13 Jan
2013
13 Jan
'13
9:46 p.m.
[Tim E. Real]
Applied patch. The model seems to still make very
little difference.
Hard to tell, but it seems like only model 7 sounds different than the rest.
Also hard to tell but the brightness seems to make no difference.
Should there be so little difference in these settings?
Situated rather early in the signal path, the tonestack's influence on
the sound will lessen as more gain is applied. (The model switches
found on commercial amp emulators will very likely also change a host
of other circuit characteristics in addition to the tonestack, so the
sound change will be much more pronounced. I prefer to expose those
characteristics with fully independent controls.)
The current tonestack model 7 is from a very small amp and it comes
with an unusually great amount of treble cut and bass boost designed
into it, probably intended to compensate for the poor bass response of
the small loudspeaker and casing.
The 'bright' filter is located between the two saturating stages so,
like the tonestack's, its effects are less pronounced when high gain
drives the poweramp stage into heavy saturation. Also, when you turn
up 'gain' and/or 'power', the range of the 'bright' control is
reduced
in order to unmap unusable regions of the parameter space. Anyway,
you may still notice that lower 'bright' settings can help to clean up
hi-gain noise, especially in notes higher up the neck.
You could replace the 'bright' filter with a more intricate
arrangement (I've been thinking about an experiment with a 4-way eq)
to get further sound shaping options, but I think that more meaningful
control over the hi-gain tone can be had by routing the amp's output
through an additional equaliser. Given the abundance of good eq
plugins, there seemed to be no good reason to put one into the amp
itself (though that may change too).
Anyway, so far it sounds really good.
It seems a /lot/ more beefier than the old amp VTS.
I recall having to run a separate distortion plugin into the old VTS. No more.
Very glad to hear you like it. I mostly play a cleanish sound
(everything at default settings) but at some point it became apparent
that even the clean tone will only work well if the amp can produce a
great hi-gain sound.
Thanks,
Tim