how can you improve the clean tone of an amp?

[mbengs1]

like say, you bought a marshall jcm800, which has not so good clean tone. is there a way to improve it with a pedal? like a compressor sustainer maybe? or maybe amp modelling? or is another amp the only option?

[WRGKMC]

#1. you can use speakers that don't break up easily.

 

#2. Use lower gain preamp tubes.

 

Here's a gain comparison of tubes.

https://www.tubesandmore.com/tech_co...ent_made_tubes

 

You can also switch to using 5751 which has always been a great way to reduce gain in amp that is just too hot. I used one myself in my Marshalls lead/crunch channels to tame the drive and get reasonable levels of saturation.

 

#3. lower the power tube bias. Many tubes can be biased colder so you don't have transformer saturation.

 

#4. Mod the amp. The circuits used in most amps can be easily modified. Changing a few resistors within the circuit can make the difference between over saturation and ultra clean.

 

#5. Switch your guitar pickups to using something more vintage wound, use gain boxes with less drive.

 

#6. Don't buy that amp in the first place. Buy something with less gain so you can avoid all of the above. An older Marshall head doesn't have gain channels. When you run them lower volume and cooler volumes the cleans will untie your shoes.

[DeepEnd]

I'm not a pedal guy but I'm not aware of anything that can make an amp sound cleaner. Once you have distortion in the signal, it's pretty much there to stay.

[Mikeo]

I used to a/b a Fender Twin and a Marshall JCM 800 playing out. I still have both the Twin and the Marshall too. I'm not even a high gain player, I just let the Marshall do what it did best.

 

There's plenty of nice clean amps out there, and you can crud up em up a bit with a OD box

 

I also can sal all Marshall amp just sound best gritty, because I saw Johnny A a long time ago and he had a couple of Marshals on stage that sounded amazing.

 

 

[video=youtube;fL3mvkZ6mVk]

[guitarcapo]

The idea of "better clean" is kind of subjective. One person's "perfect clean" might sound sterile compared to another guy's.

 

Another guy pulls out an oscilloscope to prove things... and the result sounds like you plugged the guitar straight into the PA board.

 

In my opinion, the best cleans sound all sparkling and bell like. Lots of high end with a subtle rich harmonic vibrato from the tubes.

 

The best cleans I ever heard was actually a telecaster plugged straight into a Marshall stack. Deep clear bass that shook the floor without mushiness. And a sparkle on top. If you measured it with a meter it probably was mid scooped way more than an audio engineer would like amplifying hi-fi music.

 

I think it's probably less open for debate that the more watts, the better. The difference is the clarity of the bass and the chime of the trebles without getting that ice pick shrillness.

[guitarcapo]

Also a really beefy huge output transformer will often tighten up the bottom end and make the amp seem more powerful. But that's a pricey thing to swap out.

[WRGKMC]

Breakup comes from gain staging in most amps. One gain stage is greater then the next gain stage can handle. In bass amps, the tubes or transistors are biased so the signal from one stage doesn't push the next stage into saturation. An adequate amount of headroom at the ceiling is left so one stage cant max out the next. Leo Fender designed many of his amps that way so the signal chain was more high fidelity and less distortion. Of course back in his day, Distortion was a bad thing, not an artistic tool to be fashioned.

 

You can bias most tube heads to be distortion free, but it comes at the cost. You're going to loose wattage in the process because the output tubes wont be pushing as hard at the end of that chain and you're likely to have a higher noise floor with the tubes working on the lower end of their amplification curves.

 

You may be able to modify that head so its biased like a bass head version is and just leave the tone stack voiced for guitar. Tube choices alone can probably get you there too. 5751 preamp tubes in place of the higher gain 12AX7's would be my choice. They work great to tame the gain in 12AX7 circuits. Stevie Ray Vaughn used them in his Fender amps to get cleaner blues tones. Then you just bias the power tubes lower and that should give you the cleanest tone without having to modify the amp. From there having higher wattage speakers then the amps rated for should limit the clipping the speakers produce.

 

You can also choose lower output vintage wound guitar pickups. That alone can have the biggest impact. Many vintage amps were designed for seeing a lower input impedance, and the higher you go the more the input gain stage saturates. Gubu's comment of a Tele feeding a Marshall is a great example of a lower impedance pickup feeding a hot amp to get clean tones.

 

Allot of guys use Bass amps like the Bassman 100 for clean tones. They voice the tone stack for guitar or just use it as is. They're a tough amp to get any kind of drive from them unless you goose them up to run hotter.

 

 

[mbengs1]

Paul Gilbert uses a pedal to clean a dirty amp. i think its a Detox EQ, will any EQ pedal do it?

[Phil O'Keefe]

 

I think it's probably less open for debate that the more watts, the better. The difference is the clarity of the bass and the chime of the trebles without getting that ice pick shrillness.

 

In one respect, I agree - but the reason for the "more watts" is to provide plenty of headroom. If you don't need to stay clean while getting really loud, you don't need the wattage of something like a Twin Reverb. I get killer recorded clean tones using a much less powerful Princeton. It's great for recording - but the lower wattage of the Princeton means it is insufficient for getting those same clean tones at very high stage volume levels.

 

 

[Phil O'Keefe]

Paul Gilbert uses a pedal to clean a dirty amp. i think its a Detox EQ' date=' will any EQ pedal do it? [/quote']

 

Yes, if he's doing what I think he's doing, you could use any EQ pedal - although it would work best with one with a master volume slider (such as the Danelectro Fish & Chips EQ). How do you do it? Drop the level so that you're hitting the amp less hard. Low input signal = less distortion compared to hitting it with a hot input signal. You can also cut back on how hard the amp will distort by pulling mids out of the input signal too.

 

Obviously this isn't going to work very well if you have the amp set to the dirty channel and the gain knob dimed... and it also may result in more noise, so take that into consideration too.