Yeah, going to work with Dad under those conditions would have to be pretty interesting!

Does the guy blend all those amps for a composite tone, or switch between them for certain things, or all of the above?

Good points all, and in general a great thread that has affected how I look at things.

Now, taking a brief break from bass amps, I think I've left my "tube amp snob" days far and long behind me, but check out that green Matchless head on that check-fronted Marshall cabinet. If a guy was going to play through a half-stack, I bet that'd be a pretty nice-sounding one to play through!

We used to split gigs with a band whose guitarist ran a Matchless Clubman head through a Fender Bandmaster cab, and and it really sounded great. Ahh, memories...

Actually, it's been years since I've been a gigging musician, but after reading and re-reading your post it got me thinking about nights when my band lucked into playing some of the bigger clubs around here (like, when two or three bands in front of us on the list were sick or something, and we eventually got the call).

Hearing the familiar sound of our drummer's kick and low tom and the bassist's Peavey TNT combo suddenly booming through a row of subs and nice monitors, out into a mostly empty club, was pretty exciting.

I meant to say in my last post that your likening the horn to a gearbox was helpful to me; also, in another thread here I mentioned recently picking up a little Line 6 Lowdown 110 bass amp cheap and used. I think that would be a good example of "flogging the living daylights" out of a small (10") speaker in a too-small box (12" x 12" x 12" cube, plus subtract however much the chassis cuts into the internal volume...probably reduces the internal depth by at least 1-1/2" or 2").

To me that little amp sounds pretty good on at least two or three of the models, but I wonder how hyped the models are in the lows to partially overcome the acoustic limitations of the amp's physical configuration? It would be interesting to use the amp to drive a larger, more "neutral" enclosure and drivers and see what that sounded like.

This is very interesting and is presented in a condensed-enough form for me to grasp; thank you for taking the time to write this. I have probably experienced a lot of the "replaced fundamental" phenomenon without knowing it! Maybe I need to get some time in playing my bass and listening through some larger speakers to get a feel for what some real fundamental feels/sounds like.

1. Have J-bins or W-bins been built that use 10" bass drivers? I'm wondering how a single- or dual-10" compact folded horn arrangement might work with a low-wattage head like mine...or does that compactness/small driver approach begin to negate the efficiency benefits of a design like that?

2. Does the "screaming" of the Peavey Musician occur even if nothing is plugged into the input? Or does it only happen when you plug in an instrument or just a cable? If the latter, does plugging something else into it still make it scream?

I have an old Valco tube amp that screams like crazy if I plug my lap steel into it, but it doesn't act up with my guitar. My lap steel is fine plugged into other amps. I haven't traced this problem down and dealt with it yet.

This thread is making me want to build a W-bin or a J-horn cabinet for my old 60-watt Univox tube bass head! Off to follow links...

Hmm, never heard of one of those amps before, but...

...I think the Ultimate Guitar reviewer was just saying that using the amp was so bad an experience that such an amp would be only worth $30, at best. Not that he had one for sale.

He trashed the amp so thoroughly that I'd have to put that review in the useless category, making "Ultimate Guitar" pretty unworthy of its name, at least in this case. He sounded pretty inexperienced, and to have such a negative opinion with so few "assessment tools" at one's disposal suggests to me that the amp is probably worth a listen. It's impossible for any sound-producing, electric-guitar-oriented product to be all bad, because any sound will be useful somewhere for electric guitar music.

Can you describe the amp's visuals? What sort of covering material, knobs on top or on the front, etc...Crate made a Vintage Club 30 in the early/mid '90s, but it was a tube amp...the ones I saw had the knobs on top and were covered in sort of a cream-colored Tolex, although I think some of the later ones were black. I recall people liking the way they sounded for the most part...? Are you sure it was solid state?

SR2,

If the Acoustasonic Jr. you bought is a pre-DSP, spring reverb one, here's the schematic, from a thread I posted a month or two back...

http://support.fender.com/schematics/guitar_amplifiers/Acoustasonic_Jr_schematic.pdf

Good luck with the repair; I think these are pretty cool amps, including for non-acoustic uses...but I'm kind of weird like that.

Also, speaking of Peavey Pacers, check out what this guy on the steel guitar forum did; built a finger-jointed pine cabinet for a Pacer chassis and two 8" neodymium-magnet speakers.

Thanks for that explanation; now I want to go find one of those Composers and try it out for myself!

I don't mean to derail this topic, but I am very interested to read JMF's description of what the tube actually does in the Hartke and the Eden. Back in the '90s it seemed like these low-voltage tube "enhanced" products were popping up everywhere, and at the time I had a Real Tube RT-922 rack preamp powered by an ADA Microtube 100 power amp (in my defense, I bought both because they were used, cheap, compact and lightweight, not because they had preamp tubes in them). But I read somewhere that the RT-922 had something like 16 volts on the two 12AX7's plates.

After using that thing for awhile I decided I'd like it better if the gain was a little lower overall and came on more gradually as you twisted the gain knob, so I swapped both channels' tubes for 12AT7s. I thought I could tell a difference at the time; it didn't get quite as snarly/buzzy with the gain maxed and it was easier to find a medium gain sound I liked. So I guess those tubes were doing something in there, or I was really experiencing the tube placebo effect. Eventually I developed a taste for lower-gain sounds and didn't like the RT-922's sound for the band I'd joined. I wish I'd tried some even lower-gain tubes--12AU7s, maybe--before getting rid of it, but I got into small combo amps and got rid of the rack box and its contents. And I never did try other tubes in the ADA Microtube power amp, nor did I ever really look into what those tubes were actually doing in there. Anybody know?

Regarding the Hartke tube, at the time our bass player had a Hartke 3500 head with the dual preamp path thing in it, and I remember us jacking around with it and generally agreeing we liked the clean SS pre as well or better than the "tube" pre. Never gave it much thought beyond that. That's why it's interesting for me to read what's actually in there now. I wonder how much of an Ampeg SVT's signature sound comes from being a tube amp and how much just comes from its tone stack design and the 8 x 10" cabinet...?

Eric, I've played through a Pacer before (my buddy across the hall in the college dorms had one) and to my ear, that brand of mild, kind of greasy-skanky "Lynyrd Skynyrd-esque" distortion is great for all kinds of rock and blues, but to appreciate it you sometimes have to hear it in context. In other words, it might sound pretty lame to you if you just got done rocking out through a Boss Metal Zone pedal or using a Marshall JCM900 in a room by yourself...but when you hear that Peavey grit in a mix, it can really cut through, carve out a spot for itself to be heard without stepping all over the bass, vocals or other guitars.

Having said that, I've had great results with my slightly newer Peavey Audition 20 (early 1980s), which probably falls somewhere between your Pacer and Decade in terms of available dirt level, by setting it pretty loud and with a medium gain setting, so playing soft sounds pretty clean and playing hard gets noticeably dirtier. Push the output volume and speaker hard. And if you have it set like this and in front of it you place a clean boost pedal (I use an old beat-up DOD FX-10 Bi-Fet Preamp, but there are many others...some distortion pedals can also function as a clean-ish boost) you can get some great tones by having the amp on the verge of crunch, then pushing it into freakout zone by hitting it with a hotter signal.

I also like using a compressor pedal in front of the amp, set at a pretty mild, conservative level. I don't want to hear a special-effects squashed sort of compressed signal; I just want to hear a slight limiting on the peaks, and a slow enough attack that my pick attack comes through a bit...this seems to approximate the slight sag and compression that a tube circuit might display at the onset of overdrive.

Anyway, try those things before chopping into either of your amps...you might find a combination you like.

Yeah, if I was a better bass player maybe I'd have a story about how I pulled off a bass-playing gig using my Dean Markley K-20 miked and DI'ed...or something. But I've got some practicing and learning to do before that happens!

Roly, can you describe the music you're playing in that ensemble and the sort of tones you're going for from the Mustang I?

For one thing, I have a friend who isn't gigging at the moment and has a couple of small children in a small house, and his Peavey Classic 30 is clearly not the best amp for that situation. The volume it sounds best at is waaaay to loud. He's been thinking about something like a Super Champ XD, and more recently, a Mustang amp. He likes Fender-style bright, ringing cleans and wants to be able to get tones he likes at very low volumes in the house and also be loud enough to jam with friends once in awhile.

For another, I'm just interested in what kind of sounds you go for for my own comparison. At the time of my story, I was getting sort of a medium-gain snarly distortion...I thought of it as Marshall JCM800 with the gain up about 1/3 or 1/2 of the way. It would pretty much clean up if I played softly and it would go nuts if I stepped on the boost pedal. Almost all of that gain manipulation happened in the three pedals I mentioned and the amps were just there to be as loud and clean as they could go, so I wasn't really asking that much of the amps from a tonal perspective.

In my next band I switched to actually using the Peavey as my "tone generator" instead of the Rat II and BBE DI/speaker simulator combination. I would shoot for a pretty clean sound there too, with just a little dirt, and step on the boost for solos and make the amp circuit itself go nuts. Sometimes I'd kick on a tremolo pedal, but not too often, and since I wasn't trying to reproduce a bunch of effects or a really distorted sound, I felt like the small wattage amps were ideal for me...I could push them hard and the volume was just about right for the basement or small gigs. So I'm interested in what kind of tones you get from that Mustang at a volume of 3 or 4...are you using pretty effected-out patches, or bare tones, lots of distortion or mostly clean, or what?

I would like to relate an experience that supports Roly's post.

Two bands ago, we lucked into playing what was then St. Louis' largest live music club...the now-defunct Mississippi Nights. Somehow, we got on some backup band call list and when an opening act for a weeknight show bailed for whatever reason, the club started calling bands on the backup list. I'm not sure how many tiers down we were on the list, but we must have been the first ones that said "You bet! We'd love to!"

We practiced about 15 minutes from the club, which was about 60 miles from my house. I was already in town, so from my point of view it was, if nothing else, a chance to have band practice through a really nice sound system with subwoofers and good monitors and whatnot.

This was a time when the two little vintage tweed Valco tube amps I paired up for live gigs were both laid up with problems, so I had to borrow a friend's Crate GX15 to pair with my Peavey Audition 20 and hope the two together had enough volume to be heard by everyone on stage. At the time I was running a ProCo Rat II at a low gain setting but on all the time, through the speaker simulation filter of a BBE DI-10 d.i. box, into whatever amp. A DOD boost pedal in front of the Rat kicked the gain up for solos. I split the signal to the Peavey and Crate through a crappy-sounding old Boss digital reverb, which I mainly used as a signal splitter. I set the amps to go as loud, clean and flat as they could without too much breakup--on the scooped-sounding Crate, this required the mids to be set kind of high and the highs/lows to be set below halfway. It seemed to work pretty well at our practice space, so we loaded up and headed for the club, where we discovered that...

...the main act we were opening for was the Gigolo Aunts, who were from Boston (I think), were touring and were pretty into slick tube gear. The bass player had some old Traynor tube bass amp, and the guitar players had a Matchless, a Fender (Twin? Deluxe? can't remember) and really nice vintage guitars. I go up there to set up with my frankenstein strat-like parts guitar, a couple of pedals and a couple of practice amps, dwarfed by the gear behind it. The Gigolo Aunts guys came by and made some carefully deadpan remark like "Those are nice," and walked off. The soundman came up and said, "Soooooo...what are we planning to mic here?"...like, are you wanting to share the Peavey tone or the Crate tone with us tonight? I told him, dead serious, that the Peavey was my main amp and the Crate was just there for stage volume. He said "oooooookayyyyy" and miked me up and left.

At that point I was starting to have some doubts but when we tried it, it was just loud enough to work with, and about halfway through the soundcheck song we were doing the monitor mix came together and it sounded great...probably 85-90% of what I was used to from the tube amps, which tells me that most of my tone was coming from the pedals in those days. But the gig came off fine, almost no one showed up but we played well and the Gigolo Aunts came out and kicked total ass to a mostly empty house. As we were loading out the soundman waved me over and said to his surprise the guitar sound was great out front and very easy to place in the mix, since there wasn't that much coming off the stage competing with the house system.

So, yeah...little amps can work. In my case, it helped that we were a fairly restrained band, volume-wise, being organized around and in support of an acoustic guitar-playing singer. But it worked great that night and in the places where I got to crank up and blow, there was enough sound from behind me and from the monitors that I didn't feel any lack of punch at all!