Too many amps for meaningful differences?

Many younger players have no basic electrical knowledge and therefore no idea how two seemingly similar amps are different under the hood. Even those of us who were there for explosion of options which began in the 80s can easily lose our way. By having ten choices which are very similar it resolves these problems. Memory is cheap and easy now, so why not?
 
It could be overwhelming to see so many amps yet so many similar ones! So treat it as a warehouse of amps!
Uncle Cliff said, you can go to the warehouse and you can pick any amp and take it home!
So pick one and get familiar with it, then get familiar with the advanced knobs.
Try to boost before the amp.

Then come back and pick another amp! Even a similar one and you will hear the differences by then!

I suggest you read up on an amp's history, who uses it for what, how, and why.

It's a fun journey!
 
levipeto said:
I suggest you read up on an amp's history, who uses it for what, how, and why.
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I both agree and disagree, because I think too often its easy to pigeonhole a certain amp to a given style, or, think that a given style can only be done with a specific amp, all because of what some famous artist may have used.

Then it becomes chasing tone with eyes, not ears. Thinking you can't sound like Gilmour because there isn't a specific 75 Ram's Head muff, or an Alembic (even though there are plenty of great twin and similar circuits).

It becomes not learning to use the dozens of great tools you do you, but instead obsessing over what someone else used, and feeling you can't do it because you don't have that particular model.

It becomes kind of a bottomless hole, chasing tone, and with the net so full of info, good and bad, its easy to confuse what we really need to actually make music and miss the amazing tools we've got at our fingertips
 
Looking at this from the standpoint of not having the opportunity in the real world to play even 1% of the amp types / permutations in my Fractal. Whether I'm chasing "my sound" or someone else's, the overlapping types (at baseline setttings) give me a window into a tone I might never have thought to seek from a particular major manufacturer or boutique / rare amplifier. When adding amps becomes an excercise in futility, I'm sure Cliff will move more deeply into other aspects of modeling or the Fractal's feature set - until then... More AMPS!!!
 
yek said:
Girls have brown, blond or dark hair. And while there are many variations, they basically overlap and so they are redundant.
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I laughed for five minutes about this. Iincluding the additional laughter when I realized he'd left out ...REDHEADS, of all things? How can anyone forget REDHEADS?)

Having said that, let's realize that while the response was a good joke, it didn't count as a serious answer to the original post.

For, of course, the original post asked -- with a certain amount of nuance, I think -- about adding new Amp Models to a certain category of amps, when you're having trouble telling the difference between the ones you have.

I don't know anything about the lady (or ladies) in Yek's life right now, but even knowing nothing about her/them, I can predict her/their likely reaction if Yek were to say, "Sorry I keep calling you three brunettes by the wrong names, but hey, y'know, other than hair color, all y'all women are pretty indistinguishable." :openmouth: :p Yeah, that'd go down well.

For myself, I do find it easier to tell the difference between my wife, my daughters, my mother, and the lady at the grocery-store checkout counter, than between an A/B of a pair of high-gain modern amps. (Good thing, too.)

But it was a hilarious reply and deserved acknowledgement as such.
 
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nanowhisker said:
Sorry for that, english is not my native language.
I try to give an example for what I mean:
  • user selects amp model #23 which sounds about 80% right for him/her
  • user starts to tweak the model by adjusting the available parameters
  • system realizes that the internal (tweaked) parameter set is more similar to another amp model #134
  • system suggests model #134 as a baseline

By internal parameter set I assumed that there is a finite set of parameters which apply to all amp models, however, with different vaules for each model.
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This is actually a quite interesting idea, to me.

But difficult to get working, of course, because it would need to include interactions of pre-EQ, pre-Boosts and Drives, Cabs...all the various things affecting the tone you're going for. Put enough EQ in front of a Twin and it starts sounding like a Vox at certain settings; so the system goes all Lionel Richie and asks, "Is it Vox you're looking for?" ...but it'd have to be analyzing the output of your whole signal chain as a single entity.
 
Dr. Dipwad said:
THE PREMISE:
In the Axe FX II (let alone in the III) there were already a lot of amps. Now we have more. And people are always asking for yet more.
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Well, look at the number and variation of actual amps in existence. And amp manufacturers continue to release new models. The bottom line is, a trivial or insignificant difference to you may be significant to someone else.
 
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