Was given Dave Hunter's "The Guitar Amp Handbook" for christmas. One of the things he goes on about is how the usual tone controls are "interactive". I realised I'd never thought about it much, and lets face it if you want less bass you turn the bass down or if you want more treble you turn the treble up ... so what's with this "interactive"? I suppose it means that the behaviour of the two other controls depends on how you set the third one - eg how the middle & treble behave depends on how you set the bass?
Thing is he doesn't explain HOW they are interactive, and I'm not smart enough to read a circuit schematic and tell you what the behaviour is going to be. So what should you expect from the bass middle & treble controls on say, a Plexi?
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But you can 'boost' the bass by turning the treble down. Not sure if that's what he means. Or boost mids by turning the bass and treble down?
Interesting question.
The treble control basically voices the whole EQ. The higher you run the treble control the less signal gets passed on to the mid and bass, meaning that high treble values mean a less thick and less bassy tone. If you run the treble control very low the amp will get thicker, bassier, and if you turn the treble off the amp actually gets a bit louder too. You have to balance the brightness/darkness of the tone with the presence pot.
This makes it very versatile but also throws anyone unaware of how the interactive EQ works - hence (IMO) the reputation of being hard to EQ.
The Mesa Roadster manual has explanations of the interactive EQ in it across the different preamp modes. I can't figure how to link you to it from my phone, I keep accidentally starting a Pdf download. But if you google it you should find it easily.
In some cases changing the value of one pot has more than expected impact on other parts of the tone stack in other cases its the opposite . The pots are just variable resistors and the signal chooses the path of least resistance so opening or closing one filter shunts or reduces signal to the other parts of the tone stack . I didnt fully understand this impact (and still dont) until I bread boarded a dumble preamp clone with tone stack . Even the gain control had some impact as it shared a filter path with the treble control , basically cranking it up boosted low end but over all those individual controls dont seem to do much when you turn them one at a time they only really work when you balance them against each other and then the changes leap out , im not really a fan of that as it forces you to twiddle everything even for small tweeks . I dont really see an advantage to it at the moment , possibly could give you more head room where you might normally max out one of your tone controls ?!....
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I was wondering about that ..Ive often used a graphic on the input and they sound great there but easy to get lost with your gain settings when you tweek them like you would a tone stack . Then you start changing the gain and the tone changes so you start messing with the tone stack on the amp and so on and so forth .
Caps definitely cause phase shift. The 'problem' (from a hi-fi point of view) with the standard passive tone stack is that it's not consistent across the frequency range - I think it may make a genuinely audible difference too, since I pretty much always prefer amps with that sort of stack over ones without.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I like amps with a single tone control.
Funnily enough though, when I had my first boogie, I struggled like hell with settings at gigs as they did so much more than fender. It was only after setting the treble and bass the way I wanted and learning the mid control did I get the hang of it. The Mid control on a boogie is a helluva tool.
If you like the bass on zero, and it sounds flat, treat it as such. The eq is a small component in what makes the sound.
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Dirty - gain 6 and a bit, bass 7 ish, mid 5, treble between 2 and 4 (newer strings are at 4, older ones get nasty overtones so I take the mids down a bit and the treble down to 2).
My mate came over and complained I had no treble, till he plugged in. It's just about finding what sounds good at the volume you're at, and if that happens to be bass 0, mids 0, treble 10, so be it.
A guitar amp is a tone producer, not a sound reproducer. The *only* thing that matters about its frequency response is whether it sounds *good* to you.
Presence is usually a negative feedback control affecting the amount of high frequency damping in the power amp, not a 'tone' control as such.
There are no 'rules' - experiment with them all, over their full ranges and in all combinations, and don't think that full or zero settings are wrong. For what it's worth I almost always set the bass full up in a passive tone stack - not just because I like "bassy" sounds but because it seems to loosen and soften the sound of the amp.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein