Re: Playing the "amp"
to me, playing the amp means having a small amp (tube rectified helps), or an amp that is in a sewtting where it can be cranked up that is very touch sensitive and changes around your playinf technique as well as responds differently to various guitars, pickups, and effects. My Mission Amps Super is like that...I can plug striaght in and get a WIDE range of tones just by changing the way I play the guitar in effect Im using the guitar to play the amp...it really is a great thing.
This is something that I have never gotten out of big high powered amps, master volume amps, channel switching amps, etc...to me a small to medium wattage amp with a minium amount of controls is the best and again I feel that a tube rectifier helps...
I agree with your direction but I disagree with your comment on amps, somewhat.
For one, I agree with your comment on channel switchers... jumping around on channels during a song can kill your touch to a certain extent... particularly if you're relying on it to do things that you could also be doing with your guitar's volume knob. That said, if you're really proficient at playing both channels than this will be far less of an issue since lowering gain is lowering gain, no matter how it's achieved. Myself, I like multi-channel amps because they offer up more tones in one head... but, I also have a habbit of playing both channels like it was a single channel head.... in effect I tend to select the channel that has the desired tone I want, then I rock the volume, tone, pick attack, or pickup selector to get all the desired changes I'm after.
Having bounced between high and low powered amps I can honestly say that I've gotten better results when playing high power amps, but that's just me... other people will get better results with whatever works best for them.
Myself, I find low wattage (30w or less) too restrictive. Maybe it's my lack of touch, but I find the transition from too quiet to massively overdriven happens way too fast without enough time to stop off at all the textures in between. High headroom amplifiers provide me with a broader palate of 'in between' tones than I've ever been able to get out of low headroom amps. I can get extremely light on the touch without the amps volume decreasing to the point where it's too quiet, or I can beat the strings half to death and extract all the unholy grind I can squeeze out of my now suffering amplifier.
I also find that I get better results from master volume amps than non-masters because I can precisely set how much preamp grind I want without having to worry about overall volume. Obviously less of an issue for the low watt guys, but for a high watter like myself it's pretty much mandatory. For example, with my current amp I simply dime the gain knob then rock my guitar's volume or my pick's touch to get all the desired gain/grind effects that I want.... right from clean to mean. It'd be physically impossible for me to do this with a non-master volume 140w amp... but even when I owned the 30w version of the same amp (on which the master was permanently on 10) I found that I couldn't get anywhere the same amount of touch or dynamics that I can squeeze out of the 140w version.
Then again, my amp also has a killer master volume, so this is definitely a 'your milage may vary' point.
sad man sad.
