Re: My clean channel has a faint distorted tone in the back ground.
I'm guessing it's a multichannel amp, being as you specified "clean channel"....without knowin exactly what amp it is, kinda hard to make any guesses at what it is (beyond the obvious tube issues)....but I will say, I've had two different multichannel amps that had an issue like that at one point. Once was a peavey triple X. The other was a Red knob Fender (can't remember the exact model, 60watts 112). On the clean channels I could almost always hear a very very faint distorted signal in the background. Same thing as you've said, a perfect note for note double of the clean signal, just super quiet and distorted. I tried tons of things to get rid of it the first time it happened (on the triple x), tube swaps, checking for faulty components, etc etc etc. Until eventually I thought "maybe the dirt channel is just bleeding over onto the clean channel for some reason?" So I turned all the knobs on the dirt channel to zero. Everything volume gain eq etc.
And the problem disappeared. No distorted whisper in the back ground. Same thing worked with the red knob fender too. And I've encountered the same problem on lots of other multichannel amps. And the same thing almost always works to get rid of it. The down side is, it sort of defeats the purpose of having a multichannel amp. Haha.
I only use vintage fender amps at this point. So there's no dirt channel (my 83 concert has a dirt channel. But I never use it, it doesn't bleed over anyways). But I've encountered a lot of channel switching amps that had that bleed over problem. It seems pretty common, I think most people just don't notice cause it's generally really really faint and as long as you're playing loudish it's not really an issue in most situations.
But yeah that's my suggestion. Put every knob that isn't used for the clean channel at zero and see if that fixes it.
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