5 Things you might not know about your tube amp!

welcome back folks do you hear that that's the sweet sound of Industry sorry about the noise guys we're going through some renovations on our buildings so I apologize anyways here's five things you didn't know about to vams good morning so today I want to talk about some of them secrets not so much secrets but things that you maybe didn't know about your amplifier interesting things that I didn't know about until well I did some research and then I knew then I learned number one EQ you might be looking at your Fender amplifier and wondering what exactly those tone knobs mean bass treble mids well they mean that unfortunately I don't know about my head exactly the center of frequencies of those but one of the most common misconceptions is that if you set everything to six or five depending that that's like neutral or flat and that's not the case so a Fender tone stack and most amplifier eq's operate on what's referred to as a Backson doll EQ and what that means is that when everything is at ten or twelve when everything's dimed out then it's flat so it's the it's it's a subtractive EQ so if you have for instance on the fender Princeton if you have a or any amp that has just like a bass and treble knob the idea is if everything's all the way up then your EQ is flat and as you roll it back you're ducking those high and low frequencies hey buds so with a backside all EQ one of the other features of it is as you turn those down it boosts the mid frequencies so the frequencies that aren't affected by the knobs actually get boosted as those other frequencies get turned down which is why a lot of the times we'll set our EQ it you know six and six on a Fender amp it sounds really good because it sounds like you're boosting the mid-range however you are losing a little bit of volume because you are turning down certain frequencies so your amp isn't gonna be running as hot as it could be as if it were turned all the way up so next time you're resting with your tone stack try turning everything all the way up and then controlling your high end from your guitar turn that tongue knob down see what happens it's pretty gnarly number 2 decibels versus loudness what do I mean by that well we measure volume in decibels but that Ness isn't necessarily the same thing as loudness so what do I mean by all this decibels are a funny thing because when you turned up an amplifier you know obviously it gets louder and louder but decibels are a nonlinear measurement so what that means it didn't technically it's it's logarithmic so if you know what that means you'll be a step ahead so at lower decibel levels the volume will increase more quickly when you get higher on the scale on the scale the volume doesn't and it increases at a lower rate so for instance the difference between 70 decibels and 80 decibels is way more significant than a hundred decibels and a hundred and ten in fact the difference between ten and a hundred is almost not even perceivable you can't it's it's imperceptible on most amplifiers you get to a point where the amplifier literally can't push any more volume out of it it's just distorting and so you might perceive that as more loudness because a lot of times you're getting a little bit more of a mid hump and that's a lot of where the ear hears loudness is in the mid-range so bear that in mind one of the most fascinating things I heard was that a 50 watt amp and a 100 watt amp sat right next to each other cranked up to a hundred has about has a difference of about eight decibels number three man what the hell is that presence knob I used to get asked this question all the time what's the presence knob do and I would just say like I don't know it adds presence and then I got tired of like not knowing what it was it was like I don't looks up so if you've ever been curious what the presence knob actually does here it is so in your amplifier there's a thing called a transformer okay we don't need to worry about what that does right now but the transformer is really similar to a guitar pickup and then it's just an iron core wrapped in copper wire they're really heavy if you touch them on the Amazon you will die so don't do that in fact if you even after you turn the amp off you'll die so don't touch it however there's power that runs through that transformer and it directly affects the tone of your amplifier so along with that there is a feedback loop that's created so your signal goes through that transformer and at the exact same time it's duplicated it's not necessarily the correct word but there is a feedback loop of an the signal duplicated essentially what the presence knob does is it bleeds that signal into your regular signal so it's not quite noticeable when your amp is super clean but if you push some Drive pedals through it or if you have a dirty channel you will start to notice as you turn your presents knob up there's more high end and that's pretty much all it does it's about 12 K if you know what that means so yeah that's what the president um that is really simple you know it's just basic electronics like it's not like a thing they add in or it's just how that kind of stuff works really fascinating so that's number three number four channel jumping now we're all familiar with channel we've seen everybody who owns a Marshall stack with their little grubby patch cables running between inputs one and two or whatever what you may not know however is that Marshalls aren't the only amps that you can jump in fact you can jump pretty much any amp that has two channels on it you know to greater or lesser effect so if you have if you have a black panel Fender amp from the 60s then you can very well jump that in just plug your guitar into input one run out of input two into the normal channel from the Virata channel and you'll have both channels running together now with modern-day fender amps you don't necessarily need to do that because they've come pre jumped as it is so a lot of their vintage style lamps already have that circuit taken care of with in you can still do it however and blend those channels together for a different tone if you're not getting enough out of all the knobs as it is try it it's a fun experiment whatever amp you have it has two channels or two inputs just try it just go to town start plug it in it doesn't matter you're not gonna blow anything up so experiment have fun and finally number five oh yeah this goes in with number four why are there multiple inputs on my amp what is happening what is it so beyond channel jumping like why does okay if you look at any Fender amp you'll notice it has input 1 and input 2 I don't know about you why would I plug in the input 2 it's a second one I don't what's the point well if you go back to the beginning of guitar amplification most guitar amplifiers were multi-purpose tools there's some really cool pictures out there of like whole bands plugging everything into a Fender Bassman you know or and having the two guitars of you know a bass guitar and a microphone all plug in the 1 a.m. there's pictures of you know Elvis Presley singing through a Fender Bassman it's really cool or a fender twin and so yeah it's kind of a holdover from that era but there is an actual difference between both of those inputs a lot of the times when you see another input it's usually lower a lower output so that's kind of contradictory what I mean is if you plug in two input one that's the amp full out you'll get your whole volume and everything if you plug it into the input two typically you will have less volume from that input it has a shelf on it that it won't you know cuts down some of that input volume and that's pretty much it you know you could theoretically plug in two instruments at one time it's not gonna sound great but for instance if you're playing a higher output guitar like a Les Paul with hum about really hot humbuckers and it's affecting your tube amp in a way that is not desirable plug it into the input to a lot of times it'll be six decibels quieter and that's a good way to you know if you don't have like a if you don't want to roll your volume off you know that's a good trick for you so anyways that's five things you might not have known about your tube amp or about tube amps in general and uh I'm outta here see you guys later

Channel: Casino Guitars

Views: 12,796

Keywords: tube amp, tube amp vs solid state, tube amp build, tube amps explained, marshall tube amp, know your gear, valve amplifier, that pedal show, amp repair, how to

Id: DJ0YA58-xyc

Length: 10min 10sec (610 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 28 2020