Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Tone, Glorious Tone
After I got the TonePort, I decided that my guitar amp (a Fender Blues Jr.) could be put into storage, since the TonePort was far more flexible and could be played in near-silence, since it would work with headphones. But then when I started thinking about how to get myself set up for the Big Show, I figured it would be to my benefit to free up the laptop and TonePort for a recording interface instead. Plus, I might find that the Blues Jr. could really give me some good tone if I tweaked it right. So I talked to one of the guitarists in the praise team at church to whom I had lent the amp (he’s still pretty new to guitar, and actually only started playing electric through his efforts in the praise team) and had him bring it to the church. I then got up while the day was still very new on Saturday, packed up my stuff, and headed to the church to see what kind of sounds I could get out of the amp.
Early on Saturdays, there is no one at the church, which allowed me a good hour or so of jamming out with the volume cranked (to a degree). I found out a few things: first, the amp has a wonderful, natural overdrive when you kick the “Volume” knob up; in my mind, this knob is the “Gain” control. Secondly, the amp sounds wonderful when you play it clean. This I already knew, because that’s what Fender amps do, but nonetheless, this was confirmed on Saturday. Finally, the real benefit of using the amp is that when you have it cranked pretty decently, you can use the volume pot on your guitar to go from clean to overdriven in a way that modeling amps can’t really match.
Still, I didn’t quite get the sound I was looking for going directly to the amp, so I went to Musician’s Friend this weekend and put in an order for a Danelectro FAB D-1 Distortion pedal to give the amp a little more bite. I think that with the FAB and my Route 66 Overdrive/Compressor, I should be able to have a pretty nice and flexible setup to work with as I pursue excellent tone. Now I’ll have to get over to the church early in the morning again to play with the pedal setups and see if I can get what I’m looking for. I suppose that means I’ll be reporting again, doesn’t it?
