Cliff is mostly respecting the original designs, but has a few times commented on weird design choices himself, IIRC
On the fumes thing, that guy uses the good old solder containing lead, doesn't seem to use an air sucker, yet claimed, "I don't think I have lead poisoning...?" That one made
me chuckle...
Anyway, I've built some distortion boxes in the early 80ies that way, and I'm still here with all my hair
Yeah...the whole obsession over lead solder is a bit overblown. I could be mistaken, but I was always told that the smoke actually comes from the rosin, which is what the air sucker removes. Lead poisoning itself from solder is actually a very low risk. You won't get it just from handling lead unless you don't wash your hands before you eat/drink. Handling your wet pad is almost more of a risk...lead has to be dissolved in water to be absorbed unless you literally eat it.
Anyway, to the OP....
If you're talking about the basics of setting up an amp...
Matt Schofield showed his method of dialing in "any" amp the first time he was on That Pedal Show. It's not a bad place to start, but it absolutely does not work with every amp. There are some designs where the knobs are highly interactive, and that method will have you chasing your tail with some amps. A lot of classic amps don't necessarily do what they say on the knobs in terms of what you want to achieve, at least not directly. I mean....they kinda do. Treble knobs generally make an amp brighter or darker. But depending on other settings, the mid knob might as well be another gain control on some designs.
IMO, it's valuable to learn what actually makes a tone stack "flat". Tone Stack Calculator (
https://www.duncanamps.com/tsc/, windows only) is good for this, especially if you can find schematics to change some of the values for the actual amp you're talking about. No, the tone stack is not the only thing that affects the frequency response of an amp, but it is one of the biggest things. I generally start tweaking an amp from "flat"....which could be almost any knob position for different amps. For some modern "active tonestack" amps, it's everything at noon. For most amps derived from the Bassman/Twin tone stack, it's with bass and treble all the way down and mids all the way up (or as close as you can get...Deluxe Reverbs have a resistor for mid control rather than a pot, but I believe the rest of the tone stack is almost identical to the Twin Reverb, for example). For a Vox style amp with it's 2-band, it's likely to be flat with both all the way down....they're passive...they don't actually boost, but you can almost treat them like they do if you start with the gain way up.
It really is wildly different for different amps. I almost think that some of people's strong preferences for one amp over another actually come from not understanding how different the tone stacks can be.
For the deeper parameters....I've definitely just played with the knobs. Generally, this experimentation hasn't been all that fruitful. Transformer Drive and speaker drive/compression have been fun.
At this point, other than the speaker impedance curve selection and the dynamics tab, I pretty much only dive into the deeper ones if I want to "fix" something and approach it from the same mindset as taking an amp to a modder. Some of what I do has come from YT videos about people fixing specific issues with real amps.
Most recently, I wanted to reduce (but not eliminate) the ghosting that my Tweed Twin model was causing when I used too much gain (which I like). It ended up being a few small tweaks to the power supply page that kept it under control. Or, at least, that seemed to reduce the worst of the ghosting.
