I'll believe it when I see it.
The Quest for Tone
For the past 12 years (give or take a couple months) my primary guitar amp has been a Crate "Stealth" GT-50. The amp is extremely loud and does what it does (raw, loud, screeching metal-style rock and roll) well. It's just not very versatile.
It's been out of production for a long time. You can find one on ebay once in a while; they usually go for around $200. That's not bad, considering I bought mine new in 1992 for $400. I'm more than happy with that purchase, especially considering some others I've made.
About 7 months ago I started looking for something with a little broader tonal range. I still like to crank it up and play some old Neil Young and Crazy Horse tunes, but I've grown to the point where I do like to play a few other things now and then.
Volume doesn't work that way.
My first stop was a Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue. Unlike my Crate this is a non-master volume amp. [For those of you scratching your heads what this means is that the amp doesn't have a gain control -- just volume. To get it to "break up" or distort (in a good way) you have to crank the volume up.] I didn't think that would be a problem -- the DRRI is only 22 watts. Less than 1/2 as loud as the GT-50, right? WRONG. Volume doesn't work that way.
A quick lesson on physics; one I learned the hard way. The relationship between the strength of the signal (the power or watts of the amp/speaker) and the volume (as perceived by our ears) is NOT LINEAR. Half power does NOT equal half volume. The relationship is in fact logarithmic. If you want to compare the relative volumes of two different wattages do this: a) divide the larger value by the smaller value, b) take the base-10 log of this ratio, and c) add 1. This will tell you how loud the one is in relationship to the other. You can also take that number, invert it (1/x on your calculator) and that will tell you how loud the one with the lower power is in relationship to the higher.
In short, 22 watts is 73% as loud as 50 watts. To get to 1/2 the volume of 50 watts you need to get to 1/10 of 50 watts -- 5 watts! [Note: there's a lot more to determining how loud an amp will be than how many watts it's rated for.]
The upshot is this: to get decent breakup on the DRRI I had to turn it up to the point where the windows shook. Not good. Not good at all. To top things off it had at least 1 bad preamp tube. That's not a huge thing to fix, but I didn't feel I should have to do that on a new amp that cost $800.
Unfortunately, the drive channel sucked rocks.
My next stop was a Fender Hot Rold Deluxe, a lacquered tweed Limited Edition. This amp was absolutely gorgeous. It took me about 30 seconds of playing the clean channel to decide that I must have it. Big mistake.
The clean channel is absolutely to die for. It's big, wide open, ringing, glassy. All the good adjectives that people use to describe that Fender clean sound. This amp has got that in spades. The bridge pickup on my Telecaster (with the treble rolled off just a little) sounded like bells. It was truly amazing, extremely sweet.
Unfortunately, the drive channel sucked rocks.
Like my trusty old Crate, the HRDx is a master volume amp. It's got a separate "Drive" control that allows you to overdrive the preamp tubes without generating enough volume to blow out the windows. Sadly, on this amp, it sounds like ass.
I took it to a tech. I swapped out the power tubes and adjusted the bias. I tried different preamp tubes. I tried more different preamp tubes. I just couldn't get it to do what I wanted -- have an overdrive sound that doesn't suck.
It's like somebody mated a Fender with a Marshall.
I was at a business meeting last Thursday in Hereford, MD. (Don't ask.) To make my stupendously long trip a little more worth while I took a small detour on the way home -- I stopped at Guitar Center in Towson. I wasn't specifically looking for an amp, but I found one.
I remember all those months ago looking at the specs for the F-30. I don't remember why I didn't buy one. It might have been that I just couldn't find one in stock anywhere. In any event, they had one on the floor at Guitar Center and I played it.
Oh. My. God. It's like somebody mated a Fender with a Marshall. The clean channel is awesome; not quite as sparkly as the HRDx, but pretty damn close. And it gets "fat" a lot easier than the Fender. But it's when you switch to channel 2 that things get really interesting. This thing does everything the HRDx didn't do. The "dirty" channel can go from a fat bluesy tone all the way through classic crunch and over the edge into insane shredsville. And it does it all very, very well.
I just wish I'd gotten this amp sooner. I got a decent trade on the HRDx, but still lost money in the transaction. (Not to mention trips to the amp tech, tubes, time, and stress.)
One small complaint: the clean channel is quite "hissy" once you start to crank the volume. I suspect that it's preamp tubes, but I'm loathe to start down that road. I'm gonna call their tech support and see what they say. If it can be fixed, great. If not, well, still pretty darned good.
Crate "Stealth" GT-50 |
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Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue
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Fender Hot Rod Deluxe
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Mesa-Boogie F-30
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