[Music] all right well good day chairman uh we we are a chairman down today with Grant on holiday but luckily to fill the shoes the great Grant class and we have the incomparable Lyall Caldwell as well as Brian omillian and if you’re not familiar with Lyle’s work he goes by psionic audio on YouTube and I would say without a doubt is my favorite amplifier technician to watch on YouTube and and you know sometimes my wife will come by when I’m watching you know some of these things on on our television and you know I think that that it’s it’s watching those like slow trains from you know in in Norway going to different cities I think that she thinks it’s about the same equivalency of just watching you know trains go through multiple stations on an 8 hour trip as as I’m watching Lyall you know desolder uh capacitors and replace uh you know components on a PC board but man such a treat to have you Lyle and and you’re just so knowledgeable about not only the inner workings of the amplifiers that we know and love but also have a tremendous amount of experience in understanding what a customer should be be looking for in a potential amplifier choice and I really want to spend the lon share of our time today going through your recommendations at different price points for amplifiers because this is always a question that people ask is what is the best bang for my buck if I’m going to spend 500 1,000 2,000 or more on an amplifier what’s actually great because sometimes we’re thrown off by name brands and sort of the legacy of certain brands and then believing that that means that the amp equals quality that’s compounded even further by things that we’ve talked about on the show where we’ll see major magazine Publications talk about their recommendations and some of them are just bolstered by advertising dollars and they’re not actually rooted in anything that has to do with the quality of the amp and and a lot of those editors don’t know anything about servicing amplifier so they can’t speak to the qualities of that so long- winded intro thank you a for being here thanks for having me very nice to be here yeah so I I think maybe where we’ll start is is uh you and I were were texting offline earlier this week and and we were looking through some of the Publications from like music radar and uh Guitar Player magazine and they would put these lists of like top 10 amplifiers and you know there were some there were some picks in there that you know I think were okay but for the most part these are things like the boss Katana the positive grid um uh the the orange kind of Tiny Terror uh The Hot Rod Deluxe and you know then they’d kind of have some higher end stuff like the tone king imperial or a Freedman um but for the most part the the majority of their recommendations are sort of a mix of solid state some tube um but suo amps which uh which I know you love joking there um and and so if we were to let’s say create ly’s list of let’s say you know top five or top 10 amplifiers in let’s say a low price point like 500 where would you start and maybe what are some of the problems with these lists and some of these products that we see you know typically recommended by the you know the big magazine and online Publications well the the number one problem that I see is that the people doing their reviews uh aren’t qualified to review an amplifier as far as all the things you need to consider with an amplifier they never open it up and see how it’s built and say hey they did this that’s good or they did this that may be problematic later it’s never gut shots or any explanation of the circuit it’s a guy playing it getting some good sounds maybe noting that hey okay it’s a little bit bit of a noise but most people were used to that and then a whole bunch of paraphrased copy from the manufacturer and that’s what it is and with great big pictures um and it’s being presented as a full review it’ be like if I reviewed a Fender Strat without plugging it in uh it looks cool it’s got three of these things and a thing that goes um but okay it won’t hold its tune uh you know uh the body was made with wet wood all your strings your screws are going to rust out things that a guitar tech would say hey that’s not a good one um uh the other thing is there is bias towards certain companies and bias against certain mindsets so there are companies box vender Marshall uh that can rightfully be accused at times of trading off the heritage of their logo and there are people who are anti- modeling or anti- solid state because tubes rule man and there are the guys are like okay Boomer whatever I’m just going to go get a blind six and any of these categories can have a great result or bad result um for I did an enter $500 video without recapping the entire thing it came down to three recommendations really um if you are playing a gig and you need a lot of flexibility and you don’t want to spend a lot the Marshall dsl40c and CR are pretty good choices you can get made 900 $100 used 11100 new they got a good clean they got really good overdrive they have a a a useful effect Loop they have a passible digital Reverb they’re not fantastic but they cover a lot of bases if you want to if you want to have the same flexibility without spending as much the katana and the Catalyst from line six do a pretty good job for a lot of people whether that’s the katana or the katana artist whatever uh I thought that was also a really good choice for people if they know what they’re getting that you know this thing is not built as well it’s not going to be around 20 years it’s going to be obsolete in 5 years even if it’s still working because the nature of digital stuff so if you can say oh it’s a 3500 $300 $500 amp I’ll get three to five years out of it that’s less than we pay for Netflix that’s a fine expectation if you go into it expecting this is the amp of my dreams that’s not what that is neither is that Marshall in that same price range I love the Vox ac15 C1 the custom you can get a used C1 with a green back for about $600 $700 maybe even 500 sometimes that is the least flexible as far as effects and channels and switching and stuff it is a really good sounding app it is really well built for the price point um it is Better Built at that price point than most of its competition and it’s an app that if you’re a real player you won’t outgrow it’s like having a deluxe Reverb yeah no it doesn’t do what a marshall does it does what a deluxe Reverb does the ac-15 does what that does and it does it really well and even if you later had a fredman even if you later had a ton King that ac15 would have a different spot in Your Arsenal and for 500 bucks that’s that’s you know twice as much as what you pay for Netflix but you get a lot more um the problem I had in that price range was all the things like the Hot Rod Deluxe you get a used Hot Rod Deluxe $800 uh they’re built so poort they catch on fire this is not some opinion thing this I’m not inventing this I’m saying as someone who does circuitry you cannot have 15 15 plusus 15 16 volt power supplies using 5 wat zeners and 5 wat resistors mounted right up against the PCB with no air flow they burn and they always burn every single one of them has either burned fully or you can see the singing beginning and once that happens that area the board is gone and once that power supply goes your effect Loop gets weird your Reverb gets weird uh everything gets noisy you get crackle and then you know literal fire and this is because they inherited a really cheap solution to the problem in 1990 and they’ve not fixed that glaring problem in the last 30 years they have the hot rod one the hot rod 2 The Hot Rod three the hot rod four it’s all cosmetic changes on the outside is what color the tox is or whether it’s Chrome or black on the plate but the inside that has this same ticking time bomb and then it costs a guy $300 to get that fixed if it’s fixable I don’t like that Al I’m not a big fan of the tone Masters but that’s a longer subject right yeah well it seemed like those are definitely marketed for weight more than anything well then real fast on the tone Master it is marketing a digital amp to people who don’t want digital amps so it looks like an old Fender mhm and it has that visual vibe and for clean stuff it sounds quite nice if you push it it falls apart doesn’t sound like a real Fender the model it’s Mo modeling but the clean are beautiful and has a really great sounding Reverb it’s very convenient but it’s just that one sound there’s no presets There’s No Effects Loop there’s none of the things people want from digital you can’t really hook up to computer except for the IR out that’s kind of nice so those who want digital it doesn’t do everything that guys want digital do those who want analog it’s not quite there it’s a weird compromise um really nice cabinet for I think a well programmed uh Katana would get that same sound and a whole bunch of others and cost less it won’t look like the fender but it has the USB out has the you know a lot more flexibility that someone who would say Okay Boomer I’m going to go digital would be into the the the and that could be the katana that could be the the higher end boss digital stuff you know we’re not even looking at all the the high-end stuff the fractal the Keers and stuff that’s an entire different price point but under a th000 under 500 people are like oh should I get that Fender thing it’s not quite any one great thing mhm and so if you were saying some to somebody you mentioned like under a thousand you talk about the Marshall the the Vox and the Vox is actually a pretty decent pedal platform so if you’re using pedals you can certainly make it more versatile in in that you can you know choose different flavors of distortion and overdrive and things like that to kind of give it maybe more of a marshal esque style clipping or maybe a little bit more of like I don’t know a dumbly smoother clipping obviously you’re working within the confines or whatever the existing EQ section and everything that goes on in that amp but I still think it’s it’s a totally reasonable pedal platform at that price point I I agree completely with that yeah I mean I wish there was more stuff out there and it used to be that I could say oh get a Princeton rever b isue or get a Delux RAV B isue those used to be $1,000 or less especially used with Co everything’s gone up so those are 900 to 1,400 used in a little bit more than that new so that’s that’s a shame but you know used to be a guy to put those on there and the reissue prin uh fenders the 65 reissue fenders are quite good amps not the 68 customs and not the 64 customs and all that but but the you know 65 Princeton reverb 65 Deluxe Reverb those reissues super and the twin you can get incredible deals on those you can also get incredible deals on 70s supers and twins because no one wants the waight or to ship them you can pick them up $ $800 get them restored for $200 to $400 and have an app that would cost $4,000 to build today and sound like it you know the guy who plays two Rock would be fine on a restored 74 super Reverb yeah you might have $1,100 in yeah the the70s fenders I always thought were were Sleepers for for today’s amps because they sort of check all the boxes of things that people would want you know they’re handwired still there’s there’s some differences obviously between you know the mid-60s sort of golden a Fenders but those are easy conversions to do for the most part and uh you know the Aesthetics are slightly different but you know the everything on on fenders is is is you know pretty modable fixable if you don’t like the speakers they used in the 70s those are pretty easy to get comparable speakers to what would have been used in the original stuff whether that be a Alo Jensen or a CTS or whatever it got a 76 Super right here yeah sounds phen they’re fantastic they’re fantastic and you can also get the the face plate if you really want it to look like a you know a I’m not big fan of that myself but it it is possible yeah you know some people they they want the uh they want to go all the way with their uh with the mods um so to to recap that Lyle if you would say sort of best amps from a th000 on down to 500 you have the the Marshall um what was the model number the dsl40 C and CR now that that’s not the best Marshall and that’s not the best amp but if you want a tube amp that has clean dirty effect Loop you know for your cover band gig your church gig but you don’t want to go into the modeling thing that’s really good option now yeah when I publish those people were always like what about this what about that what about this what about that and um there are people who either had a sample size of one of a model where I routinely run into the same problem every time uh but their’s had not exhibited that yet or people who were going off what they remember think costing man I I got I got me a vibro champ for $400 when in 1984 you know I mean it just that’s not the reality of today but people if you don’t keep up with the market you have a a weird sense of what things actually cost yeah and so you get weird recommendations you know there there are other amps under a thousand you know some of the trainer uh base Masters can be had for $600 $700 if you have a cabinet to go with it uh phenomenal amp um you know um and there are old PV solid states that can be great choices the trouble as I said with in the video with the old PV solid States is that py is almost defunct they used to be a great company and they had a worldclass parts department so if you had a PV from 1978 and they used a chip that hadn’t been made since 1982 they had those chips you could get those chips you could fix that app keep it going the parts department has either been shut down or is in the last stages of that and so a lot of the transistors used in the 70s and 80s you cannot get and to get two working ones I’d have to buy 20 off eBay hopefully hopefully they’re not fakes and then sort through all those to find two that might work and so cost of long-term ownership is a consideration for the older amps oh yeah what do what do you think about this is sort of been aside like the PV the tube amps that they were making sort of in the 80s and they had those like MDF um uh speaker enclosures and oh God those things are so heavy I mean like the vtms and and all that stuff the MDF was that thick yeah like even the heads weighed you know like 100 watt head was like 50 60 lbs maybe more and and the the cab is most of that yeah had like the mace or like things like that yeah I the vtm stuff was actually good it was just built really fragile um yeah Kim thyle from sound garden did his first record or two with one of those and sounded fantastic the trouble with those is they had all these dip switches and was like you could find fantastic set settings which were pretty much just out of a 1987 1959 circuit or you can make it sound horrible and just little dip switches that broke but um P has had some really great amps and some really weird amps um but with any of these things you know there’s the subjective and there’s the objective like you can have your favorite amp in the world and the next guy’s going say that’s okay yeah or I don’t care for that uh I I try to stay stay away from the subjective stuff in my review um you know I’m like hey it doesn’t work for me this would be great for a certain style player I can tell you if it’s going to catch on fire I can tell you if the if the tube sockets are kind of desolder themselves etc etc if the input Jacks were never tighten from the factory you know um So within the realm of the wellb built in the safe bet anything else is subjective above $1,000 today you get into some really nice stuff but below $1,000 and you have to remember that today’s $1,000 is the $500 of seven eight years ago so everyone who’s been doing this for a while has has to adjust to that that oh wow know that I can’t get that anywhere for cheap I used to be able to get a a made in Japan Strat W $600 everywhere I see them on eBay now uh in Reverb for $2,400 that’s I’ve owned them they’re not $2,400 guitars in my mind they’re still four $400 to $600 great I’ll grab that take it for that other gig that’s not how the world works anymore yeah now if you were to to go up in price point we were to say let’s go between a th000 to 2000 how would your recommendations change for for that price point of amp and and what’s really a great buy at at that level well it always depends on what your needs are and what your preferences are so the guy who’s playing uh metal is not going to be happy with an ac30 mhm except for clean overdubs he’d be thrilled um the guy who’s playing country would not be very happy with maybe a Freedman Dirty Shirley though it actually has a pretty nice clean sound you know so you got to you got to uh have a real good sense of what you want and how loud you need to be uh I find that um amateurs tend to have very low wat jamps because that’s what they can afford real pros tend to have very low water jamps because they’re using really great monitoring and in monitors and all that and they’re not viewing the amplifier as an amplifier so much as a a tone generator it’s the guys in the middle who will show up to a small gig on a Tuesday night with a 4×12 and a 50 wat Marshall and then complain that he’s been told to turn down um the days of 50 watt and 100 watt Marshalls being played live unless you are in a massive venue are pretty much behind us and people need to understand that the difference between a 30 wat amp and a 50 watt amp is the same as the difference between a 50 watt and 100 watt amp is the same difference between a 30 watt and 15 watt or just doubling your speakers so you could have a deluxe Reverb uh and for large gigs you bring it another 2 X12 cab run into it and they’re you’re almost at Pro Reverb levels wow um so a lot of what I do is customer education client education before we even get into anything else beyond that uh Freedman makes really good stuff sir makes really good stuff germino I’m not sure if you can get those under 2000 uh fantastic top hat is a really good really good company uh swart if you need low voltage stuff if you’re okay with it being 5 to eight Watts phenomenal build quality on a swart um there are other companies I will not mention that are not specifically great Here Comes Your Baby um yes hello start we’ll start in we’ll start with him in the cage he just started walking so we’ve got awesome got her hands full yeah so the swart for low voltage oh low wattage yeah low and it’s a very loud five Watts cuz they put a sles and blue in it um you know you could use it at a lot of gigs where people would use a prin instance set clean but um you know um I’m trying to not to crap on any particular companies at the same time I’d rather Point towards the good stuff but people are always like what about this what about that you know in general like orange modern orange are good sounding amps without any real glaring problems except that they insist on using uh these really poorly made potentiometers with really long dis shafts or really long split shafts and you can’t if that pot fails and those pots the the chea just snaps off if you breathe on it too hard you can only get really to do it properly you have to get an orange pot particularly if it’s one of the Dual gangs that they use and then they have this really long fragile pot shaft that’s a a split knurled shaft that they put set screw knobs on um I don’t understand why orange insists on giving them all the same Achilles heel you um uh Marshall has some really good amps and some terrible amps uh for instance this is not a popular opinion I get critiqued for this all the time the uh SV the studio vintage thing that’s $1 18900 is built exactly the same way as the origin 20 which is like an $8 $900 amp and no one can explain why you’re paying $1,000 extra for the same build quality neither one of them sounds like a a real Marshall n neither one is a marshall es circuit it’s not anything they’ve ever done the origin is especially removed from their heritage they don’t sound great uh if you compare them to what they’re impersonating they look fantastic but for the studio vintage 20 it looks like a Plexi it costs like a Plexi it doesn’t sound like one the origin kind of looks the same way and it’s a weird circuit where they put the the plate follower stuff and how they do the effect Loop is just hold backwards you know the Vox ac-15 C the ac3c the AC 15 and 30 by handwired great great amps the ac10 C1 is terrible and people don’t believe me because they they buy it a lot of times it’s probably their first tubeamp and they want to love it so they love it and then I say well things really got some glaring problems both as a tech and as a player they just give me hate I’m curious so I I’m actually curious cuz you just mentioned Vox um I’ve had a lot of ac30s and the most recent one I had um is the ac30 the C2 mhm and i’ I’ve had some people they’re like what do you think about and we don’t carry Vox at the store um but um they were like what do you think about this C2 and I’ve Lov them but I’m I’m wondering from like your perspective like I think it’s like what 14 I just had someone talking to um I was talking to uh I was talking to Seal Seal is one of my clients and he has a bunch of old vintage Vox amps and he’s like well what is a ac30 run these days I was like I think it’s like 1,500 bucks or something and um but I remember getting my C2 for like $500 preco but now they’re like used like $1,200 and I’m like I really want to get a a C2 back but I’m I’m like I’m curious you know I’m curious of your thoughts are they built like are they well built for the C2 they’re extremely well built for the price point um okay for those who don’t know these things most consumers most guitarists lump two mamps into handwired and PCB and those are hard and fasting handwired is great PCB is bad uh there are handwired amps that were handwired by idiots you know handwired whose hands uh is the design good um and there are pcbs that are made to be cheap to produce and get out in great numbers and their pcbs designed to be rugged and to sound good um if you buy a yes sir you’re getting really good PCB if you buy a gerino you’re buying really good hand wirring a lot of the amps in the sub $2000 price range use pcbs and many of them use really poor pcbs the signs of a good PCB are about 2 mm thick or more boards uh thick uh traces top and bottom through hole plated a lot of copper on there where the traces are run intelligently and things aren’t going to short and Arc and so if you buy the sir you buy the fredman the the the PCB series that’s what you’re getting those guys have’ been designing this stuff for a while John especially you get an great implementation and every one he makes is built to the same standard and will sound like the next one given variations in tubes and speakers and players but um you get a cheap BCB it goes out the window the Vox is extremely well built for the price point he’s a very thick double-sided through plated PCB the traces are mostly run intelligently when I get an AC or 30C which is not the CC not the Custom Classic but the custom series I bump up the screen grids to one case and um I do some changes to the tone Stacks to make them a little bit more like the original jmi eras and I’ll give everyone a point if you got one of these on the normal Channel there’s a 330k resistor I think it’s R1 in series before the volume pot on the gain channel that just neuter that channel jump over that 330k see what you think you’ll like it w um U this the only real problems the ac30 C2 has and it doesn’t affect all of them uh there’s a place on the output board where they have some quick connects that go to the primaries of the output Transformer and those traces and those pads are run very very closely to the grid traces and occasionally you’ll get an arc there and so if if an amp has that or if if an owner wants me to preemptively fix that I’ll take my Dremel and cut a little Channel there and cut that bit of the the grid away from the plate connection and then I’ll run a little bit of wire just they need to revise that board addition in later runs hopefully they will um it doesn’t happen very often but it can happen that’s about the only systemic thing I’ve run into those with those amps got and that’s an easy fix yeah I want to keep talking about some of these uh you know amplifiers but I wanted to break for just a moment to talk about a couple of sponsors that make the podcast possible every single week the first of which is the guitar sanctuary and if you’re not aware Brian is actually sitting in the guitar Sanctuary right now he loves it so much and if you’re considering having a custom pedal board built Brian offers these Services through the guitar Sanctuary not only is he building custom rigs but they have every imaginable guitar amplifier and pedal that you may need to build the rig of your dreams head over to the guitar sanctuary.com and check out their offerings everything from highend Boutique to Fender Gibson Etc they have it all also I would like to talk about Sweetwater and their Gear Exchange this is a new program that Sweetwater has launched that sort of is a hybrid between what you would find on Craigslist eBay and Reverb where it is a platform where you can sell Ed gear peer-to-peer the coolest thing though about the Gear Exchange is that you can save on seller fees if you decide to take all of your earnings and place them on a Sweetwater gift card you don’t have to pay any seller fees whatsoever and if you’re somebody like me who’s routinely buying stuff from Sweetwater it’s a great way to keep all of the money that you earn by selling that your all of your used gear go to Sweetwater com/ used you can set up an account for free I’m selling some stuff right now an old TC Electronics chorus few other old pedals that I don’t use anymore really really cool stuff I highly recommend that you check out sweetwaters Gear Exchange lastly neural DSP now for those of you who are into the modeling thing and we’ve touched on it slightly in this podcast the neural DSP stuff is really really interesting and advanced in this space in my opinion if you’re going to go the modeling route quad cortex is an absolute Powerhouse has a lot of great sounds in it and a lot of great models but beyond that one piece that I use quite a bit from neural is their plugins often when I’m starting a video or I need to kind of brainstorm some Sounds here with Oakley my one-year-old son we’ll often go into the quad cortex H get some sounds there but then we’ll head over to the plugins and I’ll check out my you know Mark 2 C+ plugin my Cory Wong plugin get some good clean sounds get some good dirty sounds and kind of use that to maybe outline or map sounds that I want to get later with my tubeamps I really love it and neural DSP is offering 30% off any of their plugins to Chairman of the board’s listeners use the discount code chairman c h a i r Meen get 30% off any plug-in that they offer except any new releases and then those will be available 90 days after the release for the same discount all right those were our sponsors so let’s go uh back to Lyle so we to recap we’ve we’ve talked about a little bit on PCB versus hand wirring in this kind of this last section and we’ve touched a little bit on some of the higher price point amps I’m wondering if if Whiley we can maybe spend a little bit of time or a little more time on the the PCB versus hand wirring because this is something that I think a lot of people misunderstand and there’s a lot of evangelists of the hand wirring uh Dogma let’s say and they can’t get away from the idea that an amp couldn’t possibly be built well because it was built on a PCB I think namely because their experience has been with poor quality pcbs and they’ve kind of painted pcbs with a broad brush to say that I had a bad experience with my $500 PCB amp and you know or even even Marshals you know some of some of the the transitional Marshals had some challenges as they were kind of trying to convert their designs from handwired amps to pcbs but I’ve also seen amplifiers that I’ve worked on uh that are supposedly handwired but then when you lift up the you know the the board where all the turrets are that there’s like a mess of spaghetti wiring underneath got one on my channel that people love and hate to watch I get as much equal hate and and love on it on a Morgan pr12 and underneath it is just spaghetti Fest yeah it looks great if you’re not looking the board yeah and and that leads to you know as you were mentioning tons of inconsistencies cuz lead lengths especially in certain stages of the amp can have a really really drastic change in how things sound if you’re using additional wire as you said like who’s hand wirring it um you know if if Dolores you know goes on her smoke break and and pulles you know an extra an extra 10 in you know of wire between you know a critical game stage you know this could be a really different sounding amp and really noisy yeah everyone’s heard about Friday amps yeah you know you know um oh my gosh here’s the first thing I want people to remember every EG SVT you’ve ever heard starting in 1969 this PCB every Marshall with the exception of some recent handwired isues starting about 1972 has been PCB so if you’ve enjoyed an album used using any Marshall made after 1972 so that’s moving pictures that’s exit stage left that’s uh Physical Graffiti you know it’s all these things that people just look up to that’s the sound those are all PCB Marshalls and uh an interesting thing about PCB design and those 7s and early ‘ 80s Marshals is that the boards are single-sided with not a lot of copper on them um and if a bad Tech is working on them they will get really messed up really fast on the bottom and the owner won’t the buyer won’t necessarily see that unless the board is lifted I’ve seen so many underneath there that have just been butchered because people are just yanking on stuff but um it can be done correctly but what Marshall did that was really smart is that all the things which get hot in the amp are not not on the PCB all the screen resistors are on the tube sockets uh the only thing which sometimes goes wrong on those amps is that causes damage is the dropping resistors the 10ks the 20ks uh the big uh two and three watt dropping resistors sometimes sometimes can cause a little bit of board damage it’s pretty rare those things don’t generate that much heat when everything’s healthy Fender in their modern reissue series say 65 Deluxe Reverb reissue that board is built the same way as Marshall built theirs back in the day but Fender puts some of the components which get hot on the PCB and so you have a less rugged of a design as a result so when a client brings one of those in I’ll move the screen grid resistors and the heater stuff off the PCB and put it where Fender had it back in the 60s and 70s where the heat is is taken care of so it’s possible to make even uh less high quality pcbs work as long as everything is done fairly well if I were to build you an app Mason if I were to build just one amp and I did the whole thing I could do a turret I could do eyelet and I wire all everything by hand and I’m like okay I need exactly that much wire to get from this eyelet to pin two of this tube but I need to have another half inch uh just to keep some slack here and I want to run along the bottom of the chassis for a bit of shielding then go up so that wire is going to be that long and then it when it’s dressed is that long and then I have all these wires here attached to that tube I’ll go in there and I’ll move them around and find the distance between them and oh if I move this wire here the the hum from the heaters goes away etc etc I can lock everything in it may take me an hour plus per amp to get everything laid out just so and then I build one for you Brian and I’ve got to do the whole thing and I may forget what I did the first time that made that the buzz go away mhm a really good amp design kind of does that first thing it says this is where everything should be with wires this is working this is great and then they kind of take a snapshot of that and they replicate that in a PCB so you make the first stamp you take that snapshot you build a PCB where all the traces are running the exact same way and then you make one you sell it to Mason make another one sell it to Brian they’re the same amp at that point and you can make a thousand of them and you don’t have to spend that hour fine-tuning per amp because you have done all that um experimenting in the design stage and then you replicate that uh if you look at a John sir amp if you know what you’re looking at he has every thing within one triode stage Al together so here’s here’s always fighting where things are on this so here’s the first input stage triode and here’s the SEC here’s the second triode here’s the third triode here’s the fourth triode and all of them are grounded to the cathode and those cathodes go to the filter kept negative for that stage and you can see all the traces and he will use the advantage that PCB can offer and say all right I’m going to run some traces that are just connected to ground here to Shield this grid Trace from everything else so you’re building in shielding into the board um and not doing just random ground planes but steering everything and making sure that all right if the signal comes in to and it goes to ground it doesn’t just go to ground to everything goes to ground to here and it flows through the entire amp the way you want it to do so PCB offers a really good designer and I’d say John is certainly a great example the opportunities to do what you cannot really do with a handwired amp unless you have a much larger space you can do almost anything you want in the highwat a highwat is a huge huge thing and just tons of real estate you try to do all that in a smaller amp they they don’t take advantage though of a lot of the space in the high wi no a a high wide is just that big to to hold the tubes and and the Transformers the the circuits you know the size of lunch box or less but um but you know they do have real estate that that they could use it’s like uh Hey can can I build a digital delay yes I can I can hand build you a digital delay it’ll be the size of your kitchen table uh versus you know the little bitty chip that goes into a stman I can do it but why would you want to car around a kitchen table when you can just get the stman thing and then you know toss it in your bag um PCB has strong advantages if the if the choice is because the advantages of design and consistency rather than I’ll just slap this thing out real cheap yeah it seems like even on sers there are certain points though where he will use uh where he’ll hand wire certain parts especially like with the heaters it seems like fewer people who are doing PC boards will will put the the you know the heater side with with uh with PCB and often they’ll hand wire that se or something like that depends on the current draw of the tubes so you know if if I’m doing if I got a amp with four e 34s or four 6L 6es that’s a lot of heat and all the heater current of the amp is right there so I’m going to have I’m not going to have those sockets chassis I mean uh PCB mounted I’m going have the sockets mounted to chassis and so that section may be handwired or maybe it be a little dotter card um uh and then so you have the heaters to that hand wire hand run pardon me at that point a lot of designers at that price point will say all right and we’ll run from there we’ll run some AC to the heaters on the phase inverter or doesn’t really matter and then everything else is going to get DC for the heaters and you can do that in a PCB and that’s a lot cheaper to do in a PCB than handwired because you don’t have to have all these little things on Terminal strips everywhere cuz it’s really hard to to mount uh have you ever tried to mount an opamp or a voltage regulator on an eyelet board you know square peg hole um so uh but yeah I mean there are heat considerations uh PCB is not always the best thing and a good designer says all right this is its strength and I’ll use it for the strength and for the where it has weakness I’m going to go someplace else M um and you find that like I said in the old old Marshalls and you find that in the old Marshalls that were uh PCB you don’t find that in the old EGS that are PCB you open up a 1969 EG SVT and that board is just charred from all those dropping resistors they have huge resistors and that board is charred it it’s literally literally been smoking for 40 years 50 years 53 years four years Jesus I can’t do math uh you know U it was never a good design it just happened to sound great yeah well and sometimes those idiosyncracies are are things that that people like you know uh I even talk about you know with with pedals and and buffers and stuff like that that that sometimes people will choose uh a buffer that’s not necessarily neutral you know like the sound of their guitar with a 10ft cable into their amp that they like you know second harmonic Distortion to be on their buffer because the perception is that it’s warmer or more musical or whatever it is even if when you go back to this reference point it’s not the the actual sound of of the amp fire it’s at it’s like more of like a tone shaping um piece more than more than anything but um I want to break for a second so that Brian can talk about a couple of our sponsors then I want to come back and talk about effects Loops because this is something that uh a lot of people deal with and and and I’d love to get your take on uh on effect loops and maybe uh informing people that there that there isn’t a a a a a database with which all amplifier makers reference when making their effects Loops that we all have this effects Loop Consortium um that we you know join the committee every year and decide what the standards are going to be there is nothing like that U so uh Brian go ahead and take it away with the sponsors and we’ll come back and talk about effect Loops thank you so much yeah so um I have three amazing sponsors to talk about our final three um I guess we could call this the the Amazon subscribing of strings when it comes to string Joy because um I just got a box of strings in a couple weeks ago Mason’s been using their strings all these different you know different types of strings and you know how they’re wrapped and everything and um you can buy just a couple strings or a couple packs or you can subscribe and have monthly strings you know be sent to your house don’t even have to leave your house and you can um have backup strings ready to go and I just put some on my guitar so I’m testing them out and I’m loving them they’re great Mason’s been using them for a while as he calls himself the uh string Destroyer so um they are a joy if I can throw out my dad pun uh to have these strings on my uh on my guitars especially having Gratch guitars too so um but check them out they have a great code uh b o a r DS for 10% off uh go check out their website star.com um my next one is going to be monoc creators uh with their discount code chairman CH h a i r Meen for 10% off we all know about monoc creators I have backpacks dual guitar bags single guitar bags pedal boards they just released a new power supply and a new angled pedal board so they you know they’re coming out with all these great products a lot of pedal board friendly products especially this angled one you can fit canvas XLR box power supplies all this stuff underneath the board fit all your stuff on there and with that release of that new board came a new angled case soft case so a lot of great stuff go utilize that code check them out go buy some stuff and as we say it’s what n 90% from free so you can’t you can’t go wrong with that um and our final one is going to be this is definitely one of the the depot when it comes are DIY people wanting to build their own their own boards or their racks or anything and they need supplies and you don’t know where to go this is where we get our cabling from our quarter inch plugs our DC power connectors our power cable for for that’s the biggest question I get is where do you get your power cables from where do you get your power plugs from so bestronics with their discount code DE chairs d a c h a i RS for 10% off go connect with brand Brad he’ll hook you up he’ll give you recommendations if you don’t know what you want you can hey Brad this is what I’m trying to do and he’ll give you great recommendations so check them out back to you all right thank you Brian um so we’re getting back into effect loops and as I had mentioned before Brian took over for the sponsored ad reads um one of the things that I’ve I’ve run into on the on the pedal side is that there are major disconnections between instrument versus line level understanding that not all pedals are optimized for an effects Loop and not all effects Loops are really optimized for pedals even though they offer uh that maybe the difference between an active versus passive effects Loop and then another thing is is like if you have a passive effects Loop how how might you deal with yeah how might you deal with it you know whether that’s through you know a dumbell lator style device and there’s companies that make similar things that are designed to correct that and then also add you know the the buffering necessary and maybe and I’m really piling it on thick here Lyall maybe the differences are value the value of a tube buffered effects Loop versus a solid state a lot of people really love the idea of the tube buffer I’ve always kind of found that it it tends to add more noise it tends to be less transparent if you just want the sound sound of the delay or Reverb effect as natural as it might be um adding in the extra tube doesn’t necessarily benefit that although it may sound better different in a way that you might prefer but it may not be totally neutral so uh any any thoughts on that that you could share with us that’s that’s a quite the laundry list you gave me there I’m trying to remember all the points um the first thing I tell people is make sure that you need an effect Loop just because you saw a guy in the in the magazine or on a YouTube channel using an effect Loop and it looks cool to an extent that’s selling a lifestyle trying to buy a better quality of life through gear if I have a Twin Reverb I don’t need an effect slop that thing is so damn clean you know Gilmore did not need an effect loop with his with his high watts and his fenders and he sounded fantastic uh if you have an ac30 you’re on the fence you can use it because then you can have your effects stay clean even if your input gets a little gritty but most of the guys who are famous for using ac30s that’s Edge that’s Len W um Brian May uh Roy Gallagher you know Beatles didn’t use many effects on those they use all the effects in front Paige used it most of Physical Graffiti is in ac30 all those effects were in front so um when you have an amp like an ac30 or that could be a Tweed Fender that has a certain compression and overdrive character and you hit it with a an echo or a delay if you were to be playing clean you would only try to do this on the screen you’d have uh B you a real gradual descent on the repeats but you play into an app that’s got some grit you play Bop and then first repeat is going to be bop and then it’s going to be B because that first repeats loud enough to make the amp overdrive so your first repeat is going to be dirty almost as dirty is what you play and the repeats clean up and that’s a big thing of what Edge and lwad do is that you have uh a real character first or second repeat and then it gets clean and you have to be careful with your um U how how many repeats you have in the levels because when you’re compressing things if you everything can be too loud you want to make sure that it it still tapers off and so the settings used for clean and the settings used for dirty can be very different but this is all before you get into an effect Loop once you get into Marshall gain or high high modern voltage gain High wattage gain you know the high game stuff if you’re playing metal if you’re playing really hard rock you probably do need infect SLP if you want to add Reverb And Delay to that because it’ll just turn to mush in front of a a Freeman think of it like maybe this is a generational thing if you go in the studio there’s certain pedals that you use in front of the amp and then the engineer adds everything afterwards so you’re tracking into that Marshall you’ll use a w but it’s dry and the Reverb any Reverb on tracking is in the room the rest of the engineer adds so you can add the delay stuff there so what that gives and I’m going to try to explain this for everyone I know you guys know this so if this is what your sound is like coming out of the amp then you’re just getting repeats added to that and then so it sounds like that same sound happening again and again again and again at decreasing levels as opposed to this is what the guitar sounded like and it has delay and then it goes into this all this overdrive in which case you just get this wall of sludge it’s useless so that’s who needs who doesn’t need in effect effect Loop and those who may want to say all right for this tune I’m going to have a St in Blue Sky in the loop of my ac30 and it’s is going to be this clean beautiful spacious thing in this next song I’m going to stick a deluxe memory man in front of it and push it and get that real character thing so you can have the best of both both worlds and that’s not just the ac30 you can do that with a Gibson ga40 you can do that with a not with the effect but the front of the amp stuff any Tweed Fender a really pushed fiberlux will do that too um effects Loops come in three categories passive effects Loops that’s just there’s an insert before the phase inverter input and it is high impedance and if you use it it probably won’t sound very good but you can put a buffer there we’ll come back to that uh the passive one is what you’re going to find in a dumbell it’s what you’re going to find in um in U uh Dr Z and they’re fine to have it costs them two output Jack you know two switch Jacks to implement and uh if you don’t use it it’s not there in the circuit uh only problem to the owner is sometimes those the normal on those Jacks will become corroded you’ll start to lose signal get noise so make sure those Jacks Are cleaned and if you aren’t using it go get some quarin uh plug holes from the hardware store and keep dirt and air out of those Jacks next level is a good low impedance buffered effect Loop that can be done with a tube within the app or exterior it can be done with solid state and by good I mean that the owner the designer is trying to say all right uh the signal here should be uh what we what is referred to as -10 line level unbalanced and the signal coming back should be the same or I need to accommodate people are going to use pedals so I’m going give it a a pad so it drops down 20 DB so it’s -30 unbalanced out so a pedal doesn’t distort and then I have to add 20db of makeup gains so the return is back to where it would have been if I wasn’t using the effect Loop that’s more complicated because you have to attenuate transparently and then you have to amplify 20 DB of gain without adding noise or coloration that’s that’s tricky to do it can be done very very well with with a 12x 7 as long as you understand that you’re adding another thing pulling on your heater Supply you have to have more real estate in the board in the in the amp and there’s always a little bit of thermal noise from a 12x 7 it can be done very very well these days with uh mosfets uh the L&D 150 and uh I think fre Freeman’s doing that and I know that George Metropolis is doing that it’s a very good way to do it it’s a high voltage High headro thing without a lot of noise and you can really tweak it just exactly the way you want it to be the dumbell lator it’s for people who love tube coloration and you can get it’s really hard to make that thing be exactly transparent they have no level it’s really hard to say all right my input level and output level are the same with and without the S but you can introduce coloration you can make it do things that aren’t at all the intent of being clean transparent but most most exter external Tu based effects Loops are kind of bad um because you have to really know what you’re doing and it’s really hard to do it well apparently and solid state stuff does that very well and I know that’s hard for people to believe as they listen to this being transmitted uh digitally through my computer through satellites across the world to your computers for you to hear this this you know but solid state is not so bad guys it’s it’s what makes the world go around literally um when it’s done right um I always get asked hey can you add an effect slip to this yes I can should I and can you afford it a lot of amps were designed a certain way there’s only so much real estate and uh it gets crazy and then see my first point of do you actually need infx Loop um other amps have effects Loops that are horribly noisy and that could be um uh the old uh this Fender supersonic have a terrible multi-section effects Loop they have an effects Loop and then they have uh a out a preamp out and then a line power amp in both those circuits add tons of noise I just bypass both of those in client amps and the noise four goes um maces Maes traditionally have horrible implementations of effects Loops especially those that have parallel effects they’re just noise generators and there’s no concept of here’s my input signal here’s my output signal and the pots have detent so I can match them you just randomly finding what’s the quietest possible without it ever really being quiet um Mason you mentioned earlier there there’s no standards for this there aren’t any standards that the guitar amp industry seems to really adhere to but there are standards for this but the audio engineering in society puts out that’s where I’m getting this -30 -10 + 4 balanced these are standards which could be applied and I’m sure that John S knows exactly what I’m talking about and the kid designing the origin 20 this week probably hasn’t followed that that that sounds mean I have no idea who who did the origin 20 but I know that the best and I know that the best and brightest of people graduating with electronics degrees these days are not ending up at amp companies where where the technology is out of the 1940s they’re all Cisco and Google and and making the world a scarier place I I do have a question about effects Loop stuff uh I think a couple weeks ago Mason you and I talked about uh it was like load box kind of related those things and correct me if I’m wrong I think maybe you could um chime in on it are isn’t there some of these boxes that you can you know you plug directly into the head and then opposite another cable goes to speaker but then some of these like effects Loops like they added an effects Loop isn’t that then we read one of them is like that it was like the Fry or something FR power station I think it’s called I think boss one too yeah I I went want the boss one but yeah I’m curious about that from like from your opinion would something like that like it’s the same thing it’s like do you need an effect I get that all the time oh I need this this and this and this and I’m like well are you using the effect swop are you using five cable method oh no but I’ve seen a lot of people do it and it be so fun that you know to have the option I’m like well just don’t get overwhelmed with option Galore like oh yeah I you know like I had like I said I had ac30 and I think I had an effect soup I can’t remember if it’s AC does I can’t remember if it has one or not it and even it does and I never even used it and people are like oh why I’m like it’s complicated I like how it sounds like I’m curious from you like some like the Fry it like do you see like any issues with people utilizing those types like a just to get an effect loop I mean that’s it’s a cool device I thought you were asking Mason um oh either or I’m I’m sorry sorry no no I just like do you have yeah if you’re recording at home or a studio you can do anything you don’t need to do any of that because if you’re actually recording these days at a place that’s professional you know I’m running logic pro on this to record this so I can send you the guys the clean up audio afterwards I could have infinite plugins on here you know earlier one of the sponsors were neural DSP I’ve got uh their new uh plugin uh loaded and I’ve got an AC uh 15 uh uh IR that I’ve been playing around with and it it’s really promising really promising and this is from aox guy um so you don’t need to have an effects Loop in the studio you you may want you you can stick a 57 on something going with the mic PR at it all afterwards or you can get an oxbox and use the IRS and then do the same thing or the fry it I think might be an option but typically you want to just record it and then add all that stuff afterwards the issue is when you want to have Studio sounds live and that’s when the loops can be cool and there is a very very big difference between applying Reverb And Delay Etc in the effects Loop before the phase inverter before the output tubes before the speakers versus applying that same processing to the sound coming off the microphone phone or the IR because that’s what would have been done in a studio so if you have all that stuff being applied to the speaker load you can get you can more closely replicate What’s Done in the studio you know this is the sound that you would have heard if you’re in the room and now we’ve put it in a cathedral versus we F we fed a cathedral through four eel 34s into a 50 wat Marshall output Transformer and then some green backs and the one on the left is a little bit fuzzy ah I gotta cool yeah I I think this is why saw you know a lot of the the wet dry wet stuff coming of age in in the in the 80s and 90s is that like a lot of these guitar players got used to having even tide harmonizers and lexicon reverbs and TC you know 2290 delays and they wanted to take the the studio and bring it with them you know on their on the Stevie Nicks tour and have the same exact sounds that they put on you know in the studio and and you know the the interesting thing with I you know is a sort of an aside that’s maybe more personalized but it’s interesting when when I see sort of the pervasiveness of people talking about wet dry wet Rigs and really the the origins behind that was in in the the use of parallel mixers and all that stuff was really just copying what was done at the studio at the time and also a response to most of that gear didn’t have any dry signal it was return only and so the the mixers had to be used in order to get the dry signal back into these things otherwise they were just you know 100% wet because they were yeah designed to be used in in and Blended in you know via the mix bus with your you know recorded guitar amp um and uh you know now everything has the dry signal in it you know and and the main challenges I think that people run into if they’re really trying to do that um system is you know you can get some latency and things like that with some of the stuff that doesn’t have an analog dry path or like the even tide stuff notoriously doesn’t have any analog dry paths so sometimes when you’re doing a real wet dry wet rig and you’re using those and you have a reference point for what the the the immediacy of the dry signal and then you have this latency on left and right um it can be a little bit more obvious um in in those sorts of situations but put Mackie 1404 VZ prob mixers on sliding rack shells for clients so feed the 57 stick your here’s your 57 it’s going to a mic pre that’s racked and that is feeding the front of the house and it’s feeding this Mackie and this Mackie is sending out Ox send just like you do in studio to all these other Intel effects and and ESB DSP stuff you know all the adventi stuff and all that comes back to a mix to a stereo mix bus on the Mackie and then that goes out to front housee so here’s my dry XLR here are my stereo wet xlrs there you go and that is a very great way to do it there’s probably better ways to do it now that was 10 15 years ago but it’s an expensive way to go even with a you know what is a 1404 back in the day 800 900 bucks now they’re probably you get them used for 100 you can you can you can skin that cat a lot of ways but you have to know what you’re doing and that was a place where we wanted to blend in parallel stuff uh parallel is best done externally uh parallel effect Loops are nightmares and apps because they’re never done well because no one wants to spend the money to do it right they want to have the feature but they don’t want to say and that features $600 yeah and that would that lets you do things like oh I’m not killing the return I’m I’m I’m muting the S so we get all the spill over and and I go I go from clean to dirty and it changes amps and changes which 57 is feeding it you know you can do all you can this guy’s rig was basically a mobile studio uh and it was like eight rack units but that’s eight more than most people have these days you should uh since seal is one of your clients um Brian one of the old Michael landow rigs when he was touring with seal and there was like some killer band that like Brian blade and like Michael landow this is like you know late 90s he would use uh you know he he he’d have a stereo mic pre he’d mic you know the his amplifier and I think the mic pre that he used it was uh what was the company called back in the day that everybody all the studio guys use uh was it Apex like a he X MH or Apex I don’t know how they was symmetric yeah and they had the the tube Essence um Mike PR and so they would feed the the mic PR and then that would feed like I think he used an a lexicon mpx1 and then that would feed a stereo Marshall Power Amp um you know I think it was called a 50 and then that would feed you know some cabinets and and and you know and he and the amp that he was using was the uh G gatron gatone do you remember these amps in the in the late 90s gatron gone I remember the I don’t remember the name especially it’s what I I’ll look it up real quick cuz it IT itronics guy is it guy I think it was guy I know that the guy that played in Steely Dan there at the end uh was using one of these two let’s see that’s why people tune into this for the excitement it must be it must be G CU gatron is is the name of a pedal pedal company anyway yeah that sounds familiar they were they were they were cool he had that you know and uh it was it was a seals band in the late ’90s early 2000s that was a was a pretty incredible band it was super heavy play those arrangements yes yeah um and actually I think I think his current tour Brian if I’m not mistaken is all the all the kind of the the hits from the 90s you know it’s nothing I don’t think it’s anything past like 2000 yeah it’s his is his like 30y year uh anniversary tour of of everything so when he was in Dallas yeah so uh he was here in Dallas a couple months he was here he was here in Dallas we were just texting this morning because we’re doing a an acoustic build with some LR bag stuff and um um yeah it’s it’s all of his like the band and stuff he uh his producer is doing bass and guitar uh Trevor Horn and a bunch of other people but yeah it’s all of his it’s all of his hits and obviously you know you know me I’m I’m 30 so being a 30-y year anniversary I you know I didn’t grow up my parents know all this they like oh my gosh I know all these songs so yeah it’s all all hits hush child yeah yeah no they they were they were huge you know they were on movie soundtracks and and all sorts of stuff and he he was he was pretty big when I was you know in uh Elementary School and was like 18 when that when that first stuff came out crazy hit really hard that was really fresh but he came out with Kiss From A Rose and every music I know just stopped when that heard that because it’s a Walt with a real string Arrangement and listen to those harmonies I mean my God I don’t know how much of the credit belongs to seal versus Trevor uh I I’m sure it’s just the two of them coming together perfectly um yeah God so good yeah his most underrated album I think is the one that’s after the one with Kiss From A Rose um oh it’s got some really cool like guitar sounds Wendy melvoin from uh Prince and the revolution is on a lot of that as is her sister Susanna um and uh she told me that it was a really cool session there there was like some you know I have to check it out I’ve heard it but it’s been a long time yeah it’s human being or human beings I can’t remember if it’s plural or singular but it’s a really good album so funny thing about that we were talking about uh pedals we’re on this pedal hunt him and I right now we’re just kind of like if if you looked at his living room there’s just pedals everywhere his house he’s trying to hunt down stuff and he was asking for a type of effect he goes I’m trying to find it to do this I was like oh uh my friend Mason had uh Wendy and I was like I don’t I couldn’t remember her last name at the time I was like her name is w and I sent him the link and he’s like I know I know Wendy that’s you know and told me all about that album and everything so yeah no it’s that’s that’s cool but yeah no h on on the second seal album the one with where he’s the silhouette you know and that had like Jeff Beck on it Jeff Beck played guitar one of those songs yeah we had like I was working in a music store and that came out and there was a Hendrick trib tribute album that came out and it was uh Beck in Seal doing um I think if six was nine or manic depression manic depression or was it if six was nine I have to go back anyway between seal and Beck it was it was just un unreal yeah yeah yeah yeah well Lyle I feel like we’ve we’ve exhausted uh uh a lot of your precious time and I know that you have that super reav behind you that’s out of coffee of coffee and because I can I’ve told everyone how young I was when the first seal stuff came out you know how old and wise I am now so take me very seriously people take me very seriously respect your I greatly appreciate apprciate your recommendations and I know our listeners will really appreciate this because you know even if I do a video about an amp recommendation or a video about PCB versus hand wirring I think hearing it from you know somebody who’s really had their their finger on the pulse of what’s going on in terms of amplifiers that are out there the common issues that they might have and and and to steer people into stuff that they’re going to be able to have in 10 years and it’s not going to be Obsolete and is going to be serviceable uh I think that that’s a really important thing in the in the more that we can uh you know add credibility to to the brands and the amps that are really doing it well uh I think is is hugely important so thank you very much for being here and for uh spending the time with us to uh to kind of sus some of these things out well thank you very much for having me let me add real quick when I say I don’t like the samp or I think the samp company is is doing a bad thing it’s not because I have a vendetta against any amp company I’m not out to get amp company X I don’t shill for amp company y my perspective because I was that kid is the kid mowing the lawns all summer long to save up to buy her amp so she saves up and she saves up and she saves up and she buys the amp that all these magazines and all these reviews and all these websites say just fantastic and then it catches on fire 2 years later right after the warranty expires I don’t like it when people get bent over by companies taking advantage of them and that can be a $200 amp a $2,000 amp a $4,000 amp I’m trying to look out for the girl saving up to get the gear she needs to be so she can be the world’s next great musician and I don’t care what what that is I don’t care whether that’s digital tube solid state whatever I am trying to be an advocate for the guitarist and sometimes it makes me unpopular that’s yeah I I can live with that yeah that’s great I think that’s awesome I think it’s it’s think it’s good to have have principles and I think that this is you know in part the reason why I think your channel has been very successful and and uh we will have of course links to Lyle’s channel that are going to be in the show notes uh whether you’re listening through you know apple or Spotify so you can check that out at psionic audio and then on the YouTube stream we’ll also of course have this all Linked In the description so you can check out what ly is doing and it really is some amazing stuff and probably amps that you either have owned or currently own have probably been on his workbench and they documented on his YouTube channel and so he can often give you some good ideas as to mods as to ways simple fixes to uh to improve the quality of the amp so I highly recommend that you check it out awesome all right guys until next time than you so much have a good one see you [Music]
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