What Is The "Orange" Sound?

[Music] foreign [Music] [Music] so [Music] when you think about guitar amps and the history of guitar amps and the manufacturers that have built them over the years a few major brands come to mind the legends the staples the standards if you will and that's marshall vox and fender now i would actually put orange in that category of legends because although they were a little late to the game compared to vox fender and marshall i think they've had just as big of an impact on the music scene over the last five decades as those big three brands and their amps have been used by such a wide variety of players and bands over the years that it's kind of actually hard to pin down the orange sound but we're going to [Music] today [Music] now before we jump into the amps a real quick history lesson in the late 1960s around 68 a man named cliff cooper opens up a shop recording studio in the heart of london called the orange shop it was painted orange it looked like a pretty wild place to be honest now cooper who was a musician had been playing in a few bands around london and opened up a small recording studio in the orange shop and this was after a few years of experimenting with some small transistor amp designs that he created to try and be able to play with headphones on in fact a few years earlier to this he had pitched one of these designs the pixie to tom jennings of vox fam and jennings apparently very kindly said no they weren't interested in it now in 1968 when cooper opened the shop it was kind of off to a rocky start they had trouble getting suppliers at the time from the big brands they couldn't get marshalls or gibsons or fenders and in order to keep the doors open cooper actually had to sell his band's equipment he they owned a few vox amps at the time he actually had to sell those through the shop in order to pay the rent and that actually became how the shop operated for the next few years they were selling used gear to musicians around london now luckily for cooper at the time the used gear market around london was pretty hot because apparently players of the time preferred the older used amps and guitars because they thought they sounded and played better which actually sounds somewhat familiar but they continued to have issues with getting new stuff in stock and so this led cooper and the team at the orange shop to start developing their own guitar amplifier and this is where matt matthias enters the story around the fall of 1968 cooper reached out to matthias who was the owner and operator of a company called radiocraft to help develop their first amplifier radio craft at the time had a hi-fi amp that they were using and after playing it cooper decided that they needed to make some revisions to it to make it a more guitar friendly amp something guitar players of the time actually wanted to play which meant louder more sustain which equated to more distortion so they set off for designing what would become the mat amp which was used by players like jimmy page and paul kossoff and peter green plenty of other famous players around london in the late 60s through the early 70s now from the beginning orange was kind of their own thing as you can see their branding is completely different than fender fox or marshall everything from the orange tolex to the shape and design of the head and the cabinets themselves all the way to the actual sound they don't really sound like anything else out there and in fact the amp that i was playing at the beginning of the video my orange is this ad30 now this is not an old orange from the late 70s in fact this is from the gibson era of orange in the late 1990s gibson actually took over the orange brand and started reissuing them remanufacturing a lot of the amps and they designed this the single channel ad30 from around 1998. now i absolutely adore this amplifier but the reality is this isn't really the orange sound this is the orange sound [Music] so this orange right here is one of the earliest ones it's an orange mad amp it's actually serial number 260 and it was built in 1971 i actually bought it from the original owner and this is really the first orange design matt matthias who owned mad amp or started mad am built them for orange before they came out with the graphic and then this particular one which is the or120 this is actually a 90s gibson reissue but it's essentially exactly the same as the original ones because i had the tech from orange who's based here in atlanta redo it to the original specs the one on the bottom here is the orange overdrive this is from 1973. this is essentially a master volume version of this but it's but it has way more gain i mean it's not the same circuit but the concept was that it's a master volume version of this this is a really aggressive mid forward amp and to me this is these two are really the orange sound this is kind of the transition you'll hear the difference between them but uh i love this amp this mad amp orange mad app hat is actually painted right if you you can feel that it's it's been uh stamped out and then painted in with black paint and it's really cool this must have been a really early version yeah it's definitely pre hieroglyphics and pre you know orange face plate design and then weren't you saying that the gibson era reissues from the 90s were using leftover parts from yeah the early ones were using leftover parts from what i understand from the original ones from the 70s they just bought all the stuff that was in the factory this particular amp if you look at led zeppelin live you'll see it on stage with jimmy page all the time you'll see it in the background with peter green this is though what jimmy page played his theremin through because it's a very clean sparkly powered amp [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] so all three of these oranges have this this is the fac control it says fac here but it says depth here and it says depth because it's really the it's like a bass control all the way to the left has less bass and as you turn it to the right it has more bass and there's one two three four five six different positions there studio stage this is like your drive thing this is stepped also obviously bass treble boost this is high frequency boost same thing that you see up here high frequency drive similar volume control the or 120 here this is your base because it has a backwards bass clef treble clef that's treble high frequency drive gain that's the volume this is not a master volume though obviously fac and then if we go down to the bottom here fac bass treble added presence knob from the or120 gain knob right master volume this thing really cranks [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh so they're pretty close like the that or120 and the mad amp are not that far off no it's just that this is just got more power yeah but the clean tone like on the neck pickup with the tone the volume rolled off is really really close yeah yeah so it's really uh reactive now the overdrive is not quite the same no the the mad amp i feel like i had more low end more punch so [Music] yeah man so how would you describe that as being different than like a marshal or a vox uh i think it has even more mids than a marshall does yeah um and it has different type of mids than than a vox does right and more gain than a box does more gain than a box does yeah especially this overdrive yeah i mean if you hit a vox with a with a just a boost pedal or something like that plenty of plenty of gain right but this is really you know it's got some i mean you wouldn't call it a high gain amp but it's it's a uh definitely a early 70s rock sound right well you can understand why a lot of the early metal guys of the time went with that because it's not high gain by today's standards but by the 70 standards no and a lot of guys will go with this or this with a pedal in front of it with fuzz or something like that this one though has that [Music] [Music] so now i think that's a pretty good representation of the orange sound now with a company like orange that's been around as long as they have been i mean they're still continuing to produce and manufacture new amp designs today it's a little difficult to nail down what the orange sound is but to me the original amps the ones they first started creating the late 60s and early 70s that is the orange sound so how do we go about getting that at home in our own rig most of us don't have access to an early mat amp or an or120 i've done some experimentation and this is the best thing that i've come up with with my current rig and pedal selection i think pairing a good amp in a box overdrive with a good eq boost in front of it can actually get you pretty close to the orange sound so right here you can see i've got a rev g2 pedal which is a medium gain amp in a box from rev it's emulating the green channel from one of their amps but it actually does the sort of marshall jtm 45 thing quite well and in front of that i've got a new pedal a dojo para boost from lawrence petros design now this is a collaboration between lawrence petros and a good buddy of mine dave honorado basically dave came to lpd and pitched this idea of having a boost pedal with a really surgical eq and this is what they came up with that's a great utility pedal to have around this video is not sponsored or anything but i figured i'd give my buddies dave and laurence a quick plug so i've got my novosj plugged into my port city pearl and since i don't have an orange cabinet i'm actually using the torpedo captor x with an orange virtual cabinet that they have from two notes and it actually sounds really good so completely clean no overdrive no real color coming from the amp itself now let's hear what the rev is doing [Applause] [Music] pretty standard marshall and a box type sound and as you can tell it's not really close to the oranges that we were just getting now i have pushed the mid-range a little bit in an effort to try and find that sort of mid-range character that the mat amp had but it's not really doing it on its own so let's hear the para boost on its own before we combine them now as you can tell because i'm clipping the input section of luna here there's a lot of boost coming from that pedal but because we're going into the overdrive we're actually not going to get that big of a volume boost going into the front end of our amp rather we're going to get more gain out of the g2 which is what i want but what's really going on here is the mid frequency here are these two knobs you have the mid frequency and the amount of gain that you're boosting that frequency and i've dialed it into what i think is pretty close to the or120 and the matte amps mid boost although i don't have you know any kind of oscilloscope or anything to really find i'm just going off of what i'm hearing so we'll kick on the g2 again and then turn on the pair boost so you can hear what i think is pretty close to the orange sound [Music] [Applause] so now that's a good starting point we can experiment a little bit here on the rev with switching this drive [Music] [Applause] it's a little too gainy though so i'm going to bring the gain back on the g2 just a little bit because again we are hitting the front end of this pedal super hard now and i want a little bit more low end going into the front the thing about those oranges that i really liked was the amount of low end that they had it was really really present round bottom end [Music] [Applause] [Music] now the final test is gonna be rolling off the volume on your guitar and seeing how it cleans up my favorite thing about that mad amp in the or120 was the sparkling clean tones that you could get out of it the cleans sound to me way better than a marshall's cleans for example [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] so so that is the orange sound and orange if you guys are watching this i think you should bring back the original or120 do it like you did in the late 60s it's a really special amp also while you're at it i say bring back this amp a single channel ad30 from 1998. this is like an ac30 on steroids it does the super sparkly clean chimey ac30 thing but has way more gain than an ac30 these are really hard to find but if you find one if one pops up around you and you're looking for that ac30 type thing check this out it's jimmy page approved if you'd like to support the channel check out the links in the description box down below you can buy my tone course down there you can sign up for the green room and you can find out more about the gear that i used to make this video those are affiliate links down there so if you buy something i earn a small commission which really helps me out in making this channel happen don't forget backstage live episode 4 is happening october 10th here on this youtube channel so be sure to subscribe if you haven't done so already and follow me on instagram at rhett shull that's it for today's video thank you so much for watching and i'll see you on the next episode on what is the sound

Channel: Rhett Shull

Views: 842,305

Keywords: Orange Amps, orange matamp, OR120, OR100, Rhett Shull, What Is The Orange Sound?, orange amplifiers, orange amp, Peter Green, Jimmy Page, Cliff Cooper, guitar amplifier (consumer product), orange crush amp, orange crush 35rt, sounds like, orange crush 20rt, orange crush 20, orange crush

Id: UgroDS8RA6Q

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/HisSmileAndOptimism]

Not strictly Doom-related content (as far as the music played in the video goes), but I thought the sub might like it since the subject is still dear to many of us.

Aside from the AD-30 in the thumbnail, the video also contains footage of Rick Beato's vintage Oranges and they're lovely to say the least.

[u/UptownTR]

Does anyone legit like Orange for things other than the look and marketing? Other than Peter Green and Paul Kossof (For the beat club stuff) I really can't think of anyone who uses one who I don't think would be better off with another amp. Matt Pike never sounds bad but I've always been far more impressed with his sound in high on fire using Soldanos etc.

Not knocking an OR120 used right but they're few and far between, and most that go for that sound tend to go for a GT120 anyway.