Gain tones at low volumes

[Eric]

Hi everyone.

Within the last month or so, I've finally come to realize that some tones just don't sound good until you turn them up. In my experience, the classic Marshall gain is a good example of that. At normal-to-low volumes, it just sounds kind of fizzy and inarticulate to my ears. However, turn up the volume, and the same tone suddenly sounds a bit more muscular and rockin'. I should mention that this is coming primarily from my experience with modelers, as I've never owned a Marshall tube amp.

Is this something other people have noticed? Where an otherwise nice guitar tone can sound kind of pathetic when turned down to low volumes? I'm not talking about low gain; I'm talking about turning the actual volume to about speaking levels.

If you have found this, now comes part 2: how do you overcome it? I ask because at the church where I play, a lot of the songs merit a healthy dose of gain, but I've come to realize I'm usually not real hot in the house mix. Accordingly, I'm concerned that what sounds good to me on stage will come off as kind of weak and fizzy to everyone not on stage. Any good advice for how to overcome that? Play clean all of the time? Real real low amounts of gain?

Just looking for anyone with some advice or experience dealing with this. If I'm way off base with this, feel free to ignore me.

[deeaa]

Enter the 36W...pure power amp drive at reasonable volumes...but then not much headroom over that...

But, IMO, Tech-21 is one amp that DOES sound just as good loud and quiet. Only tube amps sound the best cranked.

[Zip]

Only tube amps sound the best cranked.

That's why you should look into the satisfying goodness of an attenuator. Just the ticket for stages smaller than Wembley.

[Katastrophe]

Back off on the gain a little, and boost the mids a touch. There is, I believe, a point of diminishing returns when it comes to too much gain.

My old solid state Crate did the same thing, and had a definite volume "sweet spot" where it sounded better and more muscular. I had two different gain and eq settings that I used, depending on if it was a practice or if we were playing somewhere.

The best thing to do, IMO, if you have the time is to get in front of the PA, in the middle, and have the band play while you play. You can adjust better from there, and you'll be seated better in the mix, too.

[deeaa]

Ayh, attenuators are great. And you can build a simple L-pad attenuator for like $20-30 in parts, and it'll work fine for amps up to, say 15W. I built one for the Valve Jr. and it worked very very well.

In a place like a church, I bet even a 2W amp would work...I had a H&K Cream Machine and at 2W it was loud enough for LOTS of purposes...but it had no clean sound whatsoever available.

But anyway, back to the original...you must be talking about VERY low volumes indeed if there's no punch to it with modelers...usually I find them quite punchy indeed with low volumes as well. But you do need to have some snappy slightly driven gain stages there somewhere.

I guess, if there is _no_ gain stage that would be at least slightly driven/on the edge it would always sound a bit wussy at low volumes. But on very low volumes you need to rely on preamp gain, no way around it really.

That's one more reason I like my EMG's...they sound punchy even if I plug my headphones directly to the guitar, LOL...there's enough spank and kick to them no matter what volume you play.

When I play quietly at home with the AD30, I have 'normal' amounts of gain, meaning I'll have a driven model and drive at halfway mark or something, and it's plenty punchy to me at speaking volumes...BUT when I play at the training facility I have the amp on nigh clean and drive it just slightly with the OD at under 1/4 gain - the poweramp takes care of drive and punch anyway in that case. So the louder I get the less gain I use in the pre and vice versa. Very quiet, you need much more gain in the frontend to keep the immediacy and attack going.

[Eric]

Well, I should clarify. This is using a Tech 21 Sansamp direct to house, monitoring through a headphone amp. I have found that when some of the settings are real low volume, it sounds weak and fuzzy/fizzy. My concern is that no matter what I do on my end, the volume in the house will be normalized so that it's always a little softer than I prefer, which might in turn affect how the tone comes out.

I'll have more opportunity to futz with it tonight, so maybe I'll find something. I'll try a bit less gain and see where that puts me.

[NWBasser]

Not so much gain per se, but I've found that neo bass speakers don't really come alive at lower volumes until they're getting a good amount of juice from the amp. Kind of weak-kneed tone at bedroom volumes.

The only solution for me is to just crank it!

Sorry, a bit off-topic here...