Emery Sound Microbaby amp

I posted this on GearSlutz, but that's more of an engineer's spot, so I figured I'd post it here where there are more players...

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I just sold a guitar so that I could upgrade to a good amp, and I got the Microbaby. It just arrived today and I've been playing around with tonight. Mama mia, that's just Tone of the Gods, I mean seriously. I'm just using my stock American Strat right now. The other thing I did with the guitar revenues is to order a pre-wired faceplate for the Strat with Fralin Vintage Hots. If that provides another significant improvement, and I think it will, that's just going to be downright erotically good.

It's a 1 watt amp, and it uses the appropriate type of tubes for a 1 watter, not normal tubes that are barely breaking a sweat. You get that great power tube drive at reasonable, though still surpisingly loud, levels, particularly if you have efficient speakers.

But it means you can get just super creamy, chimey breakup at the flick of the pick, with a great power tube type of sag when you smack a chord. It's really got that Clapton/Layla type of Strat/Tweed sort of vibe, at least with the default tubes. I could just play all day like that.

For me, the best I've found so far is:

- Amp tone all the way to the treble

- Amp volume almost all the way up

- Strat volume down about 7'ish

- In the clean mode

- A little attenuation from the Weber MiniMASS to keep the volume down, )(with the treble compensation at +6dB, though maybe not after I put new strings on it.)

- Sennheiser e609 dead center about 6 inches back though a Great River pre with the input transformer cranked up a bit.

Playing up on the neck, that's just a wet dream for vintage guitar tone. When you smack a chord a little harder, it's just overtones on top of overtones on top of overtones. Beautiful.

It has very little hiss, even when cranked all the way up, at least in the clean or loose modes. More so in the boosted mode. I've not played with that higher gain mode yet. But anyway, unlike with the previous amp, I can crank it enough to get the mic back 5 or 6 inches without getting any hearable his into the mic. That makes for a much nicer sound, at least for vintage type stuff, than cramming the mic right against the speaker.

It can't do everything and you'd need some others for the full panolply of amp goodness. But it also takes various types of tubes, and mine is the open chassis one, so it's trivial to swap tubes. I'm going to get one alternative set as a starter, which are as far from the default ones as possible, in order to get maximum flexibility. The default ones are designed to provide more gain so you can break up at lower levels. You can get another set that drives the pre-amp the least and the power amp the most for something much closer probably to a Blackface'y type of cleaner, chimier sound. So I'm going to get a set like that so that I can cover more of that territory.

Anyway, I know I'm gushing, and I don't want to make out like there's no other amp as good. I've not played many other amps to know. But it's really quite amazing. It really is just Tone of the Gods type stuff with a Strat. Highly recommended by me. I'm working on a short but not trivial instrumental piece I can post as a demonstration. Hopefully I'll get it up by next week. I want to be able to do with the new Strat electronics.

Can't wait to hear the instrumental piece!

Phil uses several really low-wattage amps that he's getting good tone out of in his studio.

My amp, a Carr Rambler, is 14/28 watts, and doesn't quite compare to yours in terms of low wattage amps, but nevertheless, low-wattage amps are amazing for gorgeous, huge sounds in the studio.

I also mic the amp far back quite often. Obviously, it depends on the tone that you are going for, but I'll have some mics four feet back, ambient mics even farther back. Or there will be sometimes in which I want a really tight sound and will get right up on the grill. Just depends.

In my opinion, the amp makers are completely ignoring the project studio market. A 15 or even 10 watt amp is a joke in an apartment. You'll never come close to cranking that up. And even in many homes, where the other inhabitants wouldn't put up with it, and where it would just overwhelm the room even if they would.

Someone said that for headphone levels, an amp would have to be putting out something like 50 milliwatts. So 1/2 watt would be even better probably. I first got a Valve Jr. which was 5 watts. It was insanely loud, and of course not nearly as high quality an amp. Even at one watt, this guy is about 60% as loud (going by the standard wattage vs. apparent loudness, other things being equal.)

But there are only a handful of very boutiquey companies putting out these low wattage amps. Zevex is another, with the Nanohead, a 1/2 watter. The Carr Mercury has a built in attenuator that can take it down to a watt, but you lose some tone that way. To get the tone you have to have the tubes running at appropriate levels for the output level, or so everyone seems to say. Not to say that the Carr Mercury doesn't sound absolutely amazing, since it does. But it would be nice if they made something that sounded that nice that only ran at 1 watt or a half watt.

I think that a lot of people don't understand why recording with a low-wattage amp is so beneficial. I think at first, it's counter-intuitive to musicians. Most people, if they want to sound loud, come in here and try and obliterate my studio. They'll ask, "How did you get such monstrous tones on my buddy's recording?" and I'll tell them that I used really small, low-wattage amps. They look at me if I'm nuts, and then set up their enormous 100-watt Marshalls.

Clapton recorded the Layla album using a Fender Tweed, and Tom Dowd said that it was at very low level, and that if someone had come in and stubbed their toe on something it would have ruined the take. You really can get a huge sound at low levels. And, importantly, for us project studio people, you don't have to have a separate room to isolate the cabinet from you.

I build up a little enclosure out of bass traps, open at one end where the mic is, and that end is pointed away from me into a curtained corner. So even with open back headphones, I can hear what the mic is hearing and not the amp in the room. So I can dial in the tone easily while listening, and be sure I'm getting that tone.

I'm sure my neighbors probably think that's my 'secret fort' or something. I'm going to buy a Snoopy helmet and some goggles and sit in there and act like I'm flying as they walk by. They are 6" and 4" traps, so they cut down the volume significantly. But since the end is open and since it's not a sealed up space, and the traps absorb sound very well, they don't give it a boxy sound like a real Iso box would.

Just to follow up on this... I now have my Strat upgraded with Fralin Vintage Hots, and got a nice Weber Vintage alnico speaker. And it is even far more amazingly nice.

At first I put in the new pickups and I didn't like them (this was before the Weber speaker.) I thought, oh well, expensive mistake they just don't match this amp very well. So, I switched back again to the stock setup. But then, after I got the new Weber speaker and played it a while, I started suspecting it would be worth the pain to swap back to the Fralins and try it again. I'm glad I did (and that I wasn't able to sell the Fralins else I wouldn't have ever had a chance to try.)

I went back and did a full on re-setup of the guitar, made and installed a new nut, and fully set it up from scratch again. And now I'm just in guitar heaven. I can't believe how nice it sounds.

Now that I have no more excuses I started working on a new piece last night and the tone I was getting was so thick and harmonically rich that it was just crazy, even with significant low end rolloff to make room for the bass later. I love that kind of tone for certain things, where it just grinds without being really actually all that distorted.

The nice thing about this setup now is that it's really nice for recording purposes. It has an understated high end, but it's still plenty present, and the low end is quite tight, so you can thicken it up a lot and it doesn't get out of hand (though it still needs some rolloff in that case probably.) You can just slap a dynamic near the center of the grill somewhere and it sounds nice. I'm going to try the Pearlman tonight as well and see how that sounds, with the high cut on and back a little to reduce the lows and highs a bit. I bet it'll be awfully nice.

Anyway, I only thought I loved it and recommended it before. Now I really do. If you are looking for some killer vintage tones, definitely check out this combination. The Weber speaker I got, BTW, is the 12A125A. It's not expensive and sounds great. I assume it'll smooth out a bit more over the next weeks, which will probably be even better. I got the 30 watt one, 16 ohms. I just stuck it in the Valve Jr. cabinet. I'll pick up a nicer cabinet at some point probably.

Yeah ... when I was buying my strat last year I tried it through a Valve Jr.

To get a good overdriven tone it was so loud I felt inhibited playing it in

the shop, so I switched to a 15 Watt Vox Valvetronix which had a master

volume I could turn down. It's amazing how loud these low wattage amps are.

I didn't want to go with a master volume amp, because there's something really cool about pushing the power stage hard and make the amp really work. Though the pushed pre-amp and cranked down power amp scheme is obviously a very valid and widely used one and sounds good, too, just in a different way. I'm sure I'll get one of those as well whe I can afford it. Maybe a Tiny Terror or something like that.