Tube Rolling on the Fractal!?

Chris Hurley

Power User
I've mostly been playing my Synergy/Randall modular stuff for the last couple of years but I keep my trusty Fractal gear to fill in every imaginable crack that emerges in the analog world. The Axe-FX III really is the best friend a tube amp ever had.

The most recent experience is a weird one. I've been playing with a Kemper lately- this is about the 5th time. Although the Kemper is pretty neat, I still prefer just about everything in the Fractal world. Since I've been playing with profiling my amp or preamp modules, I remembered the tone match capability in the Fractal and decided to give it a whirl for the first time.

I wanted to match the tone of my Dave Friedman-modded Syn-50 and Randall Brahma module. The Brahma was supposedly modeled after George Lynch's favorite plexi, so I figured the Friedman smallbox would be a good place to start.

I had my Syn-50 running into the Fryette Powerstation load, and then fed that to the Fractal which output to the Matrix GT1000 and out to my guitar cab.

I got them as close as I could by hand (which takes a little time) and tried to close the gap with a tone match. The Fractal sounded fine but even with the tone match, I couldn't get it to match up exactly. The tone match was coming back with what looked visually like very minimal corrections and bypassing the TM block, I couldn't hear a lot of difference.

I have two of these Brahma preamp modules. One is a Randall and the other is a modification that was done by Dave Friedman for me. When I put the same tubes in them, they sound identical. I tend to prefer the Chinese 12ax7's in the Brahma which is how Dave seems to prefer them but I recently discovered that I liked the EH12ax7 in another module and have been trying that in one of my Brahmas- its thicker and maybe a little more gain. Well, the two modules sound a little different and thats about how much difference there was between the Fractal model and the actual amp. It was the same basic sound but its just a little different. Like the difference between two guitars maybe.

Remembering the fractal has a preamp tube selection, I changed it from the default to 12ax7a tube. There was a slight but noticeable change that ended up bringing it very closely into alignment with the real amp.

The Fractal is so accurate, it can even model tube rolling. I'm glad that Mr. Chase didn't decide to sell virtual NOS tubes for use in the Fractal devices or we'd be in trouble. "Black Friday Sale: Get a Quad of vNOS Big Bottle 6CA7 tubes for $10- works in any amp model in any Fractal"

As they say at Ripleys: "Believe it... Or Not!"

Yeah, you can probably get there with the other 7500 amp controls in an amp block too, but here's another avenue for your tweaking amusement.
 
Ah i remember that video they had with George playing that module as it was being tweaked..
Would love to hear it when you get it all dialed in!!
 
Its pretty much the Smallbox model. They put Ei 12ax7's in the module in that Premier Guitar video. I have a few of those but haven't tried them yet. I guess the Ei plant got bombed at some point and is now gone. I used to have piles of those tubes about 20 years ago. I found a half dozen recently while looking for something else and have been saving them so they can be buried with me or something silly like that.

I guess Randall/Friedman/Lynch settled on the China 12ax7 for production modules. Thats not what was in other modules so it seems like it was a conscious choice rather than just the cheapest thing you could stick in there.

It ain't a major major difference and you probably couldn't hear it in a lot of situations.
 
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