Re: Blog: In Defense of Small, Low Wattage Amps
There are so many factors involved in choosing the right amp for a given task that there can never be one right answer for all applications, and I think both of our learned bloggists would agree with that statement to some extent. Musical style, stage size, venue size, intra-band balance, PA size...they all contribute to the factors that need to be taken into account when deciding on wattage and cabinet selection. Personally, I have amps ranging from 5 to 100 watts, but for most of my current work, I settle on an 18w, single 10 combo. The reason I started using that amp 10 years ago was quite simple. The vast majority of my work involves interstate air travel, but not at the scale where there is a semi full of gear traveling in advance by road. When I have toured in those sort of acts, I have used my 100w 2x12 combo with a 2x12 extension cab underneath it. Somebody else was carrying it. Somebody else was setting it up. I travelled with my backpack and a suitcase.
With the act I work with now, we carry the essentials of our backline by air. After a few months of being at the mercy of hired backline and its inherent inconsistencies, I started carrying my Fender Super Champ, and found ways to make it work. I keep it close to me onstage, regardless of the stage size. Contrary to the common misconception, a larger or 'outdoor' stage can actually mean greater separation, and therefore a small amp can work fine, under the same circumstances in which a small amp can work at all. For example, here's me and my Super Champ at an outdoor gig to 16,000 people, admittedly with about 80,000 watts of line array out front.
The irony here is that the same amp would be absolutely useless in a small venue with only a vocal PA and a very loud band. It would be completely swamped. But under these conditions, once that little amp and its single speaker see the front of house system, it is absolutely f*****g huge. Forget any theories you may have about the frequencies your cabinet is producing. Under close mic'ing conditions, even a 10" speaker can produce the full range required for virtually any style other than the doomiest doom, once it hits the PA. Anyone who has seen Jeff Beck in the past few years may have noticed that only one of his Fender Pro Juniors was mic'd. In fact, many of the frequencies you might be vibing on straight from the cabinet will be eliminated by a good FOH engineer, once again, style dependant, of course. But this is only part of the equation. For many players, it is onstage that they need their thump, whether it is being high pass filtered out the front or not. In those cases, the small combo just won't do the trick. You will need to use your guile and tone shaping skills to meet in the middle with your FOH engineer, to get what you need without compromising the FOH mix.
In my case, with the styles I'm currently playing, none of that is necessary. But if I go and do a fill in for somebody in a bar somewhere with a loudish band, I won't be taking my Super Champ. It will either be a 30 or 100w amp, just so there is some headroom in my system to get big enough clean sounds when required. Even in my little slice of the world, there is no one right answer. Multiply that out to the vast permutations of playing situations, and we could talk around this in circles for all eternity. Use what you need.
Cheers......................................... wahwah
It's where the spark comes from that takes the music to a fresh place every night - that need to respond to the playing and ideas and creativity of every member of the band who's contributing to the whole.
