I just can't get why nobody(bar a few) like solid-state amps. I mean, to a member of an audience who sometimes struggles to get a VCR working, what difference does it make for them? Also, Everyone loves P.A's, but nobody moans that THEY are solid-state. Just spend a few minutes with a solidstate amp, setting it right and adjusting everything. Yes it might be a slightly harsher sound but isnt that was a lot of us want? A big harsh sound to be heard over a loud band?I know my 10 watt amp can drown out a drummer :)
Honesty, nowadays they got the solid state stuff dialed in so well there is little difference.
Shoot me if you want but i think the tube is surviving by a wise tale that amps need to be valved/tube.
iv been using roland cube amps and im gonna buy another larger one for both blues guitar and harp. the fender twin model is so freaking spot on its awesome
Generally speaking (and it is very general - as Josh says the technology has improved hugely over the last decade or so) it is to do with how the amps sound when they are overdriven (i.e. when they colour the sound as opposed to just making it louder).
Solid state amps distort differently. In simplistic terms they just chop the tops and bottoms of the peaks and troughs of the sound wave. This produces a harsher metallic, sounding distortion.
Valves act more like a compressor when they are overloaded. Rather than chopping off the peaks, they squash them down. They also produce different kinds of harmonics that sound more musical. It's a 'creamier' distortion.
The "sound" or "tone" is what the musician is looking for. And like so many things in life, newer isn't always better. Cd's do not have the quality of sound that Lp's do. I have a friend that uses old tube amps and old speakers for his stereo and he proved this to me.
For what it's worth, I picked up a GORILLA brand amp (yes, Gorilla), at a yard sale for $3, not knowing if it worked or not. Got it home, plugged in, and- whoa! It has a "master volume", which I guess is like a pre-amp control, that you can turn way up, then just a "volume" knob to adjust the actual loudness you want. I can really dial in the amount of distortion with out going to full volume. I'm not sure it sounds as good as my old Kay tube amp, but then I have to turn the Kay up pretty loud to get the distortion I want, and this one you don't have to.
If you find an old solid state cheap enough, might be worth giving it a try.
As MrUsernametoolongtotype said - solid state amps distort differently. Most are very harsh because transistors go "square wave" when they "clip" - that is - the portion of the sine wave too loud for them to reproduce gets shaped with very sharp edges and the result is a harsh sound.
Also, when tubes distort they tend to produce "even order harmonics" which are much more pleasing to the ear than odd ones.
If you spend thousands for a digital amp, it will have a) enough headroom to avoid clipping and b) a bunch of simulation software to reproduce second order harmonics, all so that it will (get this...) sound like a tube amp. Or, you could save your money and buy a tube amp in the first place.
All bets are off if you intend to play cleanly for country, jazz, bluegrass. But if you want a big fat sound with bass overtones, that only comes from driving a good tube amp to distortion by using a tight cup on your mic and driving the amp hard. ---------- /Greg
http://www.BlowsMeAway.com http://www.BlueStateBand.net
Last Edited by on Jul 21, 2009 8:08 AM
I have found a good compromise is the modern modelling amps which use a valve pre-amp. I have a Vox 212 50 amp valvetronix and I think it sounds great. It models about 11 different amps including a fender Bassman and a Vox AC 15 and 30 and with the same amount of effect the sounds you can dail in are infinite. However I find myself always drifting back to my valve amps (Fender 600 and hacker) as I sometimes just want a single predictable sound. The Vox is fun to play around with but I always jam when the valve amps mic'd up to the PA. Talking about the pa...the one at our local jam sounds terrible for harp if I just use the vocal mic. I'm assuming its a solid state and it's only really good for micking up a valve amp.
I like solid state amps. You can get very good tones out of some of them. Unfortunately, there are just a ton of very crappy very cheaply made solid state amps that sound like crap because they use the worst components and the cheapest manufacturing. I build my own solid state amps, and I can tell you that you can get a solid state amp to distort very musically and in more different flavors than most tube amp designs will allow you to do. The key part to understanding how to design a solid state amp is that it is NOT a tube amp. In tube amps you want power amp distortion, rectifier sag, and very little preamp distortion. In solid state designs, you want NO power amp distortion, NO rectifier sag, and you want ALL the distortion to come from the preamp stage. There are literally hundreds of "stomp box" distortion designs out there that are really preamps designed to distort in musically pleasing ways. Some of these designs are meant to emulate the sounds of favorite tube amps, while others are just meant to sound like themselves.
Additionally, I've found it relatively easy, and much much less expensive to experiment with building my own solid state amps than I would have with tube amps (much less dangerous too!). Check out my YouTube channel for clips of some of the amps and preamps that I've built. I'm about 3-4 days away from completing my next solid state amp, and I'll be making a youtube vid on that as soon as it's done.
By the way, there are several "production" solid state amps that people regularly use with harp. One of these is the "legendary" pignose 7-100 (i have one). Another is the danelectro "honeytone". All the Holmes harpcommanders are 100% solid state too. There are plenty of other high quality solid state amps that sound great out there too... You just gotta go for quality!
Check out www.ssguitar.com for a great blog on DIY and production solid state amps. I'm pretty active in that blog (look for username darwindeathcat),a nd have found it to be a great wealth of info for my amp-building hobby!
my valve jr is the first tube amp i ever owned. i have plenty of solid state amps. but now i love the sound i get from the tube amp that ill NEVER buy a solid state ever again. unless its a portable amp. whether its for harp or guitar tube amps sound so much better in my opinion.
I am very interested in this topic for a couple of reasons. I am poised to purchase a Vox DA-5 solid state amp for home use and for busking (eventually) because it will run on batteries. I've read here and elsewhere that many harp players like this amp and its cousins the Roland Cube and Pignose.
Besides the portability, I like that these solid state amps not dependent on being overdriven to produce the "effects". This is very important to me with my hearing issues and aversion to loudness.
Isaac's comments are particularly interesting to me. These solid state amps really are different beasts than the tube amps they emulate, and there is no technical reason that I can think of why they could not sound as good. They certainly should be more robust and maintainable too. I'm concerned by comments about the finickiness of tube amps, and potential danger of old amps, although new ones or professionally reconditioned vintage tube amps should minimize those concerns.
Last Edited by on Jul 22, 2009 10:54 AM
It's nice that this is actually a subject people are willing to debate. I agree with mr so&so, Tube and Solid State amps produce different sounds and when they're dialed in right Solid State amps do sound good. I'm using a Solid State amp partly because it delivers MY sound but mainly because it can stand being knocked around and kicked, a big BIG plus in a gigging amp.
I'm happy to be told I'm talkin out of my ass, but my guesswork goes something like this (I drafted it at work yesterday, and I don't think it deserves to be neatened):
It's interesting. I wish I had more knowledge.
My guess is you could easily compress rather than clip in a solid state amp. The gain of a transistor circuit is determined by the transistor's maximum possible gain and the components governing the potentials and current flows of the base and the collector relative to the emitter. As the magnitude of the input voltage increases, you can reduce the gain of the transistor circuit so that it stops amplifying just at the point where clipping would occur. But the cost would be you'd have to limit the power output: e.g. an amp that could deliver 100W would have to be capped at perhaps 50. I'm guessing no-one has had the guts to do this, as it seems a waste of resources.
I don't think the issue of sillily "mimicking" tubes arises - it's perfectly natural to want to compress rather than clip.
I've only played amplified harp for something like 6months or so, but still I have already many experiences of different kinds of amps.
First I used my old guitar amp 80W Marshall Valvestate, which didn't impress me much. (Later I found out that I should have used impedance matching device for the vocal mic, so it wasn't very reliable test after all.)
Second experiment was with my brother-in-law's Vox DA-5, which allowed to get some ok sounds. Would've been better with impedance converter, I'm sure.
Third experiment was PA with vocal mic, which was ok I think with some settings. Here again didn't understand to use impedance converter which would have improved the tone very much.
Fourth one was when I used Line6 TonePort with my computer, which allowed to try different simulations. With this I was able to have many excellent sounds with different amp simulations and effects. Here even the impedance didn't matter since TonePort accepted low impedance XLR. Basically the computer processed the tone. Highly recommended setup for home studio.
Fifth experiment was with my old Behringer V-AMP2 straight to PA. Sound was ok with some settings, but here again didn't understand to use the impedance converter. I'll try that again some day since I think it will be pretty usable setup with correct impedance - very portable and many sounds to select from and can be switched by pedal. (And can be used with headphones also.)
Sixth one was with home made 15W tube amp. The sound was ok, but when I bought impedance converter it turned out to be very good sound. (And with bullet mic also.) This was a setup that I would have settled with if that amp wasn't just for loan.
(After this I tried out some small amps in our rehearsal place like 30W Fender etc. Ok amps, nothing special.)
Seventh experiment one was when I bought amp made for Harp - Marble Max. The tone and quality of playing changed a lot. It is easier to learn to play when the amp really responds in a way where you actually hear clearly how you are playing.
Summary and conclusions:
Clearly the Max is the best one of these experiences. The sound is _always_ good and you can just adjust the tone towards what you like with volume+tone buttons. And the best thing is that the tone is very fat and pleasant in low volume settings too when you practise at home (or with acoustic guitar player).
The TonePort with some amp simulations produces almost as good sounds, but it's different to play with your headphones on and not hear the sound "live" echoing from the walls etc. Also there's some work to do to find the good settings - but when you do you can just save those on the computer and use exactly the same sounds in recordings when you want.
Vox DA-5 is also something I would imagine to be good choice to use in some situations like playing on the streets. Also V-AMP2 might be good choice to setup with PA to get many different kinds of tones in more "modern" styles of music - and it's certainly the easiest one to carry with you.
So to my ear the all tube Max is clearly the best one, but digitally produced sound can also be very good - the advantage in it is the versatileness. I think I'm set up pretty well now with Max, TonePort and V-AMP. If something I'd add the Vox DA-5 to my gear to be able to play amplified where there's no electricity available.
I love my little Pignose 7-100 but a valve amp it ain't ever gonna be!
The overdive produced by saturated power valves (tubes) is a completely different sound to a Solid State amps overdrive.
It's all to do with the harmonic tones (odd, ordered and uneven) which I don't purport to even begin to understand.
In general for harp players valve amps give a much nicer warmer creamier sound than Solid State which has a tendency to react in a brittle manner.
Having said that not all Solid State amps are bad. The Mouse, Pignose 7-100 (at less than half volume) have a nice, reasonably warm sound that whilst not a "valve' sound is still pleasant. The Danelectro Nifty Fifty is another Solid State amp that sounds ok.
Then of course there are things like the Holmes Harp Commander, and the upcoming Lone Wolf Harp Break, which are more like preamps, but of course are all Solid State.
I think that the "modeling" amps are good for guitar but I haven't yet heard one that sound great for harp. Some sound passable.
The fact is that the frequencies generated by the harmonica sound and react much more nicely through valves than Solid State.
This video below demonstrates it very well I think.
Brandon is playing through what looks like a Roland Cube, whilst adam is using a valve amp. The overdrive from Adams amp is far more rounded and smoother than the overdrive from Brandons amp which has a nastier waspy edge to it.
The only thing I need to add to your interesting post is that some of the distortion--for the best overdriven amp sound, I mean--needs to come from the speaker cone. It's generally easier to get this from smaller speakers (6", 8", 10") rather than larger speakers (12", 15"), but the key thing is that the magnets need to be relatively small. A Hartke 4 x 10" bass speaker cabinet will sound like crap for harp because the speakers have huge magnets, precisely so that they WON'T distort when you're running loud low frequencies through them.
Amplified harp sounds best when the various sorts of overdrive--preamp, power amp, speaker--accentuate a certain high-mid frequency range. One reason old tube amps sound great, I suspect, is because they (ideally) have original speakers, with old paper cones. I remember playing through a tweed Champ, mid 50s, with the original speaker. Incredible sound.
I have two Mouses. They're identical, except that one has a plain capped speaker and the other has a speaker with a projecting lip of some sort--about 1" high. A mini-loudspeaker coming off the cone. Much, much better sound.
I didn't know that the ideal in a solid state amp, for harp, is to overdrive the preamp but not the power amp. That's interesting.
Gray, I meant the (commercial) guts to build a 100W amp and then make half of its power unavailable to the user. But I suppose the user need never know.
It would be like getting a Lamborghini and then limiting its top speed to 60MPH for the American roads. It would have the same acceleration and control and braking power, but what a waste!
I haven't got a clue what I'm talking about.
Last Edited by on Jul 23, 2009 6:21 AM
This is the sound i use: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnfizkRIiAg
Yes, i know it sounds kinda harsh but i like that sound( I was cupping really hard for that sound clip so it can get a lot cleaner). The volume is on 6/7, the gain on 3/4 the treble on 6, the mids and bass on ten. I just want to be different and this sound goes with anything i want to play, such as blues and rock
" I'm using a Solid State amp partly because it delivers MY sound but mainly because it can stand being knocked around and kicked,"
The implication is that solid state is more rugged? I beg to differ. Circuit boards crack when your amp gets dropped. IN fact the input jacks on most solid state amps are soldered, not wired to the circuit board - if the amp even gets knocked over while something is plugged in, bye bye circuit board. I've seen amps this has happened to.
By contrast, NOTHING will survive as much abuse as a POINT-TO-POINT wired tube amp. All connections are by wires, which can flex and bend under shock. I've heard stories of p2p amps getting dropped off stage and rolled down stairs and still working.
Not all tube amps are P2P wired, of course - but older ones are and good new ones are.
Greg's comment is well taken, regarding ruggedness. But I suppose it is simple enough to "ruggedize" solid-state amps too, by shock-mounting the circuit board and wiring the input jacks to the board. While I'm pretty sure this is indeed not the standard procedure for inexpensive solid-state amps, can anyone confirm this about the popular solid-state amps?
My initial comments about ruggedness of solid-state equipment comes from my experience with computing equipment. The computer industry knows how to do it. I don't know how tubes in amps are secured and how long they last, but when I was a kid, I recall our tube TV being fixed fairly often, and it was pretty stationary.
Has Isaac considered this issue for his home-builds?
Last Edited by on Jul 24, 2009 10:03 AM
I use a Carvin dynamic mic through an Epiphone Valve Jr. and a mid-'70s solid-state Roland Cube 40. I do like the sound of both of those amps, but most often I find myself playing through the Roland. Even though it's a solid-state, it has a really nice midrangy overdrive that is not nearly as harsh sounding as many more modern solid-state modelling amps or even most of the tube amps in my price range. I can dial in the EQ just the way I want it and for OD, I just plug into the OD input on the amp. Overall though, I prefer the sound of a clean vocal mic straight into the PA.
Opinions, everyone has one. I would like to pose a question. How many people that "love" the sound of the amp they are using have ever turned it over to another player and sat in the audience to hear it? That Solid state crunch may sound ok standing next to it but it may sound much much harsher at 30' out. You cannot judge sound while standing on top of it and I would even question sitting out with a wireless because you have the acoustic sound right there on your mouth. Remember you are developing YOUR sound, however the audience is who you are playing for. Think about how many times you have heard the complaint that a Harp player can't hear himself on stage. How then can the sound be judged?
Last Edited by on Nov 30, 2009 7:43 AM
Bluzdude46, your right! You have a point here! One needs to play it from where the audience sits. When i'm performing with the bands i mainly play through my wireless rig and walk out for our sound check and dial my amp in as well as the rest of the band. Also, each venue we play at gives my rig a different sound! and must be redialed for each one, not to mention also how many bodies are in the room! I have many amps, solid-state and tube. I Love them Both! They each give the player a different nuance for sound shaping!
