Tag: amps

The Amp and Cab Switch I Didn’t Know Existed

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How It Starts

At some point every electric guitarist these days stumbles across the amazing studio musicians that create content for YouTube. Just watch Tim Pierce, RJ Ronquillo or Pete Thorn and you’ll soon have amp fever, lusting after their quick multi-head amp switching systems. After my experiments with various cabs, leading to my decision to go with all head and cab amps instead of combos, I started looking at these switching systems.

At the same time I am a huge fan and constant watcher of That Pedal Show, where Dan and Mick have taught me about the joy that is a wet/dry rig. Having one amp run all the gain pedals and another running gain plus all the time and modulation effects gives a huge soundstage that doesn’t wash out you main tone. Trying different combinations of amps for each role has led to some very interesting and inspiring tones that would not have been otherwise possible.

The Problem with Most Switchers

But this has led to a bit of a problem. All of the top amp/cab switcher are pretty much mono, and even running 2 of them would mean having to split my amps into two groups ahead of time (I don’t have many amps, so that would make it pretty pointless). Just as I was about to bite the bullet and go full mono from now on, I came across a brand I’d never heard of before in a forum post.

De Lisle to the Rescue

De Lisle makes a number of switching solutions, some more basic than the often-proposed devices. In fact, the amp and cab switched I ended up with is a fully passive device that simply lets you switch any of the 8 cabs to any of the 8 amps. Its only safety measure is a passive load that protects an amp if it’s not connected to a speaker, but even then, only if you don’t send a signal to the amp.

So it’s not fancy, doesn’t have midi control and won’t let you swap between a bunch of amps while playing to try out various tones. What it does do is let me set any amp that is connect to any cabs that are connected. If the amp could handle it, I could run all 8 cabs to one amp. More importantly, I can run any amp to any cab at the same time, making any wet/dry combination possible without having to go behind and re-wire my cabs.

Not only has this wonderful device made experimenting more fun and easy, it’s also breathed new life into my Mesa Boogie Triple Crown as I play it way more often now that I don’t have to hook it up every time I want to play it.

Which only leaves one last question, which head should I buy next. Ok, maybe that one is already answered as well.

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Can your cab really free your tone?

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Can your cab really free your tone?

CAN YOUR CAB REALLY FREE YOUR TONE?

Guitar amplifiers fall into two categories, combo amps and head with cab amps. Both camps have their own pros and cons with space, portability and ease usually taking the top spots of each list, but should they? Once you have even one head and cabinet setup, and plugged another combo amp or other head into an existing cab you realize there is something even more important to consider. Tone. That magic word that all guitarists are on a never ending search for. Turns out the cabinet and speakers you plug into have way more to do with your amp’s tone and feel than you likely ever realized. So can your cab really free your tone? Yes, yes it can.

WHERE IT STARTED

My first realization came after I bought my first head and cab setup, a grail level amp, the Two-Rock Classic Reverb Signature V3. Huge cleans with tons of bottom end was the name of the game for me. like all things life changes and I decided I wanted something smaller and more versatile. Enter a Bloomfield Drive 40 watt combo amp and out goes the Classic Reverb. A second cascading stage to give more in amp gain, and a smaller footprint for if I ever moved (I was in a bit of a minimalism phase). The only problem? After some time I really missed the big deep cleans of the Classic Reverb.

Luckily (in hindsight) I sold the head separate from the cab as I got a change to plug the Bloomfield combo into the Two-Rock 2×12 cab. The difference was honestly staggering! Not only did the bass response of the 2×12 come back, but surprising some of the chime that I thought was inherently lost in the new amp too! This revelation lead me to run the combo into the cab pretty much all the time, and eventually I swapped the combo for the 100 watt head version of the Bloomfield Drive as it seemed silly to have a combo speaker that was never getting used and also gave back the 100 watt bass response that I adore.

ADDING SOME MORE

The next head and cabinet pair I purchased was another huge 100 watt beast, the Paul Reed Smith J-MOD 100. This time the cabinet was an even bigger closed back cab giving me something else to play with. When you need more bass out of an amp (rare, but happens as you will see soon), that is the cab to plug into. The cab matches to the John Mayer signature amp very well, giving it the signature bass response that John raves about in his demos. The closed back doesn’t fill the space with sound in the same way the Two-Rock cab does, but instead gives a quicker response to the speakers as the air behind helps bring them back to the ready position faster.

WHERE IT WENT WRONG, BUT THEN SAVED THE DAY

So far both amps sound great, but different into each cab, but what about an amp and cab that were meant for each other but just don’t do it for me? That’s just what happened when I picked up a Mesa Boogie Triple Crown 100 head and cab locally. The cab was compact by deep, giving a really percussive mid range that I could see working really well for high gain metal players, but make the amp sound quite nasal and honky in my opinion. As I got ready to sell the amp and cab I figured I’d give the amp one last try plugged into the PRS cab and I was blown away, almost literally. Gone was the honk and in it’s place was massive bass end with a more classic rock feel. That cab (and the Two-Rock one as well, which also sounds fantastic with the Boogie) saved that amp for me.

Mesa Boogie Recto Cab

After I had gotten rid of my original Classic Reverb, I plugged a lot of amps into that 2×12; 5-watt marshal clones, 20-watt hand-wired Marshalls, Kempers, and more. Compared to a number of other cabs I have had (Marshall hand-wired 2×12 for the 20 watt as well as some unbranded ones) it’s always sounded more open and balanced than the rest. Even in the world of IR’s and digital amps, do yourself a favor and get a great cab or two, it’s worth it. Next up for me, I’m thinking it’s time to try and 4×12 or 4×10 and see what that does to my tone.

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Getting ODS Tones from the Bloomfield Drive

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If you’ve followed Two-Rock or been interested in their amps for a while, you’ll know that many of their amps are Dumble inspired. The Bloomfield Drive is no exception, taking inspiration from their ODS-style TS-1 and adding a lush reverb. In theory this should be the best of both worlds, but owners have been finding that they can’t quite get the ODS tones they’re looking for from it. So is some magic sauce missing, or is it user error?

Goals

I have owned a Bloomfield Drive combo now for more than a year and it has been exactly what I originally wanted. An amp that can do beautiful cleans similar to a Classic Reverb but with a drive channel that lets me get some breakup at reasonable volume levels. Setting the drive channel just on the edge of breakup gave me two “clean” channels that I could stack pedals in front of.

However lately I’ve gone back an watched Joey Landreth’s demo again, as well as checking out some videos of other actual Dumble amplifiers. I found myself wondering if I could get the ODS tones from my Bloomfield Drive. Turning up the gain on the drive channel didn’t really get me where I wanted, and remembering the Josh Smith video of the TS-1 reminded me to turn up the gain on the clean stage first as it cascades into the drive channel to push it further.

Revelation

Well turning the “clean” gain up to 3 o’clock didn’t really get me there either, leaving me a bit cold and bewildered as to how Joey got those sweet tones. Was it due to some really pokey P90s? Maybe my combo is set to lower gain levels, or I needed to roll some tubes. Well the answer was none of the above, and once again came from thinking back to a Matt Schofield video from when he was on “That Pedal Show” explaining how he sets his amps, pedals, etc.

He describes listening to the pots as you turn them and to listen for the point where the have the most impact. When doing this you usually find a couple points on the rotation of the pots (short for potentiometers or “knobs” for the non-technical) where they have a lot more impact. Doing this on the first gain knob through the whole range I found two interesting spots I didn’t notice before. They are at around 4 o’clock and 5 o’clock, or on a 1-10 scale they’d be about 8 and 9. At these two points the gain jumps up by a lot, giving those sweet overdrive tones I had been looking for.

One bonus tip if you’re looking to really up the gain on the Bloomfield Drive, the mid boost switch gives a good boost to the gain that can push it over the edge. This is especially good with certain guitars such as a Strat that is naturally more lacking in the minds.

Can you Dumble?

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The Dumble Overdrive Special is an amp of legends. Smooth and creamy with nicely pushed mids, yet so tightly defined that individual notes ring through even with massive amounts of gain dialed in. Of course, this is what I’ve been told, or read on the internet so it must be true. There is no denying however that the sound you hear from various artists that use these holy grail amplifiers is alluring and inspiring for guitar players to listen to.

Now I can’t afford an ODS (yet! one day… ) but I do have a Two Rock Studio Pro 35 which is, through some levels of relation, based on the clean sound of a Dumble, and does do a very nice job indeed. A great “pedal platform” amp, it takes anything you can throw at it and makes it sound very good, but one thing I hadn’t tried until just now was mimicking the gain structure of an ODS. You see one of the things that sets apart the ODS is the fact that the overdrive happens after the tone stack of the clean channel, basically putting it where the effects loop of most other amps is. This got me thinking, why not put a gain pedal in the loop and see how it goes.

Now of course conventional guitar tone wisdom says that this would never work, but conventions are always being rewritten anyway so I might as well be the one to give it a show. My first try was a Paul Cochrane Tim, thinking the transparent nature of the pedal would help blend it into the sound of the amp and let me add just some hair to it as I do with the pedal going into the front. Strike 1, this did not work very well at all, it somehow wasn’t compressing in a way that felt right, now was it leaving the clean and clear overheat of the amp in tact. Maybe convention was there for a reason.

Attempt number two was much better. Much, much better. A tanabe.tv Dumkudo in the loop set to Dumble (green) mode and we are off and running. The Dumkudo offers a lot of volume and gain on tap with a mid boost that can be dialed in just right to get the amp singing. Turning the volume knob down on the guitar cleans up nicely, but loses a bit too much volume at the same time. Add a Keeley Compressor Pro before the amp input and the volume level stays more in the sweet spot while letting me adjust the gain with my guitars volume. The results speak for themselves, with high dynamic range (actually too much before the compressor was added), touch sensitivity, excellent sustain and works very well with additional pedal going into the front of the amp, it really is an all around win.

So some things to test in the future; I need to A/B the Dumkudo in front vs the loop as this pedal does just sound incredible all around so it may be that there isn’t that big of a difference wherever the pedal is, but I do need to try it out so I can see differences in sensitivity or dynamics. Also my testing was all done at semi-home levels, not bedroom but not live either. Turning up the amp and having the power section work harder may eliminate the need for the compressor and may yield different results. Lastly, I have only tried those 2 pedals so far, but I have many gain pedals so I should run through all of them and see which ones seem to work best to try and draw some conclusions as to guessing which other pedals may work well (I am looking at you Kingsley).

For now, how a listen and give it a try on your own amp if you have an effects loop. Worse you can do is learn what not to do.