My own personal epiphany.

S

scorch

Experienced
OK. I'm slow.....but I have a good excuse.

I'm old.

But, that doesn't mean I can't learn new tricks. A couple of treads about different OD pedals (Bogner Blue and The new Mesa pedals) got me thinking.

What if I just put another amps preamp in front of....oh, say a Fender Twin. So I did. I put a Bogner Blue Preamp in front of the Twin and tweaked. I also have a Bogner Blue pedal. So I A/B'ed them. The Bogner preamp won......by a long shot. MUCH more variable and tweakable. Sounded delicious.

So, I went to one of my meat-n-potatoes patches - the JTM 45 - and I stuck a 1987x Marshall treble preamp in front. After rolling down the bright cap to about 200pf instead of the stock 4700pf (too hissy and bright). Bingo! Jezzus-Cripes! Instant Crunch-Box tones only better!. I have a Crunch-Box.....I know! You could get far more tonal range out of the virtual preamp than any of the physical dirt boxes.

So, in case your wondering ,you have over a hundred very cool booteek pedals right there in yer lil' box.

Anybody want to buy a Bogner Blue pedal?
 
It is a great idea.. hate to be 'that' guy, but I did think of this :) However, Randy Bachman thought of it first in the mid-1960s. He fried up his amps in the process because he didn't have an Axe-Fx.. but it led to the 'American Woman' lead tone thanks to Gar Gilles. This is a Great Canadian Tone Story. Can we get a Garnet Herzog model in the Axe-Fx? :)

"Gar" Gillies' Herzog® - All Tube Guitar Effect - garnetamps.com - Home of the Garnet™ Amplifier Company

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A Brief History of "Gar" Gillies' Herzog® Guitar Effect

The following is by guitarist Randy Bachman, formerly of The Guess Who and Bachman, Turner, Overdrive. He was the inspiration behind Gar's development of The Herzog. Indeed the original runs of these units were called "Randy Bachman's Herzog"

Gar and I developed this unit together back in '65-'66. Growing up playing violin, I loved the sustain, especially of a viola or cello. So early on in the mid '60's, I found out that by plugging a small amplifier into a bigger amplifier, I could get this sound. Now I was taking the power out, which normally would go to the speaker and plugging it into the input of another amp. The result, for a few short minutes was a cool, great new sustained sound. Gar Gillies had a tv/radio repair shop, was a cool musician, and I wasn't embarrassed to take in my amps, which were literally burned by the power misuse; fried, to say the least. Gar asked what the heck I was doing, and when I told him, he said, you're insane to do this, its very dangerous. So he offered to help me do it a safer and less destructive way. Gar proceeded to build me a tube pre-amp, which when put into another amp, got me the desired sound. But not really, the sound was a little weird in a Fender amp which was all that was around, so Gar decided to get parts from Heathkit and build an amplifier to go with the unit. We were looking for a name, and at the time I was reading a book with HERZOG written across the cover. Hence the name, so we could stop referring to the unit as the "noise thing". I used to go to his shop on Osborne Ave late at night after gigs, and stay till the wee hours of the morning, making the most incredible Moose and Ox bellowing, distortion/blotto screeching sounds that would make us laugh. But once it was smoothed out, it was smooooth. So that became my lead guitar solo sound. It was first featured on The Guess Who CBC weekly show, Let's Go and Music Hop in 1967-68 but really came to the forefront as the sound of "No Time", "American Woman" and many other songs on the Guess Who albums, "Wheatfield Soul", "Canned Wheat", and "American Woman". I continued using it later on "Brave Belt I and II", and then on Bachman Turner Overdrive albums.

That's about the story. There is still no unit that sounds like it today. One that comes close is the SansAmp rackmount which has an actual setting called "American Woman". It's close.
John Johnson of Johnson Amps, Digitech and DOD, pedals and amps, told me that as a kid, he tried to make his own pedal to get the "American Woman" guitar sound and couldn't get it. However, the pedals he did make in trying to get that sound have gone on to sell hundreds of thousands for Digitech and DOD, but none got the American Woman sound.

Cheers,

Randy Bachman
 
scorch said:
OK. I'm slow.....but I have a good excuse.

I stuck a 1987x Marshall treble preamp in front.
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You are not slow. Just brilliant.

When you say you stuck a preamp in front, do you mean for us to choose the 87x marshall treble TONESTACK and set it to PRE? Or to have the 87x Marshall's FX SEND to the JTM45?

Thanks for the great idea :)
 
No patch needed. Just stick the Plexi in front of the JTM. Roll off the sag 'til the power amp goes off. Twiddle to taste.

I'm havin' a blast with this. It's got me re-thinking everything about the way I play and set-up the Axe II. Why external anything. The only thing extra I carried to gigs was some dirt pedals.......now, what for?

This axe II thing got rid of my amp gas, now I found a cure for my dirt pedal gas!
 
Yeah, a buddy of mine back in the early '70's heard about 'slaving' amps. So he decided to try it.

Now, this person was very experimental with his recreational drugs and such and didn't always make the best personal choices.

So anyways, he sticks the output of a Superlead into the input of a Twin.

Not good.

It did make a spectacular sound for about 2 seconds.............And then proceeded to slag down BOTH amps.

It's much funner to experiment in virtual world.

Cheaper, too!
 
Tried this before, it sounded much more organic to me but i found the results much more rewarding on a single coil though, maybe that's just me.
 
dkijc said:
Oh. That's what sag is! That's what I get for not really reading the manual.
Did not know I can turn off a power amp by turning the sag all the way down.

Thanks, y'all!
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You may already know this, but anyway: Be aware that turning the sag knob is not a way to "gradually turn on the power amp simulation", but turning the sag all the way down is a special setting where the power amp simulation is turned off.
 
I have experimented with that early on and did not like it back then. But your post reminded me of this and tells me there's possibly some validity to the idea. The current amps are so good by themselves, that I have not found a need for this. But I love experiments so ... here I go again :)
 
With more experimentation, I've found that some amps are very sensitive to what you put in front of it. I've had to turn-off bright switches, roll-off presence, and a little bit of gain goes along way. It seems the more similar the amps, the better it works. Like I just got through setting up a JTM 45->59 Bassman that sounded really nice. But they are very similar amps. Another I did was a Deluxe Tweed->Fender Twin, that came out really cool.

Again, I'm not talking about metal schrapnel and molten shards of glass type gain here. I'm more into subtle shadings. Just a touch of boost.

I agree we have a wonderful assortment of amps. Its just nice to hit the 'more' button and get a little texture and tone difference.
 
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dkijc said:
You are not slow. Just brilliant.

When you say you stuck a preamp in front, do you mean for us to choose the 87x marshall treble TONESTACK and set it to PRE? Or to have the 87x Marshall's FX SEND to the JTM45?

Thanks for the great idea :)
Click to expand...

Actually I just tried playing with the Tonestack Type parameter and it gives even more tonal possibilities. OK, time to take the rest of the week off! Excellent find Scorch!
 
Yep, tonestack is really great, too. I was working on getting a AC30/HiWatt combo going a while back. It was just a little ungainly balancing both amps. Then I got the bright idea of just dropping the AC30 tonestack in the HiWatt and deleted the extra AC30 amp. Sounds really cool. AC30 shimmer and chime -with beef!
 
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