It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
Guitar Bomb Giveaway – Win a FREE set of Oil City Pickups Deep Six humbuckers
I used to know someone who had the Acetone (I think that's right) which was the Shadows sound version. Which was pretty much what he used it for, lovely sparkly cleans with a strat.
Yes me... I designed all the Session amps. How can I help?
"Just because it's never been done before, is the very reason to make it happen" - Me!
Amps are like Marmite! Lol
The 1981 Sessionette was not ever designed to be a 'rock' amp... so, please don't beat it up too much if the distortion is not to your liking if you're a 'rock' player. There are other genres of music too, that most amp makers seem to ignore.
I designed the Sessionette during 1980... it was my first SS design! However, I know exactly what you mean about the tone. It can be a little dull and the distortion, although created exactly as many pedals do even today, is not great at high gain stuff. There is a simple explanation for this. Like the Hotrods and Blues Deluxes, the distortion circuitry is Post-EQ. Whereas, modern 'rock' amps have their distortion situated Pre-EQ. There is resultantly, a huge difference in how they perform.
Pre-distortion EQ: There are some advantages and disadvantages. Firstly, having the distortion Post-EQ enables the amp to work like an old school amp, where, say, a simple single channel overdrives the output stage to create the distortion in the power amp. Many players like that kind of tone and is, IMHO, far better at the "on-the-edge" kind of sound. e.g. Roy Buchanan.
Also, you can adjust the Treble control to make the high frequencies distort before the lower frequencies. Very useful for blues, country and other forms of music where reasonably low depths of distortion are required. So, no rock or metal tones here! The down side is that removing the mid tones from the signal before distortion is added leads to quite a 'confused' unsmooth kinda sound when used at very high gains. The Hotrod DLX suffers this, and is even worse with its 'More Drive' feature -IMO. The bass 'n' treble frequencies alone do not make for great 'saturated' distortion sounds! The mid frequencies are always best for great distortion sounds... which is why Les Paul & Gem guitars sound so good in distortion! They have fewer bass and treble harmonics in their basic clean sound. Modern Marshall amps work enhance this fact.
Post-Distortion EQ: Placing the EQ after the distortion is rather similar to plugging into a distortion pedal and adjusting your tone using the amp's EQ. In this situation, the already distorted guitar sound can be made to sound very aggressive, scooped, or whatever. But the guitar signal always carries through the distortion circuit ALL of its (mids rich) tone unaltered, which is best for deep creamier distortion. It also reasonably well for low levels of 'on-the-edge' distortion too, although without the ability to decide which frequencies distort first. However the EQ generally needs to be kept at fairly neutral settings for this to sound convincing.
So, to sum up, there's a clear trade off between them! And all this applies equally to valve and SS amps. Not all amplifiers are designed in the same way and for the same purpose, although most are now-a-days Post Distortion EQ types.
I can perfectly understand some of the comments in this thread. And they also apply to other makes of amplifier like the Fender Hotrod and Blues Deluxe/Deville, even the Mesa Nomad... but NOT the Blues Junior. The BJr has Post-Distortion EQ, so can sound more like a rock/metal amp, albeit without the deep distortion ability!
What always kills me are Fender's SS amps. They design a Heavy Rock sounding SS amp and stick it in a BlackFace style cab. This means that older or more traditional players are attracted by its looks and low prices, but are totally horrified when they plug into it. Not surprisingly, because the amp is SS, in their minds, that's the reason it sounds so obnoxious! Which of course it is not. SS amps can be made to sound classic too, which is what I now do exclusively... and the big producers don't!
One more thing. My old designs from the 1980s/90s, did not feature 'Constant Current' power amps. They do now and this makes a huge difference to their overall tone and vitality. Valve amps, via their output transformers, are also Constant Current' power amps. This is the major difference between valve amps and (old design) SS amps. The switch to Constant Current techniques in SS power amps has revolutionised their sonic abilities. So comparing a valve amp to the older SS amps is bound result in 'fail' opinions. This is not longer the case, thankfully.
I like SS... you can do more with it than valves. I certainly enjoy the flack I often get because "I don't talk the toooob talk". But you know what... it's water off a duck back. Here's me playing live through a 1986 MosFet Sessionette modified with 'Constant Current' drive in the power amp: http://www.award-session.com/audio/Live_RetroTone_Blues_Solo_1.mp3
Things have certainly moved on since those early 1980s! I rest my case.
"Just because it's never been done before, is the very reason to make it happen" - Me!
Whilst if you read above (you probably have) you'll find that I really don't like the sound of these amps, I'll give Stewart the credit for sticking to his guns on solid-state amps, and for standing behind his old products in the (pretty rare, I'm happy to agree) cases where they do need repairing.
It's not because they're solid-state that I don't like them - there are some valve amps I dislike as much, too... or maybe even more so!
@Sessionman - the point you make about the EQ is a very good one, although I'm probably a bit odd because I like post-distortion EQ for lower-gain sounds too! I even like old-school Marshalls for clean sounds, possibly in preference to the 'classic' Fender cleans. Although strangely, I dislike the Blues Junior too - nothing to do with the distortion though, I just find it a boxy, muddy-sounding amp. (Some of that is the speaker, I know.)
I always found it bizarre that so much of what you say, both now and in the past, makes perfect sense from the fairly little I know about amp design (I only fix them, not build them!), and yet you made one of my least favourite sounding amps... no accounting for taste, of course. Though the fact that you might have been aiming for a Roy Buchanan-type sound perhaps explains a lot .
Good to have you here, anyway.
"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
Given all the time, I could probably design amps to do anything you want. But having such a wide range of amps would only confuse players! You have to stay within a niche and make it clear why you're there.
Frankly, I don't take it personally if anyone dislikes my amps... there are more than enough that do and that's all that counts at the end of the day! You know, the one thing I've learned over the years in this crazy biz is... you can't please all of the people all of the time. Jim Marshall could never accept that.
@ICBM - If you can't like the clip I posted, made on an upgraded Sessionette with a Tele, then I don't know where we go from here on! It's a routes guitar sound in my books and one that many modern amps struggle to produce. That sound is the result of adding the circuitry I didn't know about back then.
Further, I think you must admit that such a high power SS amp lobbed into a small cab containing a high powered mids orientated (as high powered speakers tended to be in that era) was quite a task for the time. It was the beginnings of channel switching and 'convenience' amps! Within two years, I was receiving letters from Japan offering me distribution of exact copies. So something was right... probably the Fender like clean sounds and the small package. Armed with the right pedals, anything was possible. Not so different from today really!
Thank you all for your kind words of welcome... I'll try not to be too outspoken, but it'll be hard - I'm an Aquarian! Blame Ttony for me being here... I was recruited at the Great British Guitar Show a few weeks ago. So I had no choice, but to sign up!
"Just because it's never been done before, is the very reason to make it happen" - Me!
Oddly enough I also like a lot of old-school solid-state amps which don't sound anything like valve amps, but do have that 'big' tone.
Certainly - although I wonder if that's part of the problem... by packing it all into such a small box, there perhaps wasn't enough room for the speaker to work well.
Anyhow, I should really get around to trying one of your newer amps with the constant-current output section just in case . It's nice to find someone who still wants to make solid-state *analogue* amps sound good, rather than go down the route everyone else seems to be doing, with digital.
"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 have recently had the opportunity to a/b two of my favourite budget amps - my own silver stripe bandit, and the hot rod deluxe v3. Clean, I preferred the hot rod deluxe... Just. Actually, it was so close, I was going to say the other way around until I dialed in the hrdx just right.
Drive channel was unfair, like apples and oranges, but for general overdrive the hrdx was nicer. The bandit had a better 'clean drive' sound, with low output pickups (the exact opposite - you'd expect the valve amp to win) and it had much better tight, high gain stuff but for everything in the middle the hrdx sounded better.
But overall, it really amazed me that a solid state amp could, in my opinion, be compared to what is surely one of the best budget valve amps on the market! It's not even 'budget', just reasonably priced. I'd take it over the bandit, but it was a much closer competition than you'd think.
Oh, the bandit had a nicer sounding reverb.
Solid state can be good!
It's good to have a plurality of technologies available to the modern guitarist.
"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