Up Close and Personal With Valve Amps

Recently I visited a friend from back in working days. He has a number of Real Guitars and three Real Amps: a Fender Deluxe Reverb, a Fender Vibro-King, and an Orange Rockerverb. We had a good time trying each one and I did a lot of hard listening. (Because mostly when we hear amps, it’s at 85+ dB and with a lot of distortion, and to repeat, six rubber bands across a dustbin would sound good at 90dB with distortion.)

I learned a number of lessons:

If you’ve never heard a valve amp up close and personal, you’re going to get a shock. Even at low settings, it has a clarity and punch that makes it sound much louder than the dB meter would say it was.

An electric guitar played through a decent valve amp has a heft of sound that is lost in the recording-mixing-mastering process, and it’s pretty much smoothed out by the live mixing desk as well. Raw electric guitars do not sound like processed ones. (As I’ve said before, a lot of what a contemporary guitarist does is produce electronic sounds to enhance the song soundscape.)

There’s a Rock Music Zone of guitar and amp dial settings and volumes at which Rock / Metal tones exist. Below that, the magic vanishes.

Especially a Les Paul (or any double-humbucker) can sound fierce if wound up to 9 or 10, but below that it cleans up to a “jazz sound”, no matter what you actually play and which pickup you’re using.

Strats sound like quieter versions of themselves.

Dedicated pedals sound way richer than the on-board effects in the Katana.

Of course I spent the next couple of days trying to reproduce, however approximately, the clean tones of the Fenders on the Katana.

Eventually I found that the trick is to use the Crunch channel and to keep the volume down, set power selector to 0.5W, with the Pre-Amp and Master volumes set to 100. Add Spring Reverb to taste. I’ve set the Booster Effect Level so that bringing it in or out doesn’t change the volume, and use the Blues Drive and Centa OD to provide a bit of flavour, and the Clean Boost to leave the tone unchanged. I’ve also set the EQ to dampen the 4kHz, 8kHz and 12kHz bands, which can create a shrill tone, especially on the bridge pickup.

Flip the channel from Crunch to Clean and put the power selector at 25W. The result is just as loud, but not as vivid, as the Crunch channel.   

The result has a similar sound, but not the physicality, of the valve amps. The result is far more in-your-face than I would have ever devised if I had never heard the originals.

Am I sold on “upgrading” to a valve amp? Not quite. But that’s another discussion.