which tube to change in cascading gain amp?

notonlybutalso

i recently bought a PRS MT15 head and the gain channel is just a little too wild. I have some lower gain tubes coming tomorrow but i don't know which stage to change out. I don't really want to change v1 out as that covers both the clean and lead channels and the clean channel is already glassy enough. there are currently two ECC83 preamps covering gain stage 2-5 in the lead channel but which one should i swap out do you think?

tekbow

I think you should turn your gain knob down?

tekbow

Double Post..

De_Batz

Doesn't quite work like that...

You can reduce the gain at different points to get more useable range on the knob and different drive characteristics; think about what the gain knob does...

Generally it's a volume control near the start of a cascading series of gain stages. Reducing the gain at each stage gives a different result to reducing the signal at the beginning of the chain.

Don't know the MT15 circuit, but a bit of knowledge is your friend here. Find out which stages do what, and which ones are adding the considerable gain the MT15 supposedly has... One might drive the eq or the loop, and that'll make less difference to the distortion. 

De_Batz

Also, if V1 is half a stage in the gain channel, it's likely that V2 is doing the leg work as stages 2 and 3, with V3 being related to the EQ. You might find some eq fiddling helps, too. Generally really high gain amps cut bass early pn, so you might find that adding a bit from a pedal (and cutting more at the eq) fills out the sound a bit.