Getting Soaked

Wow, doesn't that 100 watt marshall sound great up there on that huge stage pushing a lot of air. Now how do I get that sound at "Joe's Bar and Grill" with the boss already telling me that I'm too loud? Well here is a short series of articles dealing on just that: Taming the Beast ...while being sure of not getting it declawed.

What is it that we love the most about a big amp? What gives it the impression of sounding so huge? It's the 100 watts of power that's in tight control of the speakers. The power amp and the speakers are not separate units, but function interactively together. The tone is influenced by the damping of the power amp, the impedance of the speakers at different frequencies, the output transformers response to dynamics, etc. It's very much like cruising a big bike down the highway, a bigger motor gives you more response, more acceleration.

What we love about a little amp is totally different. Pushing a small amp to the limit clips the power amp into distortion and completely saturates the output transformer. The mids become accentuated as the frequency response drops in the bass and highs. The sound is more compressed due to the overloading of the power amp. The damping, (or control), of the bass frequencies is gone and the bass is floppy. In short the whole sound is kind of flattened out, thick and lush but there is not much clean (undistorted) sound to speak of.

A soaking device, (a power attenuator that you connect between the amp and the speaker) interferes with the interelation between the amp and speaker. You lose the big amp muscle, the bottom damping is gone, it's like a big shock absorber. You still need to have a power amp that is connected directly to the speakers in order to have the right feel! The proper way to achieve this is to use two amps, power soak the first one to get the tone, and feed it back into FX loop of a second big amp (100 watt Marsall), or else straight into poweramp. You can add FX and EQ along the way between the soak and the second amp.

So think of a big amp in terms of it's power and contol, while the small amp is seen more for it's fat tone. It would make more sense to soak a small amp than a big one, less to carry around and safer as well.

Safety is another issue here, a 100 Watt amp on a power soak is like a car running on the highway in second gear. Loud speakers have an inductive component, the voice coil, and a have a different frequency response curve, especially in the high frequencies. A soak is harder on the amp than a speaker is. Output tubes need to changed more often as well. If your load becomes unplugged while playing at loud drive levels, your amp will blow in seconds.

All this does not solve the problem of getting a clean sound and switching between the two of them, so you'll need another amp or preamp, or else try to use the clean preamp of the unsoaked second amp.

Hmmmm... lets see, we're down to three amps, a soak, a switching pedal system, lots of tubes, spare fuses, oh, and an air conditioner in the summer.... you're getting soaked all right. Might be great for the studio, or Joe Satriani, but, for the "Bar and Grill", there has to be a better way....

next Blog: Taming the Beast - part II