In my post above, I meant to add that if you're using a really distorted sound right now, even if you're not sucking out most or all of the mids, you should try backing the gain down in increments and maybe cranking the amp's output louder if needed.

In my first band, the lead singer/rhythm guitarist used an 80-watt Laney 1 x 12 combo and a strat, and he kept up fine with my 100-watt half-stack and the bass player's 350-watt Harkte...using a low-to-medium gain sound, but loud.

Before deciding your amp is a problem, make sure you've given some thought to these points:

From my experience, an open back combo will not behave like a closed 4 x 12 and won't flap people's pants as hard, but that doesn't have to be a negative thing. I've found closed 4 x 12s to produce a fairly focused beam of sound, which can really zoom out off the stage but can tear some people's heads off while not being as audible as you might like elsewhere in the room (obviously not as much a factor if everyone's playing at modest levels and miked through the PA).

Open-back combos don't project as well, but produce a more diffuse sphere of sound around the amp. In some ensembles and styles of playing, this might be preferable, and getting the amp up off the floor or at least tilted back and aimed at your head, or aimed across the stage at everyone in the band's head like a sidefill monitor...that might help you compete in terms of cutting through the onstage mix.

As far as sounding thin and toylike...what kind of music are you playing, and are you cutting out a bunch of mids? It's a Marshall, baby! The mids are where the magic is--check out some early Walt Mink music!--and also constitute the frequencies that are easiest to make seem "loud" to us. Especially if the other guitar player scoops his mids, you've got an opportunity to expand here. Before chasing off after other gear, make sure you've explored your eq settings...in the context of the band's mix, not solo. What might not be an ideal tone by yourself can sound great in a mix. Give some thought to conserving sonic real estate so everyone's not stepping all over each other. If one guy has scooped mids, the other guy can dial up some mids, be heard and not be in the same equalization "zone."

I'm not familiar with the 8080 specifically, but if it has no ext. speaker jacks and has an 8-ohm speaker in it, it probably wants to see an 8-ohm load. Two 16-ohm speakers in parallel make an 8-ohm load; you could install a 16-ohm speaker in your amp and combine it with a 16-ohm cabinet in parallel and have more volume that way, and just live with somewhat reduced output when using the amp without the cab, due to the impedance mismatch. But before doing that, or replacing the speaker with a more efficient one, I'd try eq-ing it with "cutting through the mix" in mind and experimenting with where the amp is onstage and at what height/angle. I have heard Valvestate heads through various cabinets in bands before and thought that they could sound good, so don't start buying stuff until you have exhausted the options with what you already have...consider its compact size and easy portability! With your one-trip load-out, think of how helpful you can be to the other bandmembers in helping to load out their gear! Yeah!

Quote from: teemuk on April 01, 2012, 06:37:40 AM
They are great amps, but be aware that they probably are not the best choice if you look for features like headroom or transparency because the MOSvalves are designed to colour the sound by having a somewhat non-linear response and especially to softclip the MOSFET outputs if driven harder. The latter feature will inherently limit the clean headroom, though it's something that certain people do look for from a power amp. They are not like your average transparent PA, which is either a good or bad thing, depending on each person's individual taste and preferences.

The rule of thumb is: if you want headroom then always choose the highest output power. Simple physics. Can't go wrong with that. Do also note that headroom translates to things like more authoritive bass response and overall signal clarity but it does not neccessarily equal greater perceived loudness or ability to cut through the bandmix any better. A low power amp outputting mid-range oriented signal that is compressed by clipping may sound far louder than a higher power amp that operates on a wider bandwidth and also reproduces all the signal peaks accurately instead of clipping them. The difference of headroom levels is often more a "feel" and overall "tone" thing than a loudness thing.

What a great post! Good summary info, well stated. Good thread in general, really.

"I think 60w on a 10" is overkill personally.  Keep it small, lightweight and functional.  It only needs 25-30w power, similar to a Frontman 25r."

As someone who likes the sound of little amps cranked hard, I can see where you'd say that, but consider something like an Evans RE150 or RE200 (amps I'd love to try sometime). They're designed for rich, detailed tone and portability, primarily for jazz guys, with 150 or 200 solid-state watts through a 10" speaker.

If you were going for headroom and portability, and giggable volume, that combination of features/dimensions might make an appealing package. But if the onset of speaker distortion mattered to you in terms of getting the tone you were after, yeah, that much power through a 10 might not be the hot setup...I can't say, since I've never pushed a 10 capable of handling that many watts to the point of cone distortion. I do know it can be a fun tone addition with lower-wattage rigs, though.

The Fahey amps do look very nice. I need to check out those video clips and hear 'em.  I

Man, all this time I've been plugging a 4-ohm load resistor in place of the speaker on my Peavey when I wanted to use the line out silently. I could've just been unplugging the speaker, huh?

No shame in those tracks! I gave them a quick sample-listen on each, on the crappy speakers of my wife's computer, so far and will check them out more later. But for whatever my opinion's worth, the important part is already there (in time, in tune) and mix issues can always be fixed, or just re-recorded. And these mixes are kind of fun anyway. I like how the guitars aren't so gained-out that they fill every sonic space available. There's space around the drums and bass and vocals, which to me sounds more like real life live bands. You may have used cheap mics, but  you can hear an actual room there around the instruments, so it sounds real.

I liked the first track, "Game Face," right off. The half-time feel appealed to me and the vocals seemed reminiscent of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and the guy that sung on the "Deconstruction" CD from the early 90s...with Dave Navarro on guitar and I think Eric Avery singing...? I like the cleanish guitar turning to the slightly dirtyish guitar as the choruses came in and you hit it harder...that's the kind of grit I like to use too, for the most part.

I liked the way "Wormhole" was in six, with a lot of space and sustainy sound mixed back amongst the prominent drums, too. I'd like to hear more when your recordings are finished. Interesting stuff.

It's an assumption, but what I hear here suggests to me that you could do what you need to with a couple of Peavey Bandits, or other smaller Bandit siblings in multiple. My experience with these amps is that you can stay in the clean channel, but with middle settings on the pre gain and high settings on the post gain, and get a loud almost clean sound with a bit of breakup from the preamp and the speaker, and it's not a fiddly set of controls to get this one elusive sound. You can play extended chords with some clarity and you can also whack it hard on double-stops and get a little crunch in there if you want. If you step on a clean signal boost pedal in front of the amp (I use a DOD FX10 Bi-FET preamp) it makes the circuit go nuts and get all loose, exciting and sustainy for solos but without sounding like a metal distortion pedal. Maybe there's a clean signal boost, or compression/signal boost, function in your Zoom unit?

Anyway, yeah...older Peavey combo(s). Cheap, reliable, good preamp design for this kind of thing, to my ear.

The amp is just an amp, although maybe with a little different center frequencies on the equalization controls and different gain structure in the preamp. If you play a guitar into it, you'll still be sending guitar frequencies to the speakers and the issue will be whether you can achieve a tone you like running your guitar through that particular amp, or whether it sounds good with whatever pedals and stuff you combine it with.

My first gigging guitar amp was a Univox 1246B tube bass head powering a Fender 4 x 12, a Peavey 2 x 10 or both. 60 watts, cranked, sometimes with an attenuator knocking a few dB off the speaker signal. No speaker damage occurred. Now, if I'd been playing a bass through the amp into the guitar speakers, maybe then...

Plug into that Rumble Bass and by all means, try out the OD channel! It might be great!

This is maybe getting away from the intended direction of this thread, but I am intrigued by your approach and if you ever have any recorded examples of you putting this rig to work, I'd love to hear them. I've never been a foot-oriented signal-switcher myself, but I can appreciate the sound of other people doing it, and reading about how other people get inspired to create different sounds is fascinating to me.

Wow! I'd love to hear it. If you ever get any clips you can post...

I'm a ways from being ready to build my own, but in terms of buying something like you describe...what about scouring pawn shops/Craigslist for a starter bass combo in the 50 or 60 watt size? Older Crate B60s, Peavey Basics, Fender BXs?

I regret declining an offered Crate B60 once, when its owner just got tired of it and got a Hartke. Looking back, it would have been an interesting experiment to put a guitar speaker in it, and maybe even cut an opening in the back, radius the edges, re-trim the tolex to fit so it looked finished...it had simple controls like what you describe and I wish I'd have thought to crank it up with guitar and really see what it could do. Might have made an interesting one-channel guitar head, run through some guitar cabinet, too.

I once helped engineer a recording session of a sort of Rage Against The Machine-styled band whose guitar player was playing through some older Peavey keyboard combo, with the tweeter removed and its hole just acting as a reflex port. It had simple single-channel controls too, but it either had the mids split into two bands, or it had semi-parametric mids...can't remember. I do remember he was running an SG and a Danelectro Fabtone into it and he was getting some really rude, rippin' distortion. A unique sound.

Anyway, those midsize bass and keyboard amps that aren't quite big enough to cut it on a loud gig could do fine with guitar, if you could get a tone you could work with...

I've been intrigued with the idea of bringing one amp in or out of the mix by feeding it a varying amount of signal with a volume pedal. Like, in my case, pulling a signal from my little Peavey's line out (that amp is kind of my central tone reference point) and feeding the line signal through a volume pedal into something else's FX return jack (or, really, the Peavey's line out signal is tame enough to go into an instrument input if you watch that input's gain level and use your ears).

This brings up interesting possibilities of where to put the volume pedal; if I put it between the "tone amp" and the "slave amp", I always have the particular tone and just vary its volume. If I put the volume before the "tone amp," I control the overall volume and how clean or dirty the signal is, according to where the volume pedal is in its sweep.

I haven't tried either yet, because I need to replace the pot in my volume pedal and never seem to find the time. But when I do, I think I'll end up putting it after the tone amp, because I like to control clean/dirty by my picking intensity and guitar volume knob position.

If you're more into clean amps reproducing multi FX, I suspect you're more comfortable switching sounds with your feet.

I would like to know the 1 guitar/3 amps signal path too. Also, I did not realize the difference in reliability between something like a Peavey Bandit and a Fender SS amp from that era was so large. Good to know.

Cool! I used to have a low-end Morrell steel that looked like the same shape as what you have, but with only a volume knob and a strat-type pickup. Must have based it pretty closely on that design. Yours sounds better in that vid than the Morrell ever did with me playing it. Your technique sounds more precise than mine, too...

Yeah, I tried to learn C6th when I got my first steel, using the DeWitt Scott method book (I'm near St. Louis, home of Scotty's Music) and it sure sounds nice if you play clean and have your chops together. I haven't got my chops together enough to get beyond "drunk Hawaiian" sound when I use that tuning, but having the greater range of intervals under the bar will be nice if I ever get it together enough.

In Dobro G, you have to get kind of janky with the bar to do a lot of stuff, but for some reason I've found that easier to process and do than muting the many unwanted strings from sounding in C6th.

My first steel was a Fender, and it was Telecaster-bright. Of course I tried it distorted, and all that brightness and C6th and the distortion was really awful!

Have you ever tried steel through a full-range speaker arrangement? With a clean tone, that might be pretty cool. I can get a sound I like running mine through a Fender Acoustasonic Jr. amp (two 8" speakers and a single tweeter). But I never really go for distortion with the steel.

The Princeton Chorus had some bigger brothers, but at the moment I can't remember the names of the other amps in Fender's lineup in that era. I think there was one that had something like 160 watts. Plus, if you were running a pair of them you might not need to push it to the fart-out point, even if you kept the stock speakers.

I don't know about Brian May's signal path, but I do know I've seen videos of Queen live and he had a stack of 9 Vox AC30s behind him. Three stacks of three. Who knows how many were actually on, but given that they're only 30 watts and it was a huge outdoor gig, maybe he was using them all. I've read about guys use a pair of amps for stereo FX and a center amp with a dry signal, but I don't know if that would be redundant with clean tones or not. I think that's usually guys that spend a lot of time with a distorted sound (Neal Schon is one guy I remember reading about like that).

I read about Pat Metheny's rig some years back and it was pretty interesting; he had a GSP 2101 preamp or something similar feeding a center amp and two side amps, and I think the side amps had differing delay times (he had real specific times he mentioned, like 13 ms and 26 ms or something) from one another, creating a real-time spatial chorus effect in the room, without actually using a chorus patch in the 2101. I forgot what the amps themselves, or speaker cabinets were though.

It would be interesting to experiment with how many watts/speakers you needed to get your sound across with a band; whether the stereo pair of amps could be lower wattage than the center one, or vice versa, or all the same.

Back to the PA thing...regardless of available channels at the board, what I was getting at was, in your part of the world, are there soundmen that will go along with a guitar player requesting  L/R/Center mics or DIs? And further, if they are willing to accomodate that, are there places to play near you with the PA actually in stereo? Have you experienced the three-amp approach you suggest mixed to mono, and if so, does the combination of stereo FX and a different mono sound blended in justify itself when combined to mono, without the L/R information making it past the first few rows, who could presumably hear the onstage sound along with the PA?

I'm leery of the Valvetronix amps and the Line 6 stuff I've tried. Some of this might be in my head, but I felt like I could get a tone that sounded good, but the amp's dynamic response was not what I wanted. If you're not into working the edges of a distorted sound, this may not matter to you, but from where I'm coming from, I endorse a non-modeling approach.

My quick knee-jerk answer is to scour local pawnshops or CL for another Bandit or two. They are fairly compact, pretty loud and usually cheap. They fit in small cars. You can drop them down stairs.

Or, hell, if you're really into a three-amp setup and want to downsize too, get two smaller amps (Peavey Envoy? Red-knob solid-state Fenders?) and use your Bandit as the center dry amp or additional swirl amp...?

Two other quick thoughts, not intended to offend at all, but made as a fellow no-budget music dad...

1) where are you gigging that you get enough PA channels to run stereo or three-channel?

2) if you're budget limited, don't get too far into the gear-daydreaming trap. Spend more time coming up with stuff to play on your instrument and less on complicated signal paths. I could do better at taking my own advice here, but hey, maybe you'll be better at following it than I am myself!

(Your three-channel idea is intriguing, though (runs downstairs going mwwaaa hah hah hah))