My live playing is on a bit of a hiatus at the moment (all members of our semi-serious band are still preoccupied with Real Life things) so I’m concentrating on solo stuff for now. I’ll be ordering a copy of Cubase Essential at the end of the month assuming nothing expensive hits me in the meantime (I MOT’d the car last month…what more can go wrong?!) but I was in need of a new amp that’s built for home recording/practice rather than a higher wattage performance amp.
My Marshall DSL 401 does have a line out socket but that sounds a bit sterile and thin; the general sound of the amp isn’t really suited to the style of music I play anyway. A bit of shopping around helped me decide on a piece of kit that’s right for the job (see above).
Needless to say a 100 or 200 watt stack is a bit excessive for what I need so I narrowed my options down to low wattage, all-valve combos that kick out a good quality sound at a volume that won’t have my ears bleeding and neighbours running to the hills. The Fender Princeton reissue has built-in reverb, a really pleasant tremolo effect and, at 15 watts, gives plenty of undistorted headroom in a compact package with that classic bright Fender clean tone. Sadly it was a bit out of my price range and I’d have to mic it up to record. The HT-5 was my other choice and, with only a couple of minor complaints, is perfect for my needs.
It’s a two channel amp so I can switch between a clean sound and an distorted one: I’ve grown reliant on pedals for my distortion but it’s handy to have the option of valve overdrive should I need it. It’s very punchy (thanks in part to a smaller than usual 10″ speaker) and has a remarkably Marshall-esque ‘Brit grit’ sound that’s great for rock and heavier blues. The valve configuration is one ECC83 preamp and a 12BH7 , which I must admit I’ve never encountered in an amp’s power stage before. I’ve seen EL34s, EL84s, 6V6s and my personal fave of 6L6s but one 12BH7 in push-pull mode is new to me.
For only five watts it’s a very loud amp. My overdrive channel setting is the gain on two thirds and the volume at less than a quarter; plugged into an external speaker cab I reckon I could play distorted along with a band but I don’t think it could give the clean headroom. The clean channel is really warm and takes pedals well though: the Big Muff fuzz or my beloved Proco Rat 2 sound great and aren’t noisy at all. The three band eq is the same as you’d expect on larger amps, and the ISF control (a knob that acts as a second mids/bass voicing control) is really useful too.
There’s an effects loop send and return on the rear panel with a selector switch for either stompbox-type or rack mounted units, which will be useful I’m sure at some point, plus an array of external speaker connections. The recording-out socket has a selector switch for two speaker types: an emulated 1×12 or a 4×12. Although it could never sound as good as a microphone in front of a real speaker cab, it’s not bad; the 4×12 gives more warmth and bottom end so I’ll probably use that.
The only problem with the amp I’ve found so far, apart from the fact that the footswitch cable is only a metre long, is that the speaker output is automatically muted when I plug a cable into the recording-out. This is fine for using with headphones but I like to use the amp’s own speaker as a monitor. Since the guitar goes into the PC and that in turn is connected to my hi-fi I can work around this by sending the guitar amp’s signal through the PC’s soundcard and then out to my hi-fi speakers.
In other news I’m really happy with the cheap (£20 off Ebay) Danelectro Fab Tone, which gives a really thick and wild distortion; it’s allegedly based on retro distorted sounds but I’d say it’s more of a lo-fi fuzz than a tribute to mellow-sounding vintage amps. Unless the amp is being hacked in half with a chainsaw, because unless you back the volume and treble right down that’s what it sounds like! I’ll try to get some demo mp3s recorded because, for a cheap second-hand effect, it’s a lot of fun.
My favourite pedals at the moment are either my Blues Driver (for mild overdrive) or the Rat, run into the Holy Grail Plus reverb with the DD-5 adding delay. My next projects will probably be changing the Big Muff’s on/off switch for true bypass and building a tap tempo switch to make the digital delay more useful live; I’m still longing for an analogue chorus and delay (Electro Harmonix Small Clone and MXR Carbon Copy, respectively) but those will have to wait until I’ve paid off my credit card…
