I'm pretty sure that Mick Jagger was not setting out an approach to purchasing equipment when he wrote the immortal lines
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes
You just might find
You get what you need
When I was thinking about buying a camera a couple of years ago, what I really wanted was a Fuji GFX 100. A medium-format monster, a snip at £7,000 for the body and £3,000 for a lens. Call me a killjoy, but with my skills and lifestyle, I just couldn't justify that. That's Holy Grail stuff. Also, the probability of me damaging or losing a £10,000 camera are much higher than that of damaging or losing a £500 camera. After watching many reviews and looking at the major camera makers' websites, I came up with this... I wanted
Fuji's simplest camera with inter-changeable lenses that is good enough so I can't blame the camera for a bad picture
That existed: it was the X-E4 that I still use now. And it's a nice bit of kit.
When it was time to trade in the Epiphone Les Paul Standard 50's, after thinking in terms of this and that and an SG, I realised that what I wanted was a
"7-lb Les Paul": two humbuckers and controls in parallel, meeting the selector switch, with a 24.5" scale length, for under £1,000
There is no such Les Paul, but there is the PRS McCarty 594 SE, which the guys at GuitarGuitar in Epsom had in stock the day I visited. It too is a nice bit of kit I now own.
Recently I thought that it might be nice, as well as time, to move up to a Real Valve Amp. Fender of course. (Really? There are other amp makers? Who knew?) What I wanted was
a Fender valve amp that can be played at bedroom volumes at the edge of break-up
which I knew to be ridiculous even as I thought about it. The 12W Princeton Reverb, the 5W VibroChamp, and never mind the 15W Blues Junior, are way too loud at natural break-up. However, I have mastered the art of getting snarly tones at around 70dB, so I don't need to rely on valve break-up. And I'm not going to be distracted by the Tonemasters and their power attenuators. Tonemasters sound almost like valve amps, but not quite. They are for pros who need to heft amps from gig to gig. Mine will be staying in one place. So the only choice is between the '65 and the '68 Princetons. The '68 has a more immediately appealing sound, but it's a little less well-defined than the '65, and I want that clean, clean sound.
So the '65 it is. GuitarGuitar do a 30-day return. What am I waiting for?
Around the same time, I wondered if I might to get a telephoto zoom for the X-E4. Like it or not, many of the good shots available in London do need to be picked out of the surrounding visual sludge by cropping or zooming. It happens that there is a very good third-party lens - the Tamron X-mount 17-70 - for the Fuji. If I were to get a telephoto zoom, and didn't want to pay Fuji prices, nor carry around the weight of solid-metal Fuji lenses, that would be the one. So I know what I need.
What am I waiting for?
I'm waiting for my inner Scrooge to stop telling me that with my appalling guitar skills, cack-handed photographic skills and warped eye for a picture, plus my unwillingness to actually go out and shoot pictures, I cannot "justify" the expense.
If I was a forty-year-old married man with a mortgage and two children needing private education, this might be a reasonable reservation.
But I'm not. I'm an older man on the last few laps. Possessing nice gear is one of the small pleasures of life, even if one doesn't use it as much or as well as a pro would. Heck, all of it can be sold on the second-hand market.
And I don't go on holidays. Now there's an expense I really can't justify.
If it ever happens, I'll let you know. And I'll try to get some culture under my belt to write about as well.
(Edited 20/9/2025: In the original version, I was too focussed on device loss, and underplayed the necessity of conventional backups. The two work complement each other.)
Think of a Cloud Drive as an external hard drive attached to your computer by wi-fi + internet rather than wire. That's all it is. It behaves exactly like an eternal drive. You can treat it like an external drive: copy files to it, delete files on it, create sub-directories, even back it up. It has one huge advantage over a conventional external drive: it is not on your premises or in your possession, so it can't get taken away by anyone with or without a warrant, or soaked if the house floods, or melts in a fire, or lost if someone's kid spills their orange juice on it, or (enter description of disaster here).
We need to protect against four things: confiscation of our devices; loss of one or more devices; loss of specific data on our devices; loss of access to our Cloud account, and other Cloud-based services. We also need to handle backup of data across multiple devices, without creating a complicated and time-consuming backup routine. For some people, especially recording artists, photographers and videographers, handling large-scale data backup is part of the job, and I’m addressing the needs of people who generate smaller amounts of data.
A Cloud drive protects against losing devices, or having devices confiscated. It allows sharing between multiple devices, and usually offer a browser-based interface, allowing access from any device, as long as you remember the password. Most provide a thirty-day undelete facility to deal with stumble-thumb deletes.
Conventional hard disk backups protect against losing access to your Cloud drive account, or losing internet access. Restores or data-reading can be done to any device with a suitable data port, though if you used special software (e.g. to encrypt and compress) you will need that on the device.
Online backup services protect against loss of external hard drives and the Cloud drive.
(Professionals will usually use a Cloud drive, keeping local copies as storage allows, and use an online backup service - since they aren’t going to walk around making backups of individual employee’s laptops.)
You're already on the Cloud in so many ways. All the e-mail services keep your archives on their servers - in the Cloud. Your password manager keeps your vault in the Cloud. Apple Notes / Evernote and the others all store in the Cloud. All your social media is in the Cloud. Any product that offers multi-device access and syncing is cloud-based.
If you use music streaming, you are accessing a cloud-based music library - far bigger than anything the most obsessed audiophile could make. If you stream video, same thing.
It's the final step to put the documents, photographs, graphics and other files you create onto a drive in the Cloud. The Cloud application will create a directory on your device for its use, and anything you put in that directory will get copied up to the Cloud drive. You can tell the Cloud application you want to keep local copies, or that you are happy downloading from the Cloud drive as needed.
What gets stored in that local directory? The data I need to carry on my life, in case I lose everything in the same day (lose phone on the train, laptop stolen in the pub, dog eats the iPad... you know the kind of thing). Contact lists, schedules, programming code, drafts of novels / poems / textbooks, DAW files, reference books, my favourite photos, music tracks, videos, diary / journal, Notes app, and so on.
E-mails, contacts, appointments. On Gmail. Since 1891.
Text documents / Notes-style apps. Pffft. Doesn't matter how much I have, it likely is no more than 1 GB. Nobody can write that much in one lifetime.
PDFs and similar: Not really an issue. 3-4 GB at most for even the most avid reader. Stored in Books.
Music. No more ripping CDs into Apple Music and synching playlists to the phone. CD-quality streaming services are now affordable and allow downloading for off-line access. If I am actually going to be off-line: 5G and wireless coverage has expanded beyond anyone's wildest dreams in 2015. I keep my CDs (unless I really regret buying it), while Amazon and other downloaders keep track of what I bought from them, so the files are always there. I only really need to keep music files I downloaded or ripped, which can't be found elsewhere. That is remarkably few. (**)
(Qobuz subscribers: downloaded files are added to your Library, with a tick next to them.)
Photo / Video backup. A glance at Reddit suggests this is deeply personal: some people are hoarders and remind you that storage is cheap (which at £150 for at 5TB external SSD it is); while others are minimalists and do not want to spend time managing backups. Then there's a whole bunch of people between these extremes. I tend to the minimalist side. My intention is that Favourites and recent haven't-made-my-mind-up-yet shots will be in iCloud Photos, and everything else I don't throw out will be in directory that gets an external backup from time to time. There's a lot of prep required for this, which I'll talk about this in another post.
With my minimalist approach, I don't have a lot of data, so I get by on iCloud's 50GB plan. FLAC-ripping, RAW-shooting, Lightroom-editing, keep-everything maximalists, will be looking at least at 2TB or more. After making use of the 1TB Adobe throw in with Lightroom subscriptions. That starts to cost.
Bonus Topic: sharing across devices. One benefit of Cloud drives is that all your Windows / iOS / OS X devices can access the drives, but sharing is not compulsory. Apple devices can be customised app by app. How much you do depends on how much you trust the other people who can use your devices, and I'll let you think through how much you trust the kids not to accidentally delete photos or mail stuff to their friends. I let Files access everything it can, and share my Photos on the phone, iPad and laptop. My music apps (Sonos, Qobuz, Amazon, Apple Music) are on all my iOS devices, and I can access those services through a browser on the laptop. I don't have Books on the phone, because I can't read on it. I can get Mail and Contacts via any browser, and share the Calendar.
Bonus bonus topic: internet privacy. I'm all for someone from Apple, Microsoft, the NSA, Five Eyes (or Five Guys, for that matter) reading my thoughts and looking at my snapshots. They might learn something. You're welcome.
(*) Having all your equipment and backup drives taken away because you made a mean tweet, or one of your darling children downloaded instructions to make an atomic bomb, or a dodgy mate sent you a dodgy image, or whatever happens to be illegal these days. They can take your devices, but they can't stop you looking at your data if you can get at it.
(**) A while ago there was a fad for ripping all one's CDs and then throwing them away. Because shelf space or something. I ripped everything to AAC / MP3 because it was the only way to download it to the music player / phone. Hence the need to backup music libraries. To become really useful, streaming services needed a) large libraries, b) CD-quality at £10 / month, c) reliable hi-speed internet and wireless, d) high-quality DAC chipsets at commodity prices. This only really came together in 2020.
I bought a paperback on Van Gogh's Sunflower paintings recently, thinking that it would be another easy art-market oriented read. I've been struggling, but maybe it's the change of the weather.
Van Gogh occupies a unique place in Art World mythology. Listen to this little snippet...
(The words are taken from a famous essay by Rene Ricard, an influential 1980's art writer, and the movie it was taken from was directed by Julian Schnabel, who is an actual bona fide painter himself.)
Van Gogh didn't sell in his lifetime, except once. And that was not a sunflower.
Writing about Van Gogh is difficult. He has to be portrayed as a great artist who happened to have some mental health issues that lead to him committing suicide. There cannot be a connection between his painting and his mental health, because that would cast him as an "Outsider Artist", which would reduce his auction prices considerably, if not change the way we see the paintings themselves.
The art-history / market problem is that "great artists" usually do very well in their lifetimes and have robust mental and physical health. They may get forgotten immediately after their death because fashions have moved on(this tends to happen to composers), but they get re-discovered. The greats of the Renaissance were never forgotten, partly because their work was all over the Vatican and other Catholic churches and monasteries, and because a cult grew up around them, helped by the descendants of their patrons.
The usual course is that an artist does well when alive, because they are of the times, and then falls into obscurity and the darker parts of the museum repositories. When someone does write a book on them, it is clear that, technically competent though they were, the images do not speak to us now, but inform us of what then was like. The exceptions tend to be on the museum walls already.
Van Gogh is an exception to all these rules. If he had died in a duel, he might have been the Galois of painting, but he didn't. He died after extended periods in an asylum, and nobody ever explains why (though there is a scene in Schnabel's movie about him that suggests he was mildly unhinged).
Ricard blames Van Gogh's life for perpetrating the undiscovered-artist-in-a-garret myth, and then asserts that, contrary to that myth, part of the artist's job is to get the work where I will see it. Charles Saatchi in his collecting heyday used to do a Saturday morning round of small galleries and artist's studios, which seems to make Ricard sound a bit lazy, but I'm assuming that Ricard did his rounds as well. He just didn't knock on every garret door. He listened to the gossip, and getting gossiped about is part of getting one's name out.
Van Gogh's life is also to blame for the myth that genius-is-madness. This is very popular with artistic hacks and ordinarily-competent problem-solvers everywhere, but the evidence is to the contrary. Tesla was eccentric, not actually bonkers. The great painters were mostly competent businessmen who ran studios the size of a small movie production house, and negotiated contracts with Popes and Dukes (or at least the secretaries of the Popes and Dukes).
Personally, I late paintings a little overbearing. All those neurotic lines and strong colours, especially the sunflowers. I'm not a big fan of impasto, and yellow is not a Top Five colour. The Starry Night painting has become a meme. I'm sure there are people who genuinely like his work, and wonder how I can admire Sargant, Leighton or Velasquez.
In the end, the auction prices make any criticism irrelevant. His buyers are well-funded museums and very wealthy private collectors. I don't have the cash to argue with anyone paying $62m in 2014 prices for a vase of poppies and daises. That's as much as a decent footballer. But then, nobody actually buys footballers for that money: it's a complicated funding scheme by rich clubs for small ones. Everyone has long suspected that high-value art transactions are also disguised business deals, and one or two are known to have been.
I'm hoping the book, The Sunflowers Are Mine by Martin Bailey, will explain these valuations and the buyers' motivations.
One day you will be standing in line for the Pearly Gates, and a junior angel will walk down the line, pick some random old guy from the line with a smile and say "my apologies, please follow me".
Huh? Wah? Who the old dude?
A man a little further ahead in the line turns and says: "that was Jeff Skunk Baxter". Like you should know who that is. When the man sees that you don't, he gives a what-do-they-teach-the-kids-in-school-these-days look, and says "he composed and played the solo on Rikki Don't Lose That Number".
Guitarists who play even one magic solo are special in the eyes of Heaven.
Classical instrumental players play other people's music. At sight. With interpretation the second time round. It's a scary skill when you consider it. The guys in Bach's Leipzig band had one run-through a Cantata (on a Thursday) and then played it straight through that Sunday morning.
Rock session musicians divide into "readers", who are hired to play what's put in front of them, and the rest, who are expected to learn the chords by ear, and compose, sometimes on the spot, their accompaniment, break or solo. Larry Carlton didn't get hired because he could read the charts, he got hired because he was a darn tootin' composer of guitar parts. That's why Steve Cropper is revered: he doesn't shred, but he composed / improvised the guitar parts on hundreds of soul and funk tracks. Including Dock of the Bay.
Think...
Tony Peluso - Goodbye To Love
Jeff "Skunk" Baxter - Rikki Don't Lose That Number
Denny Dias - Your Gold Teeth I and II, Bhodisatva, and others
Amos Garett - Midnight At The Oasis
Steve Cropper - Time Is Tight (and more)
Paul Kossoff - All Right Now
Dave Gilmour - Money (or choose your favourite)
Peter White - Year of the Cat
Steve Winwood - Medicated Goo, Dear Mr Fantasy
Peter Green - Green Manalishi
John McLaughlin - Right Off (on Miles's Jack Johnson
Eddie Van Halen - Thriller
Larry Carlton - The Royal Scam, Hill Street Blues
Jeff Beck - 'Cause We've Ended As Lovers
Joe Satriani - Always With Me, Always With You
and that guy, you know, played on While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Badge, Crossroads (on Wheels of Fire), Layla, Sunshine of Your Love. What's his name? He also played instrumentals - Steppin' Out, Hideaway - which were ground-breaking, though instrumentalists - from Hank B Marvin, to Carlos Santana, Joe Satriani, and Steve Vai - are different. It's a steadier, more consistent light, not a sudden flashing firework.
Oh, yes, and then there is the moment that the Devil took on the shape of Mike Bloomfield, at Newport in 1964, behind Bob Dylan
I said in another post that guitarists have the same fame as mathematicians: not for a lifetime's work, but (mathematician) for one crucial theorem that "everyone" uses, or (guitarist) for one solo that transforms a good song into a minor miracle. A song that everyone knew at the time, even if it didn't get to number one, that is still played now and catches the ear of everyone who never heard it before. And that, when you have heard it, seems impossible without the solo.
(Are you sitting comfortably? Because you will need to be...)
The Online Safety Act got me thinking about VPNs and other gadgets, that got me thinking about online security, which pointed me to the ideas of OPSEC, and that changed my thinking on some of these matters.
Online security is about reducing the chances of financial and reputational loss by identity theft, unauthorised third-party use of your accounts and other means, that is brought about by using the Internet. Privacy is a by-product of doing OPSEC well. This approach leads to some interesting conclusions, for instance...
Adult sites carry a reputational risk (with almost everyone in your domestic and professional life). It hits when people who want to pick a fight with you, find out you visit adult sites. They find out because they catch you in the act, or because you leave traces. Those risks will not be reduced one jot by using a 15-character randomly-generated password stored in an encrypted vault. That password protects literally nothing, since the site advertises its content. The reputational risk will be defrayed by you leaving no trace of visiting the site or being a member, which is a whole bunch of measures discussed later. The password is the least of your concerns.
Let's talk about passwords.
Device, e-mail and Cloud storage passwords must never be stored on-line. In your memory, or on paper hidden in (your choice of unlikely place here).
First, financial / identity risk. Official document numbers - National Insurance number, NHS number, passport number, driving license number - as well as bank account details, credit card numbers and the like, must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online. Where are you going to store them? Well, gee, how about on the document or card itself? Which you keep somewhere as safe as it needs to be (the room safe in a hotel, for instance). Only take such cards and documents as you really need when you leave the house / hotel room.
Passwords and challenge responses for banking sites, payment processors (e.g. PayPal), and retail sites where you store payment details (Amazon, for most of us), must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online.
Do not store your credit card or other payment details on any retail website. (Okay, maybe Amazon and PayPal.) A commercial / charity / academic site gets your name, address and e-mail, and maybe some relevant preferences. (When they send the first marketing e-mail, click the "unsubscribe" link to keep down the spam.)
If you have anything valuable - don't post a photograph of it, or post about it.
Second, reputational risk. If someone gets your social media password, they can post scurrilous content that will land you in jail (these days in the UK, that's a low bar). With that in mind, you may not want to put those passwords in a password manager or similar. This is the first of the convenience trade-offs, and it's your decision. The same applies to passwords for your favourite online forum.
While it's nice to flex about your fabulous life, every week there's a story about someone being caught out by Welfare or HR or divorce lawyers, because of a social media post. The more reputation-sensitive the industry you work in (financial services and the Arts especially) the more your social media content becomes a performative PR exercise. This is a whole other can of worms.
Third, work-in-progress. Documents, photos, files, projects, recordings and any other of your work-in-progress, finished product and records, should be in Cloud storage (Instagram and the like also counts) - that way, you can recover from the loss of your devices. By all means keep local drive copies and take external drive backups as well, if you like, but anyone who takes the computers will take the external drives as well. Choosing suitable Cloud storage is a separate subject.
Next some good news.
The hardware and software industry knows you are not going to use the Internet if you think everything you do can be seen by anyone who can download the right program. So they work hard at providing encryption and security. They are actually so good at it, Governments keep asking them to provide "back doors", which the industry actively resists.
Wi-fi these days comes with WPA2 encryption by default, but if you have older equipment, you should check.
Your computer and phone (these days) have built-in firewalls, virus-checkers, and other such. These are good enough that you never see security hype about having anti-virus programs anymore.
HTTPS is the dominant standard for Internet transmission. Your internet traffic is encrypted from your device to the final destination server, and cannot be snooped by anyone in the middle. Your ISP can see the main page address, but nothing more.
So let's get to the counter-measures. As far as possible, these are setup-and-forget. The best security measures are affordable, invisible, do not require constant maintenance, and discourage all but the best of the pros and the worst of the crazy amateurs. "Eternal vigilance" is not a technique. These counter-measures are for you - how much you trust your partner and children to be sensible and respect everyone's privacy and security is up to you.
Your devices must have a password and / or fingerprint or facial recognition. While it may be possible to do without a password on an account, the OS may prevent other security-dependent features from working with that account.
Your Web Browser should have something along the lines of "Block trackers and third-party cookies" in its Settings menu. For Safari, it's Preferences -> Privacy -> Prevent cross-site tracking. Turn that on if it isn't already. You may need to ask Google for help finding it. If you can't find such a setting, look for an Extension that does the same and install that. This will take care of a lot of the "they are selling your data" issues. (Warning, Google disable your ability to upload images into Blogger if you disable this. Tut tut guys.)
Only visit sites that are HTTPS (or "secure"). (This is almost all of them now.) Your browser should have a setting like "warn when visiting insecure sites" or "force HTTPS" or something similar. Use that.
Use your 5G service rather than coffee-shop / airport / wherever wi-fi's. 4G and earlier are less secure, but better than a spoof wi-fi provider.
Use phone apps in preference to websites wherever possible. Aside from anything else, the app is often easier to use than the website.
Taking your work computer or phone home is a convenience / risk trade-off. Let your employer decide. Anyone who takes your personal devices from home will take the work devices as well. If you must take work devices home, go straight home. Having your laptop stolen in the pub is not a good look.
Open Banking is a convenience vs risk decision. Once someone gets one account, they get as many as you have linked.
Password managers are not a security tool, but a convenient way to log on to low-risk sites that require passwords (typically anywhere that doesn't have payment or official document numbers stored, nor is reputation-threatening: retailers, charities, museums, music streamers, online newspapers, and the like). Especially if you are logging in and out of even a handful of sites every day. Choosing and managing one is a separate subject.
VPNs are a tool to bypass geo-restrictions rather than a security solution. Don't use free ones - since how else are they making money except by selling traffic data? VPNs hide the ultimate destination from your ISP, but the VPN still knows it. Who do you trust more? Choosing one is a separate subject.
Apple's OS X and iOS are terrific operating systems. NEVER use either to do anything remotely shady, because you will never be able to remove all the traces. OS X and iOS are not designed to allow that level of access.
Windows is designed to allow that level of access. Even if you are an Apple fanboy, use a cheap Windows machine for... errr... private purposes, get a decent File Shredder / Disk Wiper, set up a routine to cleanse all the temporary files that get generated by web browsing, and run it every time you finish a session. You may need help with that - this is where you find out who you trust.
What about the (digital) stash? (if you don't know, I'm not telling you) There are online storage services providing end-to-end encryption, a solution that fits well with the rest of the advice here.
If you want some security theatre over-kill, try this guy...
If you like some of his hacks - use 'em.
We end with the harsh truth. A father's biggest OPSEC problem is not that he isn't using a VPN. It's allowing his son access to money so that the boy can lose nearly $6,000 in an online game. A husband's biggest OPSEC problem is not the length of his logon password, but the deteriorating relationship with his wife that leads her to snoop on his computer and phone looking for divorce-fuel.
Most people wind up in trouble over something digital because someone snitches on them. Someone at work reports something to HR; one of your kids says something that a teacher over-hears and reports; a "good person" whose precious Liberal conscience won't let them not report it; management looking to stitch someone up. ISPs run scans on un-encrypted data to compare file signatures, and report matches. Teachers, therapists, social workers and other functionaries have been turned into informants. And never forget that un-answerable question "Darling, why do you use Private Browsing?" Wives and children are entitled to privacy from you - just ask them - but you are expected to let them see everything you do.
Hackers and "government surveillance" are "stranger danger". Hackers are after entire databases, crypto-currency, and corporates, not random individuals. The security services can barely keep track of the Bad Guys they know about, and don't need to add to the list with mass surveillance - and they have said so. The people who will spend time going after you are people who know you and want bad things to happen to you. We do not want to know that about the people we deal with every day, and so the industry pushes "stranger danger".
A few days after I finished and polished these thoughts, The Algorithm threw this up for me, and his views are very close to mine.
Oh the summer of 1973! I would be going to university that autumn. I had a summer job - ask your grandfather - and there was a crowd of us, made up mostly of boys from my old school and girls from my sister's school. We passed for legal drinking age, and met in one or other of handful of pubs in Twickenham and Richmond, usually on warm Friday evenings - and all the Friday evenings were warm then. We were all young and pretty and clever and south-west London middle-class, who lived with both parents in houses with gardens.
And we all knew the album and its hit single.
What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.
The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.
It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.
Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.
Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.
There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.
Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.
Watch or read anything about guitar amps and pedals, and you will come away with the impression that to get that juicy edge-of-breakup tone, the amp must be TURNED UP WAY TOO LOUD. No volume, no tone, as if it's some obscure kind of virtue.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
