screamingdaisy
Well-known member
Sometimes I think of stuff that I don't think is important or interesting enough for it's own thread, so I'm going to start this one and post to it whenever I think of something idle to chat about.
First up... power.
I tried setting all three channels up on different settings. It was a win and a fail all at the same time.
The fail was setting channel 2 (crunch) to 45w and channel 3 (Mark IV) to 90w. In theory it was good... some more compression on the crunch tones and some more power/articulation on the lead/heavy rhythm tones. It sounded great at home, then totally fell apart at rehearsal. Channel 3 on 90w was wide and dynamic while channel 2 on 45w was thin and narrow. I wound up bumping it up to 90w to make it more comparable.
The win was that I was running channel 1 on 45w with the tube rectifier on. I theorize that using the tube rectifier drops my headroom down to 30w or 35w... but it's just a guess. I assume that most people are like me in that they've struggled with going from clean to dirty in a mix. Usually clean sounds big and bold with a very full sound, then dirty sounds thin and wimpy unless it's accompanied by a pretty significant volume increase. Dropping the clean channel's power adds some nice drive/compression and bounce to the clean channel. It also thins the sound out slightly, which makes it a better match switching between clean and high gain without needing to rely on the big volume increase to thicken things up (although I did still need a slight volume increase).
First up... power.
I tried setting all three channels up on different settings. It was a win and a fail all at the same time.
The fail was setting channel 2 (crunch) to 45w and channel 3 (Mark IV) to 90w. In theory it was good... some more compression on the crunch tones and some more power/articulation on the lead/heavy rhythm tones. It sounded great at home, then totally fell apart at rehearsal. Channel 3 on 90w was wide and dynamic while channel 2 on 45w was thin and narrow. I wound up bumping it up to 90w to make it more comparable.
The win was that I was running channel 1 on 45w with the tube rectifier on. I theorize that using the tube rectifier drops my headroom down to 30w or 35w... but it's just a guess. I assume that most people are like me in that they've struggled with going from clean to dirty in a mix. Usually clean sounds big and bold with a very full sound, then dirty sounds thin and wimpy unless it's accompanied by a pretty significant volume increase. Dropping the clean channel's power adds some nice drive/compression and bounce to the clean channel. It also thins the sound out slightly, which makes it a better match switching between clean and high gain without needing to rely on the big volume increase to thicken things up (although I did still need a slight volume increase).