natural drive

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echoman224

Member
I’m struggling to get a good edge of breakup/driven tone out of the Vox amps (15&30) without using pedals. I’m trying to model a real life cranked amp, no other effects needed. I’d expect the input drive to help but I find as I turn it up, it doesn’t do that creamy saturation I expect. Rather I’m experiencing just louder frequencies?(not sure how to describe it)

I’m not comparing the fractal to a specific amp, rather general experience with a variety of Vox amps. I’d love to be able to get my unit to do those creamy overdriven sounds without using effects. I’ve experimented with all the Vox IRS already. I appreciate any help.
 
It seems that most Vox users and also artists like Brian May or The Edge in fact are using a booster (sometimes a compressor) before the amp for a good tone. Also when I still played my old JMI amps from the 60ties (no gain control) I had to boost the amp for a better tone.

You can select a booster in the Vox amp block itself to achieve that (at least in the Axe III). Does that count as a pedal?
 
Yes i consider those pedals which i dont want to use to achieve this. I want to create a cranked AC30 without the coloring of the sdd preamp or using a boost, just like if I were to dime a real amp.

 
echoman224 said:
Yes i consider those pedals which i dont want to use to achieve this. I want to create a cranked AC30 without the coloring of the sdd preamp or using a boost, just like if I were to dime a real amp.

Click to expand...


Made it to 16 seconds. Ugh, flat bends. Worse than Boomer bends...

I just dialed up the stock AC30 preset, cranked the amp volume all the way up, backed off the bass, and plugged in a Les Paul. It's certainly got the same amount of gain, but the speaker IR in the stock preset doesn't have the same mid-range honk. Try some different IRs. That can really impact the apparent gain as well.
 
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I'm using the Morgan AC-20 with a control switch set to the input drive,
from 2.0 to about 5.0 for me that keeps the basic tone I still want to hear and provides a nice boost/gain increase.
 
FWIW, a Les Paul plugged into a vintage AC30 doesn't sound like that video either.

I'm not sure what they recorded it with and there are always settings to consider. Plus, when I've heard it, they weren't playing 2 AC30s....but it sounded totally different from that.
 
Seemed like they recorded that rooftop video with a cell phone.
You can hear the sound change as the phone moves about.
Not so great to me.
 
I’ll see if I can get the tone close with just an amp and cab
The train wreck models are made with amps that take lots of inspiration from vox and might get you close to this tone
 
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