A method of getting a good sound from your amplifier
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As a dabbler in amp building, I reckon there are places where a little understanding of the functioning of the amp can send you in odd directions too. For instance, it's much discussed on certain bass forums that the "flat" setting on a typical Fender tone stack is around 2-10-2. But that's viewing the tone stack in isolation and ignoring the rest of the amp/speaker setup.
When I first built my Princeton-ish amp I tended to keep the bass and treble way down at gigs and changed the fixed mid resistor to the equivalent of a mid control on 10, thinking that I didn't want to lose too many mids. But actually, I started getting sounds I was much happier with after I changed the mid resistor back to the original Fender value and used halfway or a little above as my bass/treble starting points.
Exactly! The whole point of the huge mid-cut in the Fender tone stack is to counteract the almost-all-mid natural tone of an open-back guitar combo with 10" or 12" speakers - precisely to give something roughly like a flat response (ignoring the lack of true top-end, since there's no tweeter) with all the controls at 5... so defeating that by looking at the tone stack in isolation is what *not* to do if you do want a 'flat' response. Although why that should be a goal in a musical instrument amp, which is a tone *producer* and not a tone *reproducer*, I'm not sure.MartinB said:As a dabbler in amp building, I reckon there are places where a little understanding of the functioning of the amp can send you in odd directions too. For instance, it's much discussed on certain bass forums that the "flat" setting on a typical Fender tone stack is around 2-10-2. But that's viewing the tone stack in isolation and ignoring the rest of the amp/speaker setup.
ICBM said:Exactly! The whole point of the huge mid-cut in the Fender tone stack is to counteract the almost-all-mid natural tone of an open-back guitar combo with 10" or 12" speakers - precisely to give something roughly like a flat response (ignoring the lack of true top-end, since there's no tweeter) with all the controls at 5... so defeating that by looking at the tone stack in isolation is what *not* to do if you do want a 'flat' response. Although why that should be a goal in a musical instrument amp, which is a tone *producer* and not a tone *reproducer*, I'm not sure.MartinB said:As a dabbler in amp building, I reckon there are places where a little understanding of the functioning of the amp can send you in odd directions too. For instance, it's much discussed on certain bass forums that the "flat" setting on a typical Fender tone stack is around 2-10-2. But that's viewing the tone stack in isolation and ignoring the rest of the amp/speaker setup.
There's a lot of talk along the lines of "if you want to sit in the mix, you must never cut mids", and I reckon I might have internalised a little of that at the time! A bit silly when the Fender amp sound that I liked in the first place involves that tone stack voicing...