VHT Special 6 Ultra Q's

daan

daan

New member
OK so I've never had a "real" amp like this. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that 90% of my playing has been either through a Sony reel-to-reel tape deck, or an 80's SS bass amp... I had a Peavey practice amp of some sort, that I loaned to a guy who moved away with it :angryfire and lately I have been using one of those "Frontman" amps that come in the pack with Squiers (which I let a friend of my wife give to her daughter for her first amp...) Anyway, my wife heard me *****ing about my crummy amp situation, and told me to go get one. I got the VHT! So... how do I use this dang thing? I looked up the owner's manual, but it's not real helpful. So far I THINK I have it figured out, but there's about 12 more settings than I'm used to having. Like, how does the effects loop work? Do I plug pedals into that, or what? Jeez... It sounds SO much better than the crappy things I've had before, but I want to get the most out of it! It sounds like people like these for how "moddable" they are, but I don't want to head down that rabbit hole, until I get it straightened out in stock form. Have I mentioned how good it sounds? A friend of mine has a bunch of crazy $$$ amps (like old tweed Fenders) so I've used good amps before, I just haven't had one of my own that I can mess with. (I just plugged into his, I didn't change any of his settings other than volume) He doesn't have one like mine, though and when I told him about it, he was kind of "Meh" about it (but his collection is worth about what my house is...)
Anyway, thanks in advance.
 
Re: VHT Special 6 Ultra Q's

The best thing to do is play with it. Adjust the settings and see how they interact with each other. Use the effects loop for delay, modulation and any other time based effects. Run any drives or wah in through the front. If you have an EQ you can try it in either one. Use your ears when making adjustments.
VHT's are great amps, have fun!

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Re: VHT Special 6 Ultra Q's

OK so I've never had a "real" amp like this. I'm kind of embarrassed to say that 90% of my playing has been either through a Sony reel-to-reel tape deck, or an 80's SS bass amp...


You don' t have to be embarrassed about your first amp. You might be surprised at what some folks started with - especially the folks that started playing in the 60's and early 70's.
 
Re: VHT Special 6 Ultra Q's

The depth switch should be great for matching your pickups to the amp. turn it all the way up if you have low output single coils, or say turn it counterclockwise to remove some bass to keep humbuckers from being muddy.

If you find the amp kinda bright no matter what you do, that's what the texture switch if for. Middle position is the full, normal output of the amp. flipping it cuts highs.

On the standby there's high power and low power. This is called running the tube in pentode for high power and triode for low power. Tech explanations aside, the low power mode might be a little quieter but mostly just a little darker, midranger, more compressed, and mushier bass.

The watts control should be easy to use but cranking it all the way down probably won't sound the best.

With the single knob tone control one thing to try is leaving it cranked and then roll the tone knob off on the guitar to zero. Edge it up until you find a tone you like. This can sound better sometimes than just rolling back the amp tone control.
Same with the volume control. Amps like this, there's a lot of magic in cranking the amp and then edging the guitar volume up from zero, especially for bright pickups. Unless you have a treble bleed cap in your guitar.

with the FX loop... say you get a delay pedal, a reverb, a chorus, or something you want to come after the amps natural distortion. Take a instrument cable from amp fx loop send to the pedal in, then the pedal out has a cable to amp fx loop return.

for mods, look at this guy he loves the special 6 ultra
https://robrobinette.com/Special6UltraMod.htm
 
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