Orange Tiny Terror 15W vs Roland Cube 60

[cool9]

I want a natural sound that I can push and tweak with pedals. I've seen demos of these two and they sound impressive. Will I be able to get overtones from these amps when pushed?

[WRGKMC]

So long as the strings on your instrument can produce them your amp should unless the speaker has such poor treble frequency response, it hides them. Turning the treble completely down on most amps of course will mask the overtones.

 

Also, keep in mind, overtones are higher in frequency then the root note of the string. If you have pickups with limited frequency response, hot wound humbuckers for example, the harmonic chimes may not be reproduced by the pickups and the lower frequencies may mask them. Other pickup types like say a Tele have very strong treble response and the harmonics will come through just about any amp and speaker, so long as the guitar is set up well with the intonation set properly.

[cool9]

These guys with high output pups like EVH, Judas Priest, Jeff Loomis don't get overtones from their rig?

[DeepEnd]

I'm going to assume that by "overtones" you mean overtones produced by the amp, not the guitar or the pickups. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Tube amps like the Orange excel at that but a good modelling amp like the Roland can get very close. Do you have any idea what cab you'd be using with the Orange?

[cool9]

I mean pushing the amp to the point where it almost feeds back. Maybe I don't know enough about harmonic motion and guitars. Don't know what cabinet I'd be using but I could always pick up a Celestion.

The female guitarist Orianthi demos the Cube 60 on youtube.

[DeepEnd]

If you intend to crank the amp to the point of feedback, headroom will be your main concern depending on your physical setup (i.e., how far you are from the cab, its orientation with respect to your position, etc.) BTW, Celestion doesn't make speaker cabinets, just the speakers that go in them. Orange makes speaker cabs to go with their amp heads, both 4X12 and 2X12, and most of them have Celestion speakers installed. The Cube 60 has a single 12" speaker installed.

[Mr.Grumpy]

I think when the OP says "overtones" he means "overdrive" - amp distortion.

 

The Orange and Roland are very different. the Roland Cube 60 is a solid-state digital modeling amp. Roland has many years' experience with modeling amps and the Cube series sounds good and is very versatile. Since it's a modeling amp, you can dial up many different amp models and some effects too.

 

The Orange is a very basic, simple, all tube "head". Gain, (preamp volume) tone, master volume.

[WRGKMC]

He's talking about sympathetic sustain IE Hendrix/Santana sustains where the strings self generate vibrations and can produce harmonic overtones depending on the angle of the body and neck to the speaker.

 

15W should be able to do this, especially if the amp is elevated to waist level where the speaker blasts the back of the guitar body. Its should be good up to 15 feet or so fully cranked and farther with additional gain pedals or a good compressor.

 

Much of this has to do with the guitar you're using of course. You can get a semi hollow body guitar to self sustain much more easily then you can a thick dense solid body like a Les Paul. I can stand in front of my 100W Marshall with my Paul and have a hard time getting sympathetic sustain unless its got some major drive happening. I can take one of my semi's and get it to happen at very low volume.

 

I's ask what guitars do you use before answering whether a small 15W amp can pull it off. I'd also have to know what speaker you'd be using too. A low SPL speaker may not be able to adequately project enough sound to pull the sustain technique off whereas a high SPL speaker with the right guitar may have uncontrollable results and even produce microphonics.

 

I don't think you'd have Frequency response issues with the heads. Allot of it does have to do with the midrange frequencies the amps produce.

 

I have a parametric EQ Overdrive pedal that does a wonderful job producing narrow EQ bands anywhere from 65 to nearly 4Khz. I can scroll through and tune in the specific string frequencies and/or their associated harmonics to self sustain much more easily then using a full frequency amp alone.

 

 

Hendrix used a wah and fuzz pedal to do the exact same thing and simply scrolled through the wah frequencies to get specific notes and harmonics to sustain. Santana originally used West amps with the preamps wired in series to gain the amp up to get an SG to self sustain. Since this meant he had two sets of EQ's he could double midrange and treble peaks and generate self sustain much more easily.

 

The guitarist from Boston used two Wah's in series set to fixed frequencies to create a large midrange peak to get those long chord sustains. The Beatles got those sustains in sings like Back in the USSR to happen with the old Vox amps that had a MRB boost switch which was essentially an active Varitone used to peak mid frequencies before Wah pedals took over that role.

 

Thousands of other players have done similar things using all kinds of tricks. Your amp choices may need help getting the best results. There are likely much better choices out there that will require fewer pedals to achieve the best results. Knowing what guitar you use would help to narrow down some of that experimentation. I understand and have become expert at using Sympathetic sustain and can get it from a large variety of instruments, amps. you just have to keep in mind the amp is only 1/3 or less responsible for getting it to occur. Speaker, Guitar, Pickups, Pedals, Instrument setup are all equally important.

 

Chances are most amps are fairly full frequency and therefore don't focus in on specific bands unless you use an EQ device of some sort to exaggerate the frequencies you want.

[DeepEnd]

. . . The Orange is a very basic' date=' simple, all tube "head". Gain, (preamp volume) tone, master volume.[/quote']

The OP says:

I want a natural sound that I can push and tweak with pedals. . . .

Personally, that doesn't sound like the Cube 60 to me, unless you use the "clean" (JC) setting exclusively, it sounds like a--well--a "basic, simple" amp like the Orange. If he's going to use a lot of pedals, any good, loud amp might do nicely. WRGKMC is right that we need more information before "how loud" can be determined.