Teach me about... TAKE 2

[Cagey]

Tube-based guitar amps distort naturally on their own, and it's a pleasant sort of distortion that doesn't need a whole lot of help. Sometimes when you try to help it, depending on the amp or the effect, you push it over the edge to where there's simply too much distortion and it gets unpleasant. This is why you sometimes hear people say "it takes pedals well". Not all of them do.

Many modern amps are designed to head into distortion fairly early on the power curve. If you're dependant on a pedal for your distorted tone, you're going to push an amp like that too hard and it isn't likely to sound good. But, sometimes you can just drop back to the "clean" channel, and instead of making the amp distort, you give it a distorted signal to amplify. That sometimes works out better, if you like the sound of a pedal rather than natural distortion.

 

[Superlizard]

I recommend the "Marshall Manoeuvre"... a brilliant and economical way to achieve tonal bliss from a guitar amp.

Simply turn your right hand sideways (like a karate chop position - parallel to ground) place hand on the left-most knob of your amp,
and quickly/deftly move your hand to the right; hitting all the knobs in succession.  

A successful manoeuvre will turn all knobs up... to eleven.

 

[Patrick from Davis]

To expand a little, the distortion, or overdrive, or fuzz pedal, will distort the signal from the guitar.  It clips the waves giving them a flat top, and flat feet.  Then this is fed to the preamp of the guitar amp.  At this point a clean channel will reproduce the signal coming out of the pedal very true to form.  The clean preamp also alters the sound a bit, but for this post we'll ignore that.  If you take the same signal coming out of the pedal and feed it into the dirty channel on your amp, the dirty channel of your amps preamp is set up to clip the signal entering it.  Just like the pedal.  So a dirt box first clips the guitar signal into a dirty channel, and then the amp clips the dirt box signal.  Or you distort the distortion.  This makes the details from the guitar less distinct, and often will distort things enough that the overall sound is not what you were going for.

A Boost pedal amps up the voltage on the guitar signal, the vertical axis of a sine wave plot, or amplitude of the signal wave.  Your amp can only handle so much amplitude of a signal and it will clip the signal if it goes to high.  On a tube amp with one channel, if you crank the gain with a boost pedal, it puts the amp into a overdrive state.  If you boost the signal going into a distorted signal, it clips it as normal, just the gain going in was higher so it is higher gain overdrive.  This generally sounds like a high gain amp, most of the metallers and roawkers use amps designed for this, and it sounds rather huge.  There are other drawbacks, but mostly this is where people go into opinion about what they think is better.

To muck up the works just a bit more, guitar pedals that are dirt boxes generally also increase the gain going to the amp.  So with them you have a combination of distorting the signal, and boosting the gain to your amp.  Who knows how much of one versus the other is there.

To sum up, a dirt box into a clean channel will play the dirt box sound.  Into a dirty channel, the distortion will be distorted.  Most Boost pedals can be used to distort the amp as well, but the amp does the distortion.  And finally, dirt boxes are really both a boost and a distortion device in some form.
Patrick

 

[GoDrex]

I recommend the "Marshall Manoeuvre"... a brilliant and economical way to achieve tonal bliss from a guitar amp.

Simply turn your right hand sideways (like a karate chop position - parallel to ground) place hand on the left-most knob of your amp,
and quickly/deftly move your hand to the right; hitting all the knobs in succession.  

A successful manoeuvre will turn all knobs up... to eleven.

that will not work on a Carvin X-100b  -  it's nothing like a Marshall

 

[erogenousjones17]

Thanks for the clarification. I should probably add that I spend most of my time playing in an apartment. Sadly, this is not really an appropriate setting for the "Marshall Manoeuvre".

 

[Cagey]

Sadly, [playing in an apartment] is not really an appropriate setting for the "Marshall Manoeuvre".

You have to qualify that. When the bitch next door won't turn down her TV blaring the 700 club, or the idiot downstairs thinks his Yorkshire Terrier barking for hours on end is normal, then the "Marshall Manoeuvre" is the appropriate (and highly effective, I might add) response <grin>

 

[erogenousjones17]

Sadly, [playing in an apartment] is not really an appropriate setting for the "Marshall Manoeuvre".

You have to qualify that. When the bitch next door won't turn down her TV blaring the 700 club, or the idiot downstairs thinks his Yorkshire Terrier barking for hours on end is normal, then the "Marshall Manoeuvre" is the appropriate (and highly effective, I might add) response <grin>

This made me laugh. My upstairs neighbour is an old lady with a loud tv and a sewing machine (louder than you'd expect when it's above you), and the guy across the hall actually does have a yappy little dog. So my amp is probably a little louder than "traditional" or "appropriate" apartment level. But I'm still not playing at eleven.  :laughing7:

 

[Cagey]

Apartment living is no fun for musicians, that's for sure. No fun for most people, really. But, that's why they invented headphones, and more recently, little modelling amps. They're not a panacea, but they all sound remarkably good through headphones, and serve the double duty of eliminating outside interference while not adding to the problem. Get yourself a Pod XT or a V-amp 2 and a cheap set of headphones, and you can wank and crank at any hour of the day or night. Those toys also include all sorts of special effects, so you don't even need to burn up a weeks pay once a month on batteries. It's not perfect, but it beats the snot out of not being able to go nuts whenever you want. A V-amp 3 is only $140 most places, and I can attest to the fact that they romp. Go from Fender blackface clean to Marshall stack from hell on 11, add any kind of reverb, delay, chorus, flange, etc. Too much fun.

 

[exaN]

UPDATE

Just received the AC Booster, very pleased with the results. I lower to gain between 4 and 5 on the lead channel and when I kick the Booster in, I think it really makes the sound a lot richer and bigger than if I just turned up the gain to 8-9 on the amp.

Hit or miss? Hit for sure :hello2:

 

[Superlizard]

Apartment living is no fun for musicians, that's for sure. No fun for most people, really. But, that's why they invented headphones, and more recently, little modelling amps.

Back in my apartment days, this unit saved my ass many times:

Now I hardly use it at all; still a very handy thing to have.

 

[Cagey]

Apartment living is no fun for musicians, that's for sure. No fun for most people, really. But, that's why they invented headphones, and more recently, little modelling amps.

Back in my apartment days, this unit saved my ass many times:

Now I hardly use it at all; still a very handy thing to have.

I've wanted one of those for a while now. But, every time I get to thinking about it, I think about other things that could be done with that kind of money and it gets put back on the wish list. I just looked, and I see one on Craig's List for $180 locally, but that might still be a bit much. I don't understand why they're so expensive. Have to think about it.

 

[exaN]

Apartment living is no fun for musicians, that's for sure. No fun for most people, really. But, that's why they invented headphones, and more recently, little modelling amps.

Back in my apartment days, this unit saved my ass many times:

Now I hardly use it at all; still a very handy thing to have.

I've wanted one of those for a while now. But, every time I get to thinking about it, I think about other things that could be done with that kind of money and it gets put back on the wish list. I just looked, and I see one on Craig's List for $180 locally, but that might still be a bit much. I don't understand why they're so expensive. Have to think about it.

Yea I should definitely get one of these too...

 

[Cagey]

Yeah. But $330? I don't know... That's a Warmoth paint job and 4 cases of beer! <grin>