The four amps every working guitarist should know intimately.
Not own. Know. There's a difference. These four cover 90 percent of what walks into a gig.
There are roughly four amps that, if you understand how they behave, you can walk onto almost any stage in America and figure out what's in front of you within thirty seconds. I'm not saying you need to own all four. I'm saying you should have played through all four enough times to know what they want, what they punish, and how to make them sound like themselves under stress.
The four are: the Fender Twin Reverb, the Vox AC30, the Fender Princeton/Deluxe (functionally similar enough to lump together for this argument), and a Marshall — pick your flavor, but for our purposes I'm going to talk about the JCM800 because it's the one you're most likely to encounter on a backline. These four cover, by my rough count, somewhere around 90 percent of the working amps in clubs in the United States, and once you know them you can show up to a strange backline and not panic.
I'm not going to do these as a list. They each deserve a paragraph, and they each have a personality you need to understand to play through them well.
The Twin. I've written about it elsewhere, so I'll be brief. The Twin wants to be loud. It is designed to be loud. At bedroom volume it sounds polite and a little stiff. At gig volume it opens up and becomes one of the best clean platforms ever made — sparkling top end, taut low end, headroom for days. Don't try to push a Twin into power amp distortion. You can't, and trying will just hurt the ears of everyone in the front three rows. Use pedals. The Twin is a clean amp. Treat it like one. jules.rourke makes the mistake of trying to crank his AC30 to where the Twin he sometimes uses on backline already lives — and the AC30 is not the same amp.
The AC30. This is the amp the Twin isn't. It wants to be pushed. The top boost channel, when you turn it up past three o'clock, develops a chime and a compression that the Twin physically cannot do because the Twin has too much headroom. The AC30 is a midrange amp, and that midrange is what makes Brian May and the Edge and Radiohead and a thousand jangly indie bands sound the way they do. The mistake people make is treating the AC30 like a clean platform. It isn't one. It's a breakup machine that happens to have a clean setting. If you want clean from an AC30 you keep it under three on the volume and accept that you're using maybe 20 percent of what the amp does. jules.rourke runs his Rickenbacker 330 into one in stereo and the stereo trick is essentially designed around the AC30's particular kind of bloom.
The Princeton/Deluxe family. These are the working musician's secret. A blackface Princeton Reverb is somewhere around 12 watts. A Deluxe Reverb is 22. They are the amps you can mic for a 300-person room and not destroy the mix engineer's faders. They have the same Fender clean as the Twin but they break up early, because there's no headroom, and that breakup is musical in a way the Twin's breakup never is. If you only own one tube amp and you play clubs, this is what you own. I've gigged a Princeton Reverb for eight years and the only times it hasn't been enough were outdoor gigs without a PA and one room with an inexplicable amount of room treatment. Both times I rented a Twin. greer.shepard runs a Princeton too. We compare notes.
The Marshall — let's say JCM800. This is the amp Americans are worst at, because we don't grow up with them the way British players do. The Marshall is a midrange-and-grind amp. The clean channel is okay. The dirty channel is the point. The trick to a Marshall is that the bass control is essentially a 'cut treble' control — turn the bass up and the amp loses focus, turn the bass down and the mids come up and the amp tightens. Americans who are used to setting Fender amps with the bass at six and the treble at six will set a Marshall the same way and wonder why it sounds muddy. Set the bass at three. Set the mids at seven. Set the treble at five. Now it sounds like a Marshall. The other thing about Marshalls: they cut through a band in a way Fenders don't, because of where the midrange sits, and this is both their virtue and the reason your singer is going to ask you to turn down.
Know these four and you can walk into a strange backline situation, see what's there, and make it work. You will not always have your amp. You will sometimes have an amp you've never seen before. The four above are the genealogy of almost every amp design that's come since, and if you understand them, you understand the rest. Even the boutique stuff — the Two Rocks, the Matchlesses, the Dr. Zs — are variations on these themes with different voicings. The themes are what matter.
— Jason
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