Amp characteristics lookup

kavevester

kavevester

Inspired
What I have really wished for is some kind of graduation of the Amp block related to its characteristic.
It takes a long time getting to know all amps and what they sounds like.

I know about the Wikipedia list of all the amps, - still hard to remember the different
sounding of them and I know it cant be that easy to make a lookup of it. So what am I asking here?
Maybe a wiz to give input to and then filtering a bunch of amps it could be close to.

Wiz 1 question - Hi gain, mid-gain, lo-gain
Wiz 2 question - Warmth (meter 1-10)
Wiz 3 question - Master vol on/off
Etc..

You get the idea. Do anybody know a easier way than browsing through it all every time? (know I could color them in preset management but still not that fanzy)
 
One persons “harsh” is another persons “cutting” or “present” tone...

what one person calls “thick” another could describe as “muddy”.....

subjective taste, guitar/pickups used etc would make it pretty hard to have anything near a consensus as far as describing an amp using words
 
lqdsnddist said:
One persons “harsh” is another persons “cutting” or “present” tone...

what one person calls “thick” another could describe as “muddy”.....

subjective taste, guitar/pickups used etc would make it pretty hard to have anything near a consensus as far as describing an amp using words
Click to expand...
Not to mention that people can disagree on the meaning of words when describing sounds. Some say something “rocks” when they should have said “sucks”. :)
 
The thing is the kind of knowledge you're describing and being able to know which amp to reach for in certain situations typically comes from years of experience playing and recording amps. There really don't seem to be any shortcuts to develop that kind of "ear familiarity" other than personal experience and racking up the hours.

My suggestion would be to slim the amps you're using daily down to 4-5 and really get to know them. I keep my core recording and playing presets, one amp per preset, under a column labeled Favorites and move all of the amps I'm interested in exploring under a column labeled Amps To Explore. I know you mentioned not being wild about color coding but I find marking the clean amps as Green, the crunchy ones as Yellow, and the high gain ones as Red helps to keep things organized.
 
Not to mention that most amps can do lots of different things. I often find that coming back to an amp I've checked out before gives me a very different impression of it.

I'm afraid there's no shortcut to deep experience with them, a journey I'm only a tiny fraction of the way along on myself.

Isn't it great!
 
Last edited:
I had the same problem, then went through the entire amp list and color coded all of them.

Blue= fender style
Green= Clean channels
Purple= class A, Vox style amps
Yellow= crunch classic gain Marshall style amps
Orange= mid gain modern Marshall
Red= Soldano, Mesa, etc. etc.

It gets tricky because some amps can do 3 of the 6 on one channel.:)
when creating presets, name them accordingly..... Hi Gn Recto, Wrm8. Lo Gn Hiwatt, Wrm 5. Cln Fender, Brte 1.
Then when searching your preset list just type in Hi Gn, Lo Gn, Cln.
 
Last edited:
RDeraz said:
I had the same problem, then went through the entire amp list and color coded all of them.

Blue= fender style
Green= Clean channels
Purple= class A, Vox style amps
Yellow= crunch classic gain Marshall style amps
Orange= mid gain modern Marshall
Red= Soldano, Mesa, etc. etc.

It gets tricky because some amps can do 3 of the 6 on one channel.:)
Click to expand...

Great idea. :)
 
My latest work in progress has 4 amps, 2 channels of each. Naming it descriptively is tricky, especially the several variations thereof. Even worse if you want to be able to tell them apart in scribble strips.
 
Good idea. Lists about amps and drives exist. But is any of them an office document? That would allow to add comments and ratings there.
 
kavevester said:
What I have really wished for is some kind of graduation of the Amp block related to its characteristic.
It takes a long time getting to know all amps and what they sounds like.

I know about the Wikipedia list of all the amps, - still hard to remember the different
sounding of them and I know it cant be that easy to make a lookup of it. So what am I asking here?
Maybe a wiz to give input to and then filtering a bunch of amps it could be close to.

Wiz 1 question - Hi gain, mid-gain, lo-gain
Wiz 2 question - Warmth (meter 1-10)
Wiz 3 question - Master vol on/off
Etc..

You get the idea. Do anybody know a easier way than browsing through it all every time? (know I could color them in preset management but still not that fanzy)
Click to expand...
Love the idea. I realize as said above that there is a lot of trial and error involved in amp selection but still, something that can help narrow down to an amp or two based on key descriptors would be awesome.
 
horror said:
Love the idea. I realize as said above that there is a lot of trial and error involved in amp selection but still, something that can help narrow down to an amp or two based on key descriptors would be awesome.
Click to expand...
The amp picker needs to have backing metadata that is retrieved when the editor scans the factory AMP blocks. That metadata could contain a variety of information useful to us when searching, and then the picker could let us sort on columns to reorder the entries, or filter based on our criteria. The code exists "out there", it would need to be integrated and the interface changed to give us that flexibility.

As an interim, perhaps we could get a CSV, TSV, YAML/JSON or XML dump of that information and pull it into our own spreadsheets. I know FracTool can dump some information but it's still closely tied to the format of the data in the .SYX files and needs to be coerced into something more readable to normal people.
 
Ok thank you all.. I thought it would be like that but yes keep it small and don't look at all the Amps every time.. But at least Fractal could do a little bit of differentiation in the lo/mid/hi gain area.. But yes again I'll get much better at this doing it on my own one by one. (d... it :) )
 
Tonedeaf said:
One day I'm gonna arrange all my presets by amp model like the first page of the Amp Block Menu. One day....
Click to expand...

You'd then have to decide to go for the list as shown in the Amp block on the hardware, or the list as shown in the editor ... because the order is different. :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom