How to get distortion w/o a pedal?

harrisonmerwin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhVWJgIzftE

spinal tap clip...

Survo-

Add noise gates, EQ racks, compressors, signal boosters etc to the sound.

armanHammer

By the way, attentuators are for pussies. Hearing well is overrated.

Dirty_Frank

armanHammer wrote:

By the way, attentuators are for pussies. Hearing well is overrated.

Noise complaints on the other hand, are not, but prevent hearing loss.

A conundrum? I think so.

IDgotI

Neil uses a vintage 1959 Fender Deluxe. Some places say it's a 12 Watt amp. Some say it's 22. Either way the point is it is *not* a very powerful amp. The result is that it's very easy for him to crank it all the way up and get it to distort. Then it's just a matter of micing that amazing tube amp distortion and feeding it out to the house. I haven't heard the story about the tubes catching fire before, but it seems plausible since I did read somewhere in an interview with Neil's guitar tech Larry Cragg that the amp had been rebiased to run with a different set of tubes than what it was originally designed for.

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. :-)

mccreadyisgod

IDgotI wrote:

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.

who's_pearljam?

mccreadyisgod wrote:

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.

IDgotI

mccreadyisgod wrote:

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.

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.

sennin

who's_pearljam? wrote:

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.

BOB! Welcome back!

I love my Weber Minimass hooked up to my Hotrod! Goodtimes.

lucylespian

Great write-up IdgotI.

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.

IDgotI

lucylespian wrote:

Great write-up IdgotI.


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.

Yup. Headroom is the key to this thread really. If you want distortion, you want an amp with low headroom (preferably a tube amp for tube distortion). If you want clean sounds and no distortion, you want a ton of headroom.

The cleaner the sound, the less likely people are to react to it as being loud. So ironically a 1 watt amp will anoy people more often than a louder more powerful one. Then again it will also distort more easily... and since the name of this thread was distortion without using a distortion pedal... that's the deal right there. If you want distortion without a distortion pedal... get an amp with low headroom.

lucylespian

Yeah, or get a multichannel amp with distortion channels built in that will break up early at low volumes. This is why I have my H&K Triamp, and I'm a Mesa loving freak. It's also why I am after a Mesa Triaxis.

MichaelMcKevin

Seeing as how these attenuators seem to run between $300-600, i think I'll buy a practice amp

lucylespian

GivenToCarve wrote:

Seeing as how these attenuators seem to run between $300-600, i think I'll buy a practice amp

Yeah, trouble is, you are used to tubes now, and you probbaly aren't gonna like the tone or lack of feel in a cheap solid state practice amp, but hey, it's not a bad idea.

sennin

GivenToCarve wrote:

Seeing as how these attenuators seem to run between $300-600, i think I'll buy a practice amp

I got my Weber MiniMass for $100. http://www.tedweber.com/atten.htm

BUT if you need a practice amp, I have a Vox Valvetronix 15w amp for sale.

IDgotI

One thing I've been wondering about during this thread is if anyone has had a chance to check out those Fender Deluxe COSM Boss pedals yet? (There was a recent thread about them... These things: )

http://www.bossus.com/index.asp?pg=1&tmp=163

I mean... I know there's no way it's going to give "Insta Neil Young tone" but I'm still curious.

lucylespian

IDgotI wrote:

One thing I've been wondering about during this thread is if anyone has had a chance to check out those Fender Deluxe COSM Boss pedals yet? (There was a recent thread about them... These things: )

http://www.bossus.com/index.asp?pg=1&tmp=163

I mean... I know there's no way it's going to give "Insta Neil Young tone" but I'm still curious.

NO, cos'm not really into pedals or Fender for that matter, but you have to wonder how the tone of a "covetted tube amp" famous for it's touch responsiveness makes it's way into a little box like that. More magic of marketting perhaps, or maybe a close digital guess.

Pacomc79

IDgotI wrote:

One thing I've been wondering about during this thread is if anyone has had a chance to check out those Fender Deluxe COSM Boss pedals yet? (There was a recent thread about them... These things: )

http://www.bossus.com/index.asp?pg=1&tmp=163

I mean... I know there's no way it's going to give "Insta Neil Young tone" but I'm still curious.

It's cute marketing really, but they probably give a pretty decent fenderish tone if that's all you're looking for.

check out the lovepedal woodrow (5E3) http://www.lovepedal.com

and http://www.durhamelectronics.com/ the crazy horse for some instant neil young tones.

Of course you still won't have the wizzer, or the broken firebird pickup in the ancient Les Paul or the Tweed Deluxe, but you'll definately be soloing to down by the river.

The amp in a box thing is well done by the V-Stack line of pedals. They are intended for direct computer recording if that's your fancy.

IDgotI

Pacomc79 wrote:

It's cute marketing really, but they probably give a pretty decent fenderish tone if that's all you're looking for.

check out the lovepedal woodrow (5E3) http://www.lovepedal.com

and http://www.durhamelectronics.com/ the crazy horse for some instant neil young tones.

Of course you still won't have the wizzer, or the broken firebird pickup in the ancient Les Paul or the Tweed Deluxe, but you'll definately be soloing to down by the river.

The amp in a box thing is well done by the V-Stack line of pedals. They are intended for direct computer recording if that's your fancy.

Dude you so rock! Two amazing looking pedal manufacturers I had not heard of before! Thanks!!!!

lucylespian

Hey, no-one got my joke ............."cos'm not into pedals"...............cmon, someone laugh !!!

I have an amp in a box, it's just a big heavy box !!