How to get distortion w/o a pedal?
MichaelMcKevin
Posts: 1,161
So I've been playing with my new Traynor (which i love, thanks for the recommendations) and I'm trying to get a more distorted sound out of it. I know the amp can only take it so far, but I was lookin' for like a Neil Young or a Warren Haynes type sound, cuz i know Neil doesn't use any distortion pedals. Tampering with the Gain on channel 1 doesn't seem to give me a whole lot of bite.
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I do this by hitting the boost button on the amp itself, and then having both channels 1 and 2 lit on the footswitch? Pardon my ignorance but this is what I know/maybe think as of now...
Channel 2(no lights on footswitch are on)- Clean
Channel 1 (Light 1 on footswitch is red)- Lead w/ gain
Channel ? (Both 1 and 2 are lit on footswitch)- Boost?
I'm having trouble getting the volumes to be consistent, for example, everytime i switch from Lead to Boost or Clean-Lead, the volume is also significantly louder.
I am a sucker for tube-pre-amp, so I have The H&K tri-amp to do that. There a few stand alone tube pre-amps worth looking a though. H&K Tubeman is basically the preamp from my head , in a pedal, Mesa V-twin, pretty cheap, Mesa Tri-axis( I am buying one of these in the next few days) Now i know this is not teh forum for Mesa loving, but Randy did invent cascading gain, and does know a thing or two about it. The Recto pre-amp is also very good. They all have superb cleans as well as a huge variety of gain sounds. All of these can be plugged directly into the effects return for an all tube tonefest.
The volume boost you are getting is what happens when you add another gain stage. I am amazed at how many people get confused by this. It is the main reason I don't use pedal, preferring multi-channel amps, where you can set teh individual cahnnels up to prefered gain, adjust channel volumes so they are all teh same, then adjust volume using master volume. ONe of the pre-amps I mentioned will allow you to do this.
old music: http://www.myspace.com/slowloader
An antenuator will allow you to crank the amp and control the volume, so you can practice.
I just got a Weber MiniMass antenuator.....good stuff! The clean channel sounds awesome when it breaks up!
Yeah, gain works like a multipler. Whatever volume you have set will be multipled by the gain factor. The more gain stages you have, the more multplication factors you have, so volume builds very quickly once you have the gain up a bit. If you have distortion at the first gain staeg, then you get really filthy as the final product.
JEFF HARDY AND JEFF AMENT USED TO LOOK THE SAME
"Pearl Jam always eases my mind and fires me up at the same time.”-Jeff Hardy
Take the volume up to about 5 the gain up to around 7.5 the treble to about 6 mids to about 5 and turn the bass up until it sounds full with no flub.
The preamp drives the power amp into overdrive....that's what you're looking for.
Neil actually has a special device called "the whizzer" with several footswitches that turn the knobs on his tweed deluxes to various settings. Everything has it's own place in the tone but ultimately you need to get the amp's power stage into overdrive. This can be accomplished by turning the amp to 5 or more generally and "pushing it" into overdrive with the gain stage.
Neil drives the hell out of those amps, he has well broken in loose speakers and in the case of that less paul the P90 is about to fall out.
There is no real right or wrong way to do it. Mesa uses several cascading gain stages in the preamp, some use pedals, some use hot pickups and big strings, some use a variety of different gain stages, some use low power amps and crank them, some use high power amps with a lot more of the preamp tone coming through etc. Everything in your rig that is in the line from your fingers through the speaker can effect the tone. Tube amps start to get that great smooth detailed liquid distorted tone at the point they start to overdrive and higher.
On channel two with the amp volume up past 5 and the gain past about 4 or 5 you should get some semblance of the tone you seek without the use of a pedal, if there still is not enough distortion there crank the gain up a little more. If that dosen't work you might want to try a pedal especially a good quality tube overdrive like the EH Hottubes or the Soldano Supercharger or the aforementioned Mesa's or the Budda.
That's completely badass. I've cranked my 50 watt 212 Ampeg reverberocket to 10 before, with humbuckers, standing two rooms away with doors closed with a 20 foot cable, and it was still scary. I'm glad my tubes didn't catch fire.
Now thats what I'm fuckin talkin about!
Is channel 1 and 2 together just like a boost?
No... The first button on the footswitch, when one light on, is channel 1. When you hit the second button it gives it the boost, though channel 2 still isn't on.
This is because your amp is a Class A/B, which are a lot more efficient, and produce a lot less heat than Class A amps. I think it is usually the circuit boards or amp casing that catches fire, not the tubes. There isn't much that can burn in a glass vacuum tube. Apparently the newer Fenders, like the Blues Junior/Hot Rods etc can get pretty hot too. The local amp guru in this area says he has seen a few which have nearly caught fire. MInd you, he rags on pretty much everything, cos he only sees the problems.
For interest , there is an excellent article on the Mesa web-site about this stuff, which includes an interesting anecdote about Randy doing some work to reduce hum for Neil Young during one of his earlier tours, possibly Rust era.
If you want to get a more gainy sound out the lead channel at a reasonable, even extremely quiet volume, you'll have to put an overdrive or distortion pedal in front of the amp. What you're trying to re-create with the pedal is your amp at a louder volume with a medium/low gain sound already coming out of it. Put that in front of the gain channel, and you should get a fairly overdriven sound, especially with the boost on.
Gotta remember, to get 40 watts of tubes to saturate and give a wicked sounding distortion, it's going to have to cranked up. I'm never happy with my practice sound, so I just use pedals at home to get gain. An attenuator is an option, but it's expensive, and will eat your tubes faster than you may like.
When I use my YCV80 live, and in practice, I have it cranked up loud enough that I lose headroom on the clean channel, and am getting power tube distortion already. Then I throw my Fulldrive II pedal in front and just take it to sonic proportions that I can't get at home. I don't use the lead channel when playing live because I find it does get muddy, and sounds almost too modern for my liking. The clean channel at extremely loud volumes with humbuckers takes on a bassman/plexi sort of crunch, so it's perfect for a nice OD pedal in front.
"why dont you just make 10 louder"
"well...cause...um...cause our amps go to 11"
2005.09.05
"how many people did die from that?...did P.Diddy kill them?" - Eddie Vedder 2006.02.19
spinal tap clip...
2005.09.05
"how many people did die from that?...did P.Diddy kill them?" - Eddie Vedder 2006.02.19
Noise complaints on the other hand, are not, but prevent hearing loss.
A conundrum? I think so.
Anyway consider getting a less powerful amp if you want to go all out on tube distortion. Someone recently posted a thread about a hand wired Gibson 5 Watt amp. That thing should be about as good as it gets for cranking up in an Appartment. Not that it will sound *quiet* by any stretch, but I guess there is something to be said for only having to worry about your next door neighbors calling the police as opposed to neighbors down the block. :-)
If I cranked my 6-watt tube amp with it's 8" speaker, I'd be getting noise complaints. If you cranked a 1-watt amp, you could piss off neighbors. Wattage isn't directly proportional to volume, which means that a 50-watt amp isn't half as loud as a 100-watt amp. In fact, it's close to logarithmic, which means that a 10-watt amp is half as loud as a 100-watt amp. Of course, the number and size of speakers will weigh into the equation... 10 watts thru a 4x12" cab will sound louder than a 100-watt amp thru a single 12" speaker.
I have that Martone 1 watt tube amp, and I STILL use the master volume on that to keep it low enough to use in the house.
Neil is a whole different story. His amp is probably the most pampered amp in rock. He runs it hot, and distorted and on the edge of calamity. The other part of his sound is the old Firebird pickup in the gibson. The wires are loose inside it, and it's microphonic and would be considered a crappy pickup if someone bought it and reviewed it. I think only he can tame that thing!
To get the Traynor to overdrive in your house, you would be best off with an attenuator. That way you can practice with the distortion, too. When you have the amp turned up, look for that sweet spot where you can play soft and it's clean, but you can dig in more and get distortion. You can also turn the volume down on the guitar when you're playing rhythm and crank it for more crunch in a lead.
It will wear out tubes faster that way, but if you want that sound, then that's the price you pay. And the price isn't that high in the long scheme of things. That sweet spot is why tubes are still used in guitar amps! I haven't found any pedals that can duplicate that yet.
Don't be mankind. ~Captain Beefheart
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Hence my story ending with an unfortunate encounter with the police either way :-)
Anyway, just to prove I can hold my own with the geekiest of audio geeks... the sound to power pay off point you make is of course completely correct, and a function of the Fletcher Munson curve. Here's a link concerning the Fletcher Munson curve:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher-Munson_curves
Another factor above and beyond all of what's been mentioned is speaker sensitivity and speaker efficency. Some speakers are extremely efficient at converting amp power into sound, and making the most volume from it, and some are mechanically inefficient, meaning even a great deal of power poured into them will result in lower volume.
So at the end of the day the only way to gauge any of these things will be by ear, or rule of thumb. As a rule of thumb I still think it's fair to say a 5 watt amp designed specifically to give readily accessible tube distortion will be a safer bet for getting usable tube distortion in a home than a 40 watt amp that can power a gig in a club.
Of course a lot of it also has to do with the home. Paper thin walls in an appartment building will not forgive much of anything. A house with a yard and driveway is another matter. Again, going by rule of thumb, I would think a person living someplace where they can get to a loud, but not yet tube distorted sound on a 40 watt amp, might be able to reach tube distortion playing at roughly the same volume on a 5 watt tube amp. But you're right, it's all a question of whether or not one lives in a space where loud is an option to begin with.
EDIT:
Eh... That wikipedia article is a bit shite. The point of the Fletcher Munson curve is that within a certain range of volume the human ear and hearing act a bit like a compression circuit. Meaning that two sounds that are different volumes in terms of the amount of air moved, or amount of electrical power required to produce them can match up fairly closely to each other on the "Equal Loudness" curve. (The only places where sound is noticably affected being the low bass and high treble, with everything in between sounding "equally loud".) This is how we can hear extremely soft things like mosquitos, and extremely loud things like space shuttles taking off with the same ears. The brain doesn't take as much notice of loudness differences for sounds in between.
And, while I'm geeking out... another interesting thing is that often what we react to as volume *is* distortion... which seems kinda relevant since distortion is where this thread began. A great way to test / prove this it to try listenning to crappy boom box or computer speakers next to some really kick ass flat sounding speakers or monitors. The crap speakers will sound 'louder' as soon as they distort, and you'll want to tell whoever is playing them to turn them down once they do. That person you ask to turn them down will, in turn, hear you loud and clear. You'll both be able to talk about how bad the sound is with normal speaking voices while the crap speakers are rattling and buzzing, and in short order one of you will turn the volume down.
With great sounding speakers, on the other hand, it's easy to be listenning at a level that sounds fairly "normal" and "not loud enough" until you try to talk to someone else in the room and say "turn it up", at which point you'll realize you have to repeat yourself, and that you're shouting because you can't hear each other because the music is so loud.
Since the ear, owing to the Fletcher Munson "Equal Loudness" curves is actually very bad at gauging true volume, human hearing tries to make calculations about loudness based on other clues to determine how loud something is. Distortion, not just good grungy rock distortion, but third order harmonic distortion, the actual sound of an amplifier failing to deliver the goods, is something most people have learned to associate with volume after growing up with TVs, radios etc.
So the irony is a 1 watt distorting amp might trigger someone to yell that something is too loud even when the sound of his or her yelling is louder. Meanwhile that same person might not notice that music form a 100 watt system is playing music too loudly for people to hear each other speak. Again owing to the fact that the human ear perceives many sounds as having "equal loudness" according to the Fletcher Munson "Equal loudness" curves, it's actually the sound of distortion that people often take as their cue for deciding if something is too loud.
The "solution" to that from a guitar players perspective is ideally to live behind walls that can limit the transfer of sound. In that situation the pure math takes over. The sound is either loud enough to make it thru the walls, or it's not. Sound from a 1 watt amp and a 5 watt amp, and a 40 watt amp can all sound generally the same or "loud" to human ears. To a wall it's all about physics. All three amps might sound just as loud if you are standing in the room with them, but only one of them might actually move air forcefully enough to be heard from outside.
This is the sonic variation on the old pencil in half a glass of water experiment from grade school where we learn about optical illusions (A pencil can look "broken" at the water line in half a glass of water). Just as there are optical illusions, there are audio illusions. Sounds that reach our ears can sometimes sound equally loud even though they aren't. In fact sometimes sounds that are riddiculoulsy quiet can seem far louder than they are. Sometimes a mosquito can sound louder than a siren... just think of hearing a (red) mosquito on a summer night when you are trying to sleep.
Once a sound hits the human ear all bets are off on how it will be perceived. Loud? Noise? Too soft? Music? The trick for a musician is to try to keep sound from ever reaching a neighbor's ear, and *that's* where math can still be useful because to a wall which only interacts with sound in terms of physics, a less powerful amplifier is going to move less air than a more powerful one. Once the sound from either escapes past that wall, people might hear it as sounding roughly the same in terms of volume. But before it gets past that wall it's still just about physics.
Sound output from a 1 watt amp or a 5 watt amp, esspecially with inefficent speakers, is just going to be easier to contain so that no one gets to hear it and complain it sounds "exactly as loud" as sound from a 500 watt marshall stack.
Anyway to wrap up, it is true that the increase in *perceived* volume relative to amp power is logarithmic, meaning it requires about 10 times more power to perceive an increase of 1 decibile. So the distance from 1 decible watt to 2 decible watts is 10 x while from 2 decible watts to 3 it's 100x. But again what's important here is to remember this is what it takes to generate an increae in *perceived* sound. Walls just deal with physics. To us the difference between 5 and 40 watts might seem like less than a few decibles, but to a wall, all that matters is how much air is moving. Since our ears are compressing sounds of greater volume, in terms of moving air and physics, the difference between a 5 watt amp and a 40 watt amp (all things being equal in terms of speaker efficiency) can literally be greater than you might think.
BOB! Welcome back!
I love my Weber Minimass hooked up to my Hotrod! Goodtimes.
A coulpe of points to add.
The formula I am familiar vfor is doubling the watt gives you an extra 3dB. This may be different ot a decibel watt of course.
Also, it is an easy assumtion that messages just pass from ear to brain, but in fact about twice as many pass from brain to ear, ie, teh brain is instructing the ear about what it wants to hear. As you clearly ppointed out, there is a difference between the perception of a sensory stimulus and teh response to it.
In this case, we get really pissed off quickly by crap sounding audio signals, which is yet another reason to buy and own the best you can afford, preferably with lots of headroom.
Another really important point about whether your neighbour hears you and complains or not, is what their ambient noise is. If it's meal time, and their TV is going and kids are yelling and pots and pans are crashing, they are not going to hear you like they will at 10pm when all is quiet.