 2 15" cabinet, oh yeah.

What is the difference between the input 1 and input 2? I believe the first is for passive and the second for active?

What is the danger of having 2 instruments plugged in at one time (i.e. a bass in 1, guitar in 2 - or moog in 1, and bass in 2, - or moog in 1, wurlitzer in 2)? Is it very inadvisable?

I don't plug two things into it unless on the rare occasion someone comes to sit in without an amp. But sometimes, when I sub the gig out, a Moog/Wurlitzer combination is used in my place (it is a r&b soul/hip hop live band thing and my amp and cab stay at the club - a bit too much to carry around NYC).

I'd appreciate anything anyone has to say on this matter. Much love,
Cuzme :)
 
I used the Acoustic 370 series amp for a good while in the 70`s. It was a superb powerhouse amp with great tones. I didnt care for the deep dark Cerwin Vega 18's though. I had them replaced with EVM 18B's to get more high end definition. If Harvey was in on that model it was surely tough. Mine survived a club fire. The knobs melted off the front, the grill and tolex burned off one of the cabs but it kept on truckin for a couple of years.
 
Cuzme said:
Hey Harvey,
I use an old Acoustic 370 head with a Fender 2 15" cabinet, oh yeah.

What is the difference between the input 1 and input 2? I believe the first is for passive and the second for active?
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Input 2 is for hotter instruments that might overload the preamp if plugged into input 1. As I recall, it had about 10 dB less gain than input 1.

What is the danger of having 2 instruments plugged in at one time (i.e. a bass in 1, guitar in 2 - or moog in 1, and bass in 2, - or moog in 1, wurlitzer in 2)? Is it very inadvisable?
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No danger whatsoever. It should work fine. As long as the levels don't clip the input stage (which also won't hurt anything), you can use it like that forever.

I don't plug two things into it unless on the rare occasion someone comes to sit in without an amp. But sometimes, when I sub the gig out, a Moog/Wurlitzer combination is used in my place (it is a r&b soul/hip hop live band thing and my amp and cab stay at the club - a bit too much to carry around NYC).

I'd appreciate anything anyone has to say on this matter. Much love,
Cuzme :)[/QUOTE]
 
I ran an arp oddessy into mine along with a jazz bass. never any problems.
 
mandocaster said:
I have heard rumors that Harvey was one of the chief engineers for the Acoustic Control Corporation, makers of amps used by Jaco, Zep, etc.

I recently bought an Acoustic 140 bass head. It really produces the thick meaty bass sound despite its low wattage.
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It's about 110 watts into a 4 ohm load.

You can get a great bottom end out of it by running it into a pair of JBL D140F bass speakers, another one of my "babies".
 
those 140's were bad to the bone. My keyboard picker had them in both his leslie 147rv's.

I hollered "Mercy" on several occasions when he`d be kickin that B3 on some low end while they were spinnin.
 
Toki987 said:
I used the Acoustic 370 series amp for a good while in the 70`s. It was a superb powerhouse amp with great tones. I didnt care for the deep dark Cerwin Vega 18's though. I had them replaced with EVM 18B's to get more high end definition. If Harvey was in on that model it was surely tough. Mine survived a club fire. The knobs melted off the front, the grill and tolex burned off one of the cabs but it kept on truckin for a couple of years.
Click to expand...
I didn't do the "look" of the 370 - if we'da stayed with my original metal knobs, they wouldn't have melted off.
 
Harvey Gerst said:
I didn't do the "look" of the 370 - if we'da stayed with my original metal knobs, they wouldn't have melted off.
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hehehe, company tradeoffs in reliability and efficiency for economics always rears it`s head at some point down the line. Usually in the end user`s hands.
still, a great amp though. Shortly before it died I bought one of Pete Traynors big tube heads and ran it through a Bob Heil cab, never had that same punch and tone though.
 
I have a pair of 450's I still use with my stereo Rick. I can back the nails out of dry wall. :D
 
Track Rat said:
I have a pair of 450's I still use with my stereo Rick. I can back the nails out of dry wall. :D
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Ah, but can you melt the underwear off the beautiful ice queen? :)
 
Over in the talkbass forum there is a thread that asserts that all solid state amps sound the same.

The Acoustic amps put the lie to this. Mine sounds like no other amp I have tried, and offers a variety of usable tones with its simple controls.
 
mandocaster said:
Over in the talkbass forum there is a thread that asserts that all solid state amps sound the same.

The Acoustic amps put the lie to this. Mine sounds like no other amp I have tried, and offers a variety of usable tones with its simple controls.
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That's kinda like saying all tube amps sound the same, isn't it?

A Mesa Boogie doesn't sound like a Marshall, which doesn't sound like an Ampeg, which doesn't sound like a Peavey 5150. An Acoustic control solid state amp doesn't sound like a Kustom, which doesn't sound like a Crate, which doesn't sound like a (well, you get the idea).

I stood right next to Jimi Hendrix and heard him get "his sound" out of four Acoustic solid state amps. Yeah, there are some good reasons for tube amps and I pushed for Acoustic to make some tube amps right from the start, but there are good and bad solid state amps (and there are good and bad tube amps as well).
 
Harv', did you ever mess around with the transformer types that Bob carver was using?
 
Cuzme said:
...What is the danger of having 2 instruments plugged in at one time (i.e. a bass in 1, guitar in 2 - or moog in 1, and bass in 2, - or moog in 1, wurlitzer in 2)? Is it very inadvisable?

I don't plug two things into it unless on the rare occasion someone comes to sit in without an amp. But sometimes, when I sub the gig out, a Moog/Wurlitzer combination is used in my place (it is a r&b soul/hip hop live band thing and my amp and cab stay at the club - a bit too much to carry around NYC).

I'd appreciate anything anyone has to say on this matter. Much love,
Cuzme :)
Click to expand...
Harvey Gerst said:
No danger whatsoever. It should work fine. As long as the levels don't clip the input stage (which also won't hurt anything), you can use it like that forever.
Click to expand...


I'd think you might get into phasing type issues here, especially if the two instruments covered the same frequency range. The two signals are combined at some point in the circuit, and when they are, if the signal from one instrument is going positive while the other is going negative (at a similar frequency) they would tend to null, or to reinforce if both were going in the same directio.

If you put a sinewave into one input, and the same sinewave 180 degrees out of phase into the second, I'd think thay'd cancel. That's why I've never used both inputs on an amp.

Correct me if I'm wrong. :)
 
crazydoc said:
I'd think you might get into phasing type issues here, especially if the two instruments covered the same frequency range. The two signals are combined at some point in the circuit, and when they are, if the signal from one instrument is going positive while the other is going negative (at a similar frequency) they would tend to null, or to reinforce if both were going in the same direction.

If you put a sinewave into one input, and the same sinewave 180 degrees out of phase into the second, I'd think they'd cancel. That's why I've never used both inputs on an amp.

Correct me if I'm wrong. :)
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How is this different from running two instruments into two channels of a mixer and bringing that summed signal into the monitors? Using the two inputs at the same time is like having a passive two channel mixer built in.

It's not the same thing as having two mics recording the same signal from two slightly different locations.

You won't get phasing problems by having two different instruments plugged into the amp at the same time.
 
Harvey Gerst said:
How is this different from running two instruments into two channels of a mixer and bringing that summed signal into the monitors? Using the two inputs at the same time is like having a passive two channel mixer built in.
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Well, in mixing you have at least two options to distinguish the two signals.

One is stereo separation, where you can pan the two signals apart in the stereo field toward different speakers, helping to separate any conflicts in the signal.
The other is EQ, as is done where there is masking, slightly boosting or cutting different frequencies in two signals of similar frequency range.

You can't do this with two instruments plugged into the same amp, unless each input has separate frequency controls (as some do - I don't know if they'd be adequate for this purpose though).

Maybe phasing was a bad term to use, though I think that the phase relationship of the signals plays a part in it. This is nothing to do with two mics on the same signal - rather it is mixing two similar signals with constantly changing volume and frequency relationships, that at times are going to reinforce and at times null.

When you tune a guitar by beat frequency, the two string signals are going through the same path. If you were to tune two guitars plugged into the same amp to each other, could you do it by beats? If so, then I think my premise in the above post is true. If not, then it isn't.

Then again, I could just be full of shit. I guess I'll just have to try it out. :)
 
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