Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

[Firebrand]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

I run mine ground round. 85-90% lean. But I found it best to buy the preformed burgers so they don't ...

Oh, got a little distracted.

I like to find an amp that has great cleans and decent gain. The trick is getting one where these settings can be the same with or without pedals on sometimes. I have found myself dialing in some strange EQ settings to accommodate pedals. And when I end up doing so it's usually the pedal that leaves my collection.

Though right now I am completely overhauling my rig. Two pedals left to sell off. I have already sold my main amp head and just returned the replacement I purchased. The search continues.

 

[Mincer]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

I found that the sound I go for has little to do with the amp...just a small selection of effects into any clean amp tends to work. It isn't even particularly guitar based, either- if it is a decent guitar with at least 2 pickups and a tone control, I can find my sound.

 

[TimmyPage]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

I'm big on pedals, and they shape the core of my sound. My pedalboard is in a state at the moment where I can plug it into whatever crappy or amazing amp they hand me at a venue (I usually use their in-house amps because the only amp I have in the UK is a Roland Cube) and still get 'my' sound. I'd say a grand majority of my 'sound' comes from a slightly coloured boost/overdrive pedal that I keep on 95% of the time. For a long while last year it was the OD-11 from Lovepedal, now I've switched the the Walrus Audio Voyager, add in a touch of lightly modulated reverb (to use as colour, not ALL the time) and a delay (which I have on almost all the time, though I change the settings on the fly to get different sounds). I'm looking for a Compressor at the moment to give my tone that last touch and I'll feel like I'm done.

Playing into a really nice amp certainly makes me sound better but overall I find that 80% of my tone is in the pedals I use to colour my sound and my guitar.

 

[toneseeker74]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

I have on again, off again affairs with pedals. Most of the time I plug straight into my amp. I have found that speakers make a huge impact too. After years of resisting, I finally bought some Vintage 30's. My speaker quest is done.
As far as pedals go, my most frequently used pedal is a delay. I have a Boss DS-1 and Catalinbread CB30 for tone shaping, not so much for adding grit to the signal.

 

[GAS-a-holic]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

Definitely top down. Since I play and sing, I need to keep things as simple as I can. I like to get the majority of my tone from the amp and use a good boost for solos. The rest of the stuff on my board (wah, vibe & delay) are only used as needed.

 

[jeremy]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

It's very simple from a user interface standpoint lol. Lots of work went into beneath the hood things but at the end of the day, having as much distortion as I'll really need at 10 and clean at 7 without having to switch guitars is well worth it.

I especially like the compressor part of the overdrive pedal - it's a simple setup designed to emulate tube sag and it really makes a difference in feel which is nice because my 1974x is a lite iib build with a solid state rectifier so it naturally feels stiffer than its tube rectified counterpart.

Edit: I should also say the overdrive pedal is the madbean flabulanche... A fender-inspired design and supposed to be somewhere between a blackface deluxe reverb and a 5e3. Having never played either I can't say if it is or not but with the volume backed off it plays very well with my Marshall 1974x. It's an always-on pedal especially because jfets fatten up as you add gain, and the compressor shaves off some highs as you turn up as well, so the overall effect is that it is fat and ballsy at 10 (especially when the Marshall is cooking too) and sparkle-y and clear when it's clean, especially with a buffer in front of it. Which is why the next iteration is going to have an on-board input buffer.

that pedal sounds awesome!

 

[Sleepy]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

A light boost and delicate EQing, then any decent amp.

In hindsight finding the perfect, ultimate amp mattered to me a lot more when I was using disgusting unnecessary amounts of pre-amp gain. There was always either too much fuzz too dark too bright too boxy too flubbery etc. I could never dial in the same tone twice because of volume/room acoustics/pickups.

I've realized (coinciding with my falling in love with strats and p90s and away from humbuckers) I like the sound of the guitar itself - as in the chimey piano-like sound of an unplugged resonating body with new strings on it. So sweet and balanced, just too quiet. I believe making that louder is the point of amplification. But of course you can't do that perfectly and a perfectly clean signal can get ugly with certain frequencies crowding everything else out and sustaining much longer or cutting through the mix disproportionately.

A lightly broken up clean channel (most quality, non-gimmicky tube amps can do this pleasantly - marshall fender and vox style all work since this is a sweet spot for all 3) and a tubescreamer in front with the gain very low (used as a compressor type thing - lets say just adding bubbles rather than adding any flavor). That's my tone. Not plain water nor a bloody mary... Just a chilled glass of San Pelligrino.

I listen to some of the ultra saturated hi gain amp tones I used to worship and can't fathom what I was thinking other than that I hadn't started seriously recording and mixing yet, so my ears believed my guitar by itself needed to sound like a 100 piece orchestra (of angry drunks) and leave no space for anything else.

 

[Chickenwings]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

depends on the gig, because that has a bearing on which amp im using.
However, generally speaking if the amp can do its own dirt, i will use that and kick it in the pants with an overdrive when needed.
If the amp is a clean one (like my twin) i will use a couple of overdrives or fuzz.

 

[Phantasmagoria]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

Top down.

I like to plug straight into my amp ..nothing in front or in the loop, crank the gain ..and take it from there. That's the tone I like best

I might occasionally have some light delay at the back for solo's..

...much as I love distortion/overdrive pedals and buy them constantly, I rarely use them with my amps. Until pretty recently they'd mostly just lie around in my cupboard collecting dust ..but now that I have my loop pedal, they're great for plugging into/jamming along with that. I'm finally actually using them a bit :lmao:

The only other pedals I use at all are my wah & harmonizer..

 

[Ascension]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

If I can't play a gig with the amp alone without effects I don't own it! I absolutely NEVER run a dirt box and rarely use anything other than reverb and a delay + a compressor for clean sustain. 90% of the time I'm running my high gain tube amps quite dirty and using touch and my volume to clean up.

 

[jimijames]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

that pedal sounds awesome!

My hat's really off to midwayfair (real name: Jon) and the guys from runoffgroove for the circuit - it's on a different level in terms of topology. It has an on-board charge pump and in the stock configuration uses 2n5457s which, coupled with the 18v supply clips like a j201 but cleans up much better.

The first clipping stage has the topology of a fender amp and the clean sound is definitely in that camp. The second clipping stage is designed to emulate power amp clipping and uses 3x bs170 mosfets arranged to clip (the body diode? I'm not sure which one it is but there are two ways to clip a MOSFET IIRC) and generally just sounds very smooth. Lastly it has a bjt output buffer which gives it a definite EP boost vibe when it's clean.

The compressor is really a nice touch as well - because it's dependent on how much output is going into it you get both more gain and compression as you turn up the volume, so the result is it cleans up better than any OD I've used as you turn it down.

It's really a unique pedal. I've tweaked mine slightly to have a pretty aggressive bass roll off knob before the first stage so I can lean out the pedal from being too fat (imo) to tube screamer and treble booster-type eq settings. Stock the pedal is pretty fat sounding, which I think is due to the fact that fets get thicker as you turn up the gain.

I'm slightly enamored with it - I can record a few demos with my vox tonelab direct into my computer here tonight. Sound quality isn't great but it's much better than my camera microphone lol.

 

[80's_Metal]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

Bottoms up.

I like that I can run my board into any clean amp and retain a faithful tone.

 

[eclecticsynergy]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

For me: Guitars > Triaxis. Case closed.

My rack does have a compressor and a distortion (half-space Boss RCL-10 & ROD-10) in the signal path before Triaxis, but the comp only gets used once in a while and the distortion almost never. Any chorus/flange/rotary and delay/reverb is done after the preamp. Post EQ is available but superfluous.

For rehearsals I use an Ibanez UE-300 pedal leftover from my gig rig back in the early 80s. Sounds great- compressor, chorus, and the original tube screamer in one box. But it's just icing on the cake, rather than defining the tone. My core sound is Boogie Mk II (a faithful old friend also part of my 80s rig, stalwart veteran of over 4000 sets & sessions when I finally retired it from active duty. Exact same tone is available from Lead 2 Yellow mode of the Triaxis, one of the things which made me fall in love with it immediately.) Tube screamer does have a certain magic- it famously gooses the honk, sure, but it preserves pick attack very accurately and lends a bit of looseness to the MkII's tight & punchy low end, letting me get a bit closer to the ripping JMP type lead tones I use a lot in the Tri. I find it kind of ironic that some use the TS to tighten their sound, but I think that's more in the focused-mids department... Recently picked up a John Spina modded DS-1 which I expect should help the old Boogie approximate the more massive Recto tones I visit once in a while.

I'm not unaware of what a privilege it is to have accumulated some great equipment over the years. And in a way I envy those who can run just a pedalboard with any amp and still have their signature sound. I also think it might not be very long before modelers can duplicate the feel (not just imitate the tone) of good tube amps. Each generation gets closer, and computing power will soon cease to be a limitation. Perhaps it already has.

But for me, for now, there's no substitute for heavy iron and glowing tubes.

 

[El Dunco]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

Top down. Usually always straight in and working with the amp before decided whether it needs anything extra.

 

[chadd]

Re: Your Tone - from the ground up, or from the top down?

Top down. I have a Mesa Roadster with four channels and I only use clean with dirt pedals when I need something very specific and so rarely used that I don't want to dedicate one of my four channels to that tone.