Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Touch Sensitive

My two fabulous tube amps—the tiny Fender tweed Champ and the hulking Vox 125—couldn't be more different. It isn't just size and volume; it's about how they respond to my playing. Switching between them reminds me again and again how playing electric guitar is hugely about playing the amp.

I spend most of my time with the Champ. I'm playing in my basement late at night, and so the little amp is the perfect thing. Plus, it sounds absolutely glorious. But it has its limitations. I mostly play it clean, and at a low volume setting (between 3 and 4), and at this setting, it makes my strat sound so lovely, it shows just how much Leo Fender had a direct line to God in the 1950s. I'll give Seth Lover some credit too, 'cause the Seymour Duncan '59 I have in the bridge also sounds absolutely gorgeous through the Champ at clean volume.

I don't crank the Champ much at home; for two reasons: first, it's loud enough that it wakes people up; second, the kind of overdrive it produces, while really cool, is pretty ragged and scratchy. Partly because of the tiny speaker in the Champ, a lot of the low-register distortion is actually speaker breakup, it can sound pretty ratty. The higher-end stuff sounds a lot smoother, and chime-y chords break up brilliantly. I prefer this amp on the edge of breakup, where you can take advantage of its huge dynamic range and touch sensitivity to play between clean and dirty simply with pick attack.

The Vox is an entirely different universe. The single-coil pickups (and relatively low-output '59 PAF) don't overdrive this amp much on their own, so I use my Tube Screamer mostly as a signal boost. It drives the Vox into really meaty, crunchy territory. The Tube Screamer works vastly better driving the Vox than driving the Champ, at least at low volume, because the Vox has a tube pre-amp that the pedal can push. The Champ's overdrive is only in the power stage, so it doesn't crunch at all until you crank it up.

But here's where it gets interesting. As I say, I play the Champ most of the time, and so I've learned (or my fingers have learned) the amp's dynamics. I know—at an intuitive level—how to play this amp, how to make it sound good. So when I get the urge to tear it up a bit more, and go to the Vox, I am always stymied by how different it sounds. When I first get into this amp, I can't make it sound good at all. It takes me the better part of an hour to get the dynamics sorted out, between my ears and my fingers. Once I get there, the Vox sounds astonishingly good, and like the Champ it is enormously touch-sensitive. But it's an entirely different touch sensitivity; and the one doesn't transfer to the other. I am always surprised by how much they are different, and yet working according to the same basic logic.