Dimed amp vs. Clean amp & Drives

Lance Holland

Lance Holland

Inspired
Even with my tube amps, I’ve always used a cleanish amp with some hair and then added pedals for overdrive and leads. On my Fractal, I've taken the same approach using drive blocks (or channels with more gain). For giggles, I copied the amp and cabinet from the stock 100 watt plexi into my gigging preset and dimed the tone knobs and gain. Rolling back the guitar’s volume for cleans and various levels of dirt worked great. It seems like a simple approach for gigging...no need to run over and smash a footswitch for a solo or just digging in for more dirt. My primary concern is levels. The plexi seems to compress well enough like a real amp but I'll need to try this live.

Our cover band does a huge variety of material “Doors to Devo to Dua Lipa”. The music calls for cleans to singing leads (but not metal). I’m wondering if others use a cranked amp model and varying guitar volume rather than drives in their Fractal.
 
I have a few presets that are like that, mainly classic style or mid gain amps! I like the driven sounds better and I ride the volume knob and when using that technique it seems to work better when I don't have a drive in the signal chain. Not to mention Drives have such a wide range of different voicings. I like to just get the same fundamental sound just by turning up the guitar.
 
Depends on the song. Playing lightly with the volume down thru a cranked amp is a much different sound than playing hard into a compressor in front of a cleanish amp even if the resulting tones have similar amounts of distortion or lack thereof.
 
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strabes said:
Depends on the song. Playing lightly with the volume down thru a cranked amp is a much different sound than playing hard into a compressor in front of a cleanish amp even if the resulting tones have similar amounts of distortion or lack thereof.
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Oh - of course. I tend not to get too hung on specific tones for our covers. It certainly wouldn't be an alternative for that hard comp into a fender tone.
 
Also some high gain amps like the Atomica sound great with the Gain turned down and the Master up a bit.
 
Speaker Compression is a great tool for managing the dynamics. That would be my go-to parameter to tweak for live balance.
 
Lance Holland said:
Interesting. Can you point me to a reference/video where I might learn about that?
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Sure! The wiki has a nice collection of info:
https://wiki.fractalaudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Amp_block#SPEAKER_COMPRESSION

Honestly, I would just start playing around with it. It isn’t too hard to hear the difference. I would recommend going back and forth with single notes and chords, hard and soft picking, and of course the volume knob up/down, to figure out where the dynamics work best for you. Generally I find that more compression is fun playing by myself, but I need less for live.
 
They're different philosophies for tone. Either start with a gained up amp and get cleaner sounds by backing off your guitar volume. Or start with a clean amp and boost it with drive pedals.

I also play in a cover band that also has an eclectic repertoire. I personally think the second approach is a little more versatile. I like a truly clean amp as a base and get different flavors of drive with different pedals. But different strokes for different folks.

However, the beauty of a digital rig is that you don't really need to make compromises like this. You can have multiple amps at your disposal for different sounds.
 
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Depending on genre/style, I tend to use one amp model per song and use the amp functions to adjust gain, levels, etc. right within the amp block.

Except for fuzz tones, I rarely use the drive block - mainly because virtually every time I A/B between using a pedal to add gain and using the preamp boost or amp gain/drive (combined with master volume adjustments) I prefer the amp alone without a drive block.

And although I do use my guitar’s volume knob, I have many scenes where an expression pedal adjusts the gain of the amp (sometimes sweeping the preamp boost amount, sometimes the amp drive, and often also sweeping the master or EQ settings in at the same time as the drive). This allows for a very smooth transition between gain levels.
 
giantslayer said:
Sure! The wiki has a nice collection of info:
https://wiki.fractalaudio.com/wiki/index.php?title=Amp_block#SPEAKER_COMPRESSION

Honestly, I would just start playing around with it. It isn’t too hard to hear the difference. I would recommend going back and forth with single notes and chords, hard and soft picking, and of course the volume knob up/down, to figure out where the dynamics work best for you. Generally I find that more compression is fun playing by myself, but I need less for live.
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This is pretty cool. It cleans up a LOT with the guitar's volume control. I'll need to experiment more but this is promising.
 
Rumbletone said:
Depending on genre/style, I tend to use one amp model per song and use the amp functions to adjust gain, levels, etc. right within the amp block.
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I'm more boring than that. I'm mostly using one amp model for my electric material (with a bunch of effects) and another one for when I plug in the acoustic.

There's so much going on during our gigs. We use an app called "juke" where attendees can request songs (and give a tip in doing so). Our set list is literally changing on the fly through the gig and it can get confusing. The link below is one we have for an upcoming show. It's not all the material but ones we can pull out and cover without trouble. But the bottom line is that anything that can simplify my setup is a big deal. So, if I don't need to worry about the tech, I can focus on the songs.

https://juke.band/cakefight/LAT-June
 
Lance Holland said:
I'm more boring than that. I'm mostly using one amp model for my electric material (with a bunch of effects) and another one for when I plug in the acoustic.

There's so much going on during our gigs. We use an app called "juke" where attendees can request songs (and give a tip in doing so). Our set list is literally changing on the fly through the gig and it can get confusing. The link below is one we have for an upcoming show. It's not all the material but ones we can pull out and cover without trouble. But the bottom line is that anything that can simplify my setup is a big deal. So, if I don't need to worry about the tech, I can focus on the songs.

https://juke.band/cakefight/LAT-June
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For sure there are different approaches. I play in one cover band and we cover some of those same artists and songs - some would have their own presets as they use song-specific FX (Feel It Still, Tainted Love) though many I would cover with my “Basics” preset that has 4 different amps, each going from clean to dirty, plus an acoustic sim. I can usually get to any preset within a few seconds, but if I’m starting a song immediately I sometimes start on the ‘basics’ preset then navigate to a different preset while I play and then switch over to the other preset. Totally depends on the song though, as well as the bandleader (in my cover band the leader often requests specific FX/tones or even a specific pickup position, whereas in other bands they just care that you hit the right notes on time and aren’t particular about guitar tones).
 
I use a combination of the approaches in most presets. Using Class A amps, with the gain just past the edge of breakup, I use the guitar volume to get clean tones and add a drive for solos and more distorted tones. With the drive engaged, rolling off the guitar volume provides mild crunch and chimey edge of breakup tones.
 
I treat all my amps as single-channel amps, whether they're tube or digital.

I especially like the "Ford 1" setting in the ODS-100 factory preset. It reacts well to the guitar and picking dynamics when at stage volume. Switch the drive in that preset to the "Zen Master", which is the model of what Robben Ford uses, if you want to go for more of his sound.

The "Deluxe" amp model works extremely well for this too, just turn up its gain and treble and it becomes a beast that reacts to the guitar well.
 
I don't use a cranked amp, but I use amps with a bit more gain than "edge of breakup", then roll back my guitar volume for edge of breakup in most cases. If I want a bit more, I can roll up guitar volume. For more compression, I add a boost. Most of the time I just ride the guitar volume. It's been my experience that "less is more" with gain.
 
I've always been a cranked amp guy and played with the knobs on my guitar. Well....not cranked compared to some, but definitely not clean if the guitar is turned up. I think it came from a combination of liking more "classic" players that played like that and being too broke/cheap to buy drive pedals for my first several years of playing.

I only use one amp and one preset, and I do have a "loud" scene on it - which is mostly that the gain knob is up a bit and the input EQ is set to do something like what a TS or Klon does into a screaming amp. The rest of the foot switches are for wet effects. But, I'm also not trying to cover that much ground.

I have tried to do it the other way (pedals into clean amp), especially before Fractal when I needed to be quieter. And it always wound up the same - one of the drive pedals became "always on" because I never remembered to turn it off, and I still just used the knobs on the guitar to clean up. The only real difference is that I prefer amp distortion to pedal distortion as a general rule.
 
Well...that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I tried the new cranked amp approach at rehearsal last night and struggled to get the sound to clean up without dropping out of the mix. In the end, I needed to switch back to my regular patch that uses drives. Strange how it worked so well at home but not with the band but that's been my experience - until I try it with the band, it's TBD.
 
Lance Holland said:
Well...that didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. I tried the new cranked amp approach at rehearsal last night and struggled to get the sound to clean up without dropping out of the mix. In the end, I needed to switch back to my regular patch that uses drives. Strange how it worked so well at home but not with the band but that's been my experience - until I try it with the band, it's TBD.
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That's more or less my experience with that approach too. There are some clever things you can do with compressors, especially the output compression tab in the amp block, to help mitigate that. But in the end, starting with a cranked amp and backing it off is a subtractive process rather than starting clean and adding drives.

Another thing is that people have very different definitions of what "clean" is. To some people, edge of break up/slightly dirty is what they consider clean. For me, I want a more pristine clean. Backing off a gained up Marshall never gets me that.
 
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