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Fender Amp Magic 6's


gardo

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I've heard several versions of the Fender magic 6's What's your take on it, For what I do it's treble 6 mid 6 bass 4+vol 2 on the clean side..I rarely use the drive side The amp is a solid state Princeton Chorus

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I guess it's a good enough place to start. I've typically run my amps with scooped mids. My current settings are bass 12 o'clock, mid 9 o'clock, treble 3 o'clock, presence 12 o'clock. The treble boost is a substitute for a treble bleed since I have my guitar turned way down.

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I've owned many Fender amps all my life and don't remember having it apply. Probably because most of my amps had upgraded speakers.

 

Maybe the guitar's used is the key.

 

I typically ran Gibson guitars with humbuckers for many years. You could force a Fender amp to overdrive at around 3/4 on the volume with treble cranked to max, Bass on maybe 4 or 5 depending on the cab used.

 

You plug a fender guitar with its single coil pickups in and you'd have to crank the treble way down below 5 to get close to a decent tone. Even then practically no overdrive no matter how much you turned up, just surf guitar tones. That's why I disliked Fender guitars in the beginning. You couldn't get driven tones from an amp plugged straight in.

 

Once they started making drive pedals then it didn't matter what you played, you could get anything to clip and it didn't matter if the amp produced clean tones.

 

If the pedal had tone controls it didn't matter where the amp knobs were set either. The pedals over rode your standard settings you used plugged straight in and you set the amp to get the best pedal tones. Maybe they wound up on 6 depending on what pedal you used, but plug a different one in and that totally changed.

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I've heard several versions of the Fender magic 6's What's your take on it' date=' For what I do it's treble 6 mid 6 bass 4+vol 2 on the clean side..I rarely use the drive side The amp is a solid state Princeton Chorus [/quote']

 

The traditional Magic 6 formula applies to classic Fender tube amps from the Blackface and Silverface era. The formula is Volume 6, Treble 6, Midrange 3, Bass 2. There's a couple of non-6's there, but they're usually expressed as 3 x 2 = 6 to help you remember / stick with the 6 motif...

 

http://www.singlecoil.com/docs/magic-six.pdf

 

Personally, I think there's some good theory behind the basic formula (which I believe was first written about by Bjorn Juhl of BJFe), but I have never really bought into it as an ironclad rule. Yes, it does get the tonal balance pretty decent in a lot of cases, and the gain staging is good, and it helps the distortion balance sound even across all the strings, but it doesn't really take into account different speaker voicings, nor does it take into account the different sounds of various guitars, or the different stylistic and personal preferences people often have.

 

IOW, you might think it works great with your Les Paul, yet you might think it's too bright with your Tele... Overall, it's certainly not a bad place to start - but don't be a slave to it - be willing to adjust the sound as needed from there, depending on the guitar you're using and the requirements of the musical situation at hand.

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I own a few Fender amps. No rules for me.

 

The only ss amp I owned was called a sidekick. Back in the early 80's Bill Schultz from Fender gave it to me for buying a guitar. The best Fender amps still have a tube rectifier.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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I own a few Fender amps. No rules for me.

 

The only ss amp I owned was called a sidekick. Back in the early 80's Bill Schultz from Fender gave it to me for buying a guitar. The best Fender amps still have a tube rectifier.

 

 

 

I had a Sidekick 30 in the mid-80s for a while. It was actually a pretty decent sounding little SS amp IMHO. That's cool that Bill gave you one. I'd love to hear the full story behind how that happened if you feel like sharing... :)

 

 

 

PS I agree with you about tube rectifiers - but I tend to lean towards smaller amps anyway.

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