Quote from: J M Fahey on March 15, 2013, 12:00:20 PM

Not much.
Definitely not a "compressed" one, nor long sustain or attack squashing.
"Clean" channel gain is *usually* set to an "average" guitar, played by an "average" guitar player, starts clipping around 6 or 7 on the volume control.
Why? : so a weak player/pickup/thin_strings still have a little extra gain available to compensate (7 to 10 ) while a loud player will still have clean sound up to, say, 5 .
That with a true Audio/Log volume pot, of course.
So in practice you can overdrive a Clean channel by 6 to 10dB, not much.

My son wanted 4 channels. The two clean channels should be allowed to overdrive, softly, based on the "gain" control. The two distortion channels should start from overdrive all the way up to hard distortion. By "soft overdrive" my son wants to be able to hear every note clearly, but does not like it when the "distortion" falls off and a clean tone then remains. For example you strum the low E, you hear two or three seconds worth of overdrive and another four or five seconds of cleaner tone. He expects the same "overdriven" tone to become progressively more quiet but without losing its tonal characteristics.

Therefore I will tell my son that he cannot have everything

Would that mean that the average bass amp requires a speaker with multiple times the wattage of the guitar amp's? Would you be able to take any old cabinet and plug a bass amp into it or would you require a specially made cabinet?

Perfect. How much distortion would you expect out of the clean channel, assuming no pedals inserted in between? Would you get the distortion where compression is very evident, where the attack caused by picking is almost lost completely ? Or would it overdrive but never really "distort" even at full gain ?

I do not have a good quality all tube amp here, so I would kindly ask anyone that does, or knows, to help me:

Turn guitar to max, on the clean channel, turn the gain up so that it is not clean anymore but overdrives. Make sure that playing a chord clearly overdrives. Now play a single note, eg open low E and hear the "fuzz" of the overdrive. The question is how long does it take before the tone looses its fuzz and reverts to pure sinusoid? Is it possible that with this very soft overdrive the tone will continue to maintain its "overdrive" sound as the note dies?

Will something blow? Is the PSU of the guitar amp (purposely) weak and cannot handle the low frequencies?

Thanks