The New Tone Thread

  • Thread starter Thread starter Telegram Sam
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Ha, thanks. My wife thinks I'm just insane. She is supportive, but she doesn't get it.

Your lead tone does seem a little murky but not too bad to me. It sounds like a nice creamy lead tone wants to come out but it just needs a little fine tuning. I see your presence is on 0 and all your knobs are on 5. Turn them bitches. Get some presence in there. Presence is generally high mids. That could be the clarity you're not getting.
 
Greg_L said:
Hey tone thread homies........my quest for deaf is complete! :thumbs up:

Found this baby at a GC in Hollywood on a recent trip there. It was like seeing a beautiful woman from across the room. My peripheral vision went dark and all I could see was this amp. I think I even heard angels singing. Plugged it in, turned it up, bought it on the spot.

JCM 800 reissue. 900 bucks. Clean as a whistle. Loud as fuck. :listeningmusic:




The family portrait....
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Oh god. Fucking beautiful! Congrats!
 
Lt. Bob said:
congrats man ......... I'd be looking for a gig where I could use 4 half stacks!
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Thanks bud. I do wanna go amp mental at a gig one of these days. Like, bring everything. I have a show thursday at a small-ish place where a halfstack is almost overkill and a full stack is laughable. Now that I got my little truck back I might go full stack at that show.

I'll be putting the new 800 through it's paces tomorrow at band practice. I know it's gonna be killer. I'm really excited to have all of my amps, but you know probably more than anyone how long I've been babbling on about 800s. It's my last piece of the puzzle.
 
Cool Greg, I knew you'd snag one eventually.....Still no 'net at home for me, but should be this week.....Until then I'll just have to keep working on the drum programming (which is coming right along btw), & catching up on "me" time.....See you guys in a few days......
 
minerman said:
Cool Greg, I knew you'd snag one eventually.....Still no 'net at home for me, but should be this week.....Until then I'll just have to keep working on the drum programming (which is coming right along btw), & catching up on "me" time.....See you guys in a few days......
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Thanks dude. Hang in there. Although I wouldn't wish "working on drum programming" on my worst enemy. That's gotta suck!

I used the 800 at band practice last night and gave it a nice little workout in a loud live band setting. It was awesome. I haven't played through an unaltered 2203 circuit in a very long time. I could review it with one word: Headroom. That's what really stood out the most to me. Headroom might not seem important to a mouth-breathing knucklehead like me that plays punk rock powerchords, but it is. The balls and fury that blew out of this amp were incredible, but it also had a very clean and chimy upper end. It's one of my favorite characteristics of any amp. I also really liked how it cut through without having to be face meltingly loud. Clean gain is I guess how I'd describe it. Not clean in the literal clean tone sense, but clean gain like it has all the "distortion" and overdrive I could want without getting mushy or fizzy. Lotta fun.
 
Greg_L said:
Ha, thanks. My wife thinks I'm just insane. She is supportive, but she doesn't get it.

Your lead tone does seem a little murky but not too bad to me. It sounds like a nice creamy lead tone wants to come out but it just needs a little fine tuning. I see your presence is on 0 and all your knobs are on 5. Turn them bitches. Get some presence in there. Presence is generally high mids. That could be the clarity you're not getting.
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Yeah, I've gone back and forth with the tone controls and ended up settling on the 12:00 position for most of them. My problem is when I try to add hi-mids and highs in the preamp section, it tends to make the distortion gritty or grainy, kinda scratchy and harsh. It had been long enough since I'd really twiddled the amp's knobs that I tried again...and yeah that presence knob definitely belongs at or near 0.

It's almost like I need to be able to add highs later in the signal chain than the preamp section. Maybe an EQ in the effects loop? I'll have to play with that and see what I can come up with. My MXR 10-band EQ has been in its box for months now...it's really a noisy little S.O.B.
 
Tadpui said:
Yeah, I've gone back and forth with the tone controls and ended up settling on the 12:00 position for most of them. My problem is when I try to add hi-mids and highs in the preamp section, it tends to make the distortion gritty or grainy, kinda scratchy and harsh. It had been long enough since I'd really twiddled the amp's knobs that I tried again...and yeah that presence knob definitely belongs at or near 0.

It's almost like I need to be able to add highs later in the signal chain than the preamp section. Maybe an EQ in the effects loop? I'll have to play with that and see what I can come up with. My MXR 10-band EQ has been in its box for months now...it's really a noisy little S.O.B.
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I have an MXR 10-band as well, and it might be what you need, but I'd keep working on just the amp and mic position. You have a very nice amp. There's no reason you should need to resort to band-aid fixes IMO.

You say the sound can get scratchy and harsh with highs dialed in, is that in the room to your ear? Or is that only what the mic is getting? If it's just in the mic, being dead center can do that. Move it out to the cone some.

What power setting are you using? Maybe you're just not driving the speaker hard enough?
 
Greg_L said:
I have an MXR 10-band as well, and it might be what you need, but I'd keep working on just the amp and mic position. You have a very nice amp. There's no reason you should need to resort to band-aid fixes IMO.

You say the sound can get scratchy and harsh with highs dialed in, is that in the room to your ear? Or is that only what the mic is getting? If it's just in the mic, being dead center can do that. Move it out to the cone some.

What power setting are you using? Maybe you're just not driving the speaker hard enough?
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The scratchy highs are in the room sound, but they're definitely exaggerated in the mic'd signal. Last night I played around with the presence, and the EQ in the effects loop, just listening to the amp in the room. I didn't really find any awe-inspiring settings, so I'll sit tonight and put a mic in front of it so I can hear the changes better. And good point about the center mic position, I started doing that out of frustration even though I knew it was generally not going to yield the best results.

As far as power setting, the 5W and 15W settings stopped working a couple of years ago (fallout from a warranty repair, and I never went back to the guy to fix it). So I'm always on the 30W setting. I found out really quickly that cranking this amp is not an option...it'll blow itself up! So my output volume usually stays in the 50% - 70% range, with the channel master around 70%, which is usually enough to overcome that compressed power section sound. The amp will brighten up a bit with a higher output volume, but the speaker doesn't like it very much. It's a balance. This amp is pretty fussy with its controls, and its definitely too powerful for its own good.

Thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully I have some time tonight to play around a little.
 
Tadpui said:
The scratchy highs are in the room sound, but they're definitely exaggerated in the mic'd signal. Last night I played around with the presence, and the EQ in the effects loop, just listening to the amp in the room. I didn't really find any awe-inspiring settings, so I'll sit tonight and put a mic in front of it so I can hear the changes better. And good point about the center mic position, I started doing that out of frustration even though I knew it was generally not going to yield the best results.

As far as power setting, the 5W and 15W settings stopped working a couple of years ago (fallout from a warranty repair, and I never went back to the guy to fix it). So I'm always on the 30W setting. I found out really quickly that cranking this amp is not an option...it'll blow itself up! So my output volume usually stays in the 50% - 70% range, with the channel master around 70%, which is usually enough to overcome that compressed power section sound. The amp will brighten up a bit with a higher output volume, but the speaker doesn't like it very much. It's a balance. This amp is pretty fussy with its controls, and its definitely too powerful for its own good.

Thanks for the suggestions. Hopefully I have some time tonight to play around a little.
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You might need to have that amp serviced if things are breaking down and not sounding right with it. I had a similar problem with my old 2204. It never sounded terrible, but it was dark and difficult to dial in. It never fully sounded or acted 100% the way I thought it should. Trying to get bite without harshness was tricky. Then after two techs, I just dove in on my own and found a ton of things wrong with it. Things wired incorrectly, bad internal caps, etc. I fixed all that back to factory fresh, and the amp kills now. It's like a new amp. It now sounds like I thought it should - a pure rock and roll machine. So maybe you got something like that going on. You might have a bad tube or bad filter cap or something.
 
Just letting you fuckers know still waiting for the 'net install, gonna have cut a couple trees down to get signal for my dish, supposedly Tuesday is gonna be "the" day.....LOL.....Everything I try to do is a struggle, but, it's gonna be alright, good to see you guys posting in the thread, & again, (fingers crossed), Tuesday should be "the" day....LOL....
 
And I WILL have tones tonight. I did some country leads/fills for a guy and I have to get the git tracks solo'd for him to use so I may as well put a bit up.
Oddly enough, now catch this, I wasn't able to get a guitar sound I liked for this with the Mark V and ended up getting what I wanted with the Ampeg GVT-5H thru the Mesa's speaker ...... who'd of thunk it?
Anyway ...... later tonight.
 
Lt. Bob said:
And I WILL have tones tonight. I did some country leads/fills for a guy and I have to get the git tracks solo'd for him to use so I may as well put a bit up.
Oddly enough, now catch this, I wasn't able to get a guitar sound I liked for this with the Mark V and ended up getting what I wanted with the Ampeg GVT-5H thru the Mesa's speaker ...... who'd of thunk it?
Anyway ...... later tonight.
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Yes please!
 
Alright .... I was asked to do some country rhythm and lead/fills for a song ...... and I have been promising some clips from the Ampeg for a while and unexpectedly it ended up being the amp I used so I have some clips of it.
There's nothing high gain ..... it's all clean or clean with a bit 'o' dirt sneakin' out. But it's a decent representation of how the little Ampeg does and, in this case, it beat out a Mesa Mark V. :eek:

So I set up to do these tracks and, figuring I'd want clean .... I just went for the Mark V.
Seemed like a no-brainer. It was sitting there after all .... plugged in and everything ..... but, it didn't sound right.

So I added a Damage Control Liquid Blues pedal (twin tube distortion) that I frequently use for its compressor ..... a nice sounding comp and I leave it as a clean boost with the gain on zero .....

Still wasn't right though, so I pulled in the Ampeg GVT-5H head which is that little 5 watter I got 6 months ago or so.
Plugged it into the Mesa's speaker which in my Mark V is a Weber Michigan.

The little Ampeg immediately got me in the ballpark of what I wanted but it still wasn't quite right ... so even though it was clean country, I added some gain on the Damage Control pedal .... hmmm, surprisingly it fit the country licks well.

Ampeg has no 'verb though so I hooked up my Fostex 3180 spring reverb (look it up) and it's sounding kinda like Fender blackface 'verb ..... and that's what we have here:

The chain is:
Stinnett guitar
Fostex 3180
Damage Control Liquid Blues
Ampeg GVT-5H volume 9 '0' clock - treble 1 '0' clock - bass 4 'o' clock
Weber 100 watt 8 ohm Michigan Alnico 12"
Oh, and the mic is an EV Cobalt 7 near the speaker's edge slightly aimed inward.

These are the rhythm and the Lead/fill lines I sent, starting from right before the middle solo.
I fade out the music so it's just the tracks.
And they were done in my usual lackadaisical, 'wing it as I go along' way. :D

I did 3 of the lead/fill lines and knew the third one was it as soon as I did it.
 

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And now that you heard that solo ..... ummmm, solo .... here it is with the backing tracks just for perspective as to how that sits in a mix.
It's not really a mix, of course .... I just have the rough mix mp3 he sent me to play with but it still gives an idea.
 

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