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I've had a lot of people recommend a solid-state amp for jazz. I understand weight, reliability, and (maybe) heat and energy efficiency might be better than with a comparable tube amp, but for various reasons I don't care about any of those things.
I care about tone, and I aim toward the more traditional side of jazz. I play a hollowbody with flatwound strings, and the most modern thing I go for tonewise is Wes Montgomery. Solid-state amps didn't exist when many of my favorite jazz guitar tones were recorded.
So, what does a solid-state amp do, when it comes to tone, that a tube amp doesn't do as well? I understand there were jazz guitar recordings made after solid-state amps became available; I'm interested in advantages or disadvantages for those kinds of sounds, as well.
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05-04-2017 07:41 PM
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the only advantage that i can think of is "acoustic" type tone. I tend to see two categories of archtop jazz sound, the warm, "electric" sound, and the "acoustic" sound, for lack of better terminology. If you are after that second type of sound, many times an acoustic solid state amp (say in the style of AER, Acoustic Image, etc..) with full range speakers, will please you more than a tube electric guitar amp.
But for Wes style sound, i personally can't find a "tone" or "feel" reason to choose solid state over tube.
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It is worth mentioning that Wes did use a Standel solid state amp for a while. I thought it sounded really good.
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Depending on the kind of tone you want, you definitely want to think about a tube amp's clean headroom. Depending on the size of the room you're playing in, a 5 or 12 watt tube amp might not be able to stay clean at loud enough volumes to fill the room or to compete with a drummer or horn section. Again, generally speaking, tube amps will begin to break-up (or distort) as you increase the gain. Likewise, if you have a more powerful tube amp, you might find that the sweet spot for your favorite tone is too loud for home. Decent solid state and/or modeling amps can get pretty close to the sound and feel of tube amps without the limitations on volume and how it affects tone. I recently bought a Boss Katana for $200 and find that it gets me close enough to tube amp sound and feel as well as the ability to do so at just about any practical volume level. I don't think there's a tube amp in decent condition at that price level that can say the same thing. For the record I like both kinds of amps and currently own and use both.
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If you want to build a tone around clarity, rather than saturation, solid state is great. A solid state amp can get you a fat tone with tons of dynamic range. In my experience, tube amps have an optimum volume zone where they are doing what you want and it's a relatively small zone. Having played a ton of gigs as a bassist with guitar players who need to get their tone, man, and people start moving away from the band and everybody has to play too hard. I go back and forth between tube and solid state, and often just end up putting a pedal in front of a solid state amp if I want a little bit of hair.
Look at the comparison that was just posted between a henricksen, a Mambo and a princeton. Do you really hear a huge difference there?
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I'll wait til later tonight when I can use my Sennheisers.
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Guitar players are in general very conservative and backward thinking. The golden age of jazz guitar (50's and 60's) and rock guitar (60's and 70's) were before high quality SS came along, tubes ruled and many listen with their eyes and just wont let go. Tubes can be great, SS can be too. I find it funny that folks who insist SS sucks, plug into a SS pedal to create some level of distortion for their beloved tubes to amplify. Good tube amps generally cost more and can have maintenance costs, but if you're not pushing the amp like EVH, tubes can last decades. Most SS amps, if it needs repairing you'll dump it in the trash and get a new one, because the amp is worth $350 and it'll cost more than that to try to fix it. I love tubes and transistors.
Play both and decide what you like, or get both!
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I'm trying to anticipate whether any of my existing amps is likely to yield satisfying results for jazz. They are in storage right now; otherwise I'd just have a go with each of them and see what happens.
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Have a go with each and see what happens?!?
Originally Posted by Moon River
Sounds like a pretty good idea to me
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Solid state amps sound great--they sound great for lots of things, and I don't hear a distinctive difference between between a clean tune amp and a solid state amp. If you push the tube amp into saturation it does interesting things, but most people's idea of jazz involves a less saturated sound.
As I was trying to say before, imagine a gig in a large room, with a loud band. You lug the fender twin, and it's loud and clean, but you cant' get it to do any overdrive. So next time you bring a fender deluxe. You make it loud enough to be heard over the drummer, and it's too distorted for what you're playing.
Or you lug the solid state rig that's 100 watts and weighs 4 lbs, and sounds great, and if you want a little hair on the tone stomp on a pedal.
Tube amp guys are constantly buying pedals for exactly this reason, trying to get the tone they want at whatever volume they want. Using solid state boost pedals to drive the preamp section or solid state overdrive pedals designed to make a 50 watt amp sound like a tweed deluxe. If you are going to do that, why not just bring a good solid state amp?Last edited by PB+J; 05-04-2017 at 10:42 PM.
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True enough, but on the other side, you also have guys with SS amps throwing in pedals to get a more "tubey" sound. It goes both ways IMO. Originally Posted by PB+J
To the OP: it would be useful to the conversation to know what amps you have in storage . . .
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Solid-state brings fidelity. Tubes bring distortion. It depends on which you prefer.
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I like tube amps. A good tube amp sounds great. So does a good solid state amp.
Some people will say "i can't compromise on tone." But all amps are a compromise. A tweed champ can't get sparkly clean sound of a twin. A twin can't sound like a tweed deluxe. A tweed deluxe can't get as loud as a blackface deluxe. A blackface deluxe doesn't sound like a tweed. One ten doesn't sound like four tens. A ten doesn't sound like a twelve. A marshall doesn't sound like a mesa. Etc etc etc.
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I forgot to mention one other difference is that you can dial in your sound on SS then turn the amp up and "your sound" remains, just louder. There is often a lot more interplay between tubes, tone knobs and the volume on a tube amp. Plenty of players want that interplay, they know the amp well and can get it to do just what they want, but if you plug in to an unfamiliar tube amp, set the tone where you like and then turn up or down, the character of you sound can be altered. Again, neither good or bad, better or worse, but they are different.
To the OP; what amps do you have now?Last edited by whiskey02; 05-05-2017 at 07:31 AM.
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Originally Posted by PB+J
and no two amp of same make, model, and even year sound alike, especially tube amps. Parts vary in their spec' within the specified acceptable range. Tube vary even more adding to the stew of parts that make a tube amp. Same with solid state but you're not replacing transistors the way you do tubes.
I would add one more thing to solid state feature side is their tones doesn't change as much as you turn down the volume. What change there is, is come more from the speaker than the amp.
Bottom line find an amp you like and keep it.
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Tune amps have fat warm tones and lots of iconic jazz records use them. Lots of recordings with Polytone amps if we are looking at older recordings and as it was said above, Wes played a Standel amp for a while and sounded just like himself. Personally I think that a good amp brings convenience and a sound that, to the listener, can be indistiguishable from a tube amp. Yes we might be able to hear the difference in a listening test just like a photographer can tell what camera is being used with equivalent lenses across different systems but to the viewing audience all people care about is how good the picture is. The only real difference is if the player notices a difference and that is totally subjective so really if someone prefers a tube amp then that is great and if someone prefers a ss amp that is equally as great as long as the music is good. Personally I miss my Fender Twin but I sure don't miss lugging it around and in real life I care a whole lot more about the guitar I am playing than the extremely small difference (to me) between a tube amp and my Bud. And the ability to put it in a small bag and put it over my shoulder while having a huge sounding little amp that sounds great, is extremely loud or quiet with no need to worry about where my volume knob is and tons of headroom makes it so much more
worthwhile to me. If it was a big difference then sure I would be breaking my all the time and needing different amps for different volumes but the sound difference is not big enough that I feel like I need to do that.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro
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Fender Hot Rod Deluxe III combo Originally Posted by Longways to Go
Marshall JVM 410H head
Hughes & Kettner Tubemeister 18 Anniversary head
Marshall 1960A cabinet (G12-T75 & Mesa Vintage 30's in an x-pattern)
Cast-off 1x12 cabinet (Reverend Alltone 1250)
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I love my DV Mark Little Jazz for its tone, size, aux in, headphone out and line out for recording.
And I love my GB Hot Rod Deluxe for its tone, power, reverb, "class" and general heft.
For me both amps are very useful.......
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It really depends on which tube and solid state amps you're comparing. In general, the big difference between tube and ss amp circuits has to do with how they distort (there's always some distortion) and with the impact of output transformers on the sound (ss amps don't have 'em as a rule). To oversimplify, tube distortion sounds better than transistor distortion (to a point). But because there's more to an amp than just whether it's made with tubes or transistors (e.g., tone circuitry and other design elements, speakers, cabinet, power level, etc.), tube vs ss may be the least of the differences between two amps. If you mainly play at lower volumes with clean tones, with a tube amp you get the disadvantages of tubes' greater weight, fragility, and maintenance costs, without really getting the benfits of tubes' more pleasing distortion characteristics. Originally Posted by Moon River
John
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I use both, happily.
My favorite all time amp is an old Ampeg tube amp. But, it's too fragile to gig with reliably, so I gig with a Roland JC55, which is solid state. They don't sound exactly the same, but I can get an acceptable sound from either one.
I've played a few Polytones without being able to understand what other people like about them. I have played a couple of Fender Twins without being especially happy -- I think it depends on the speaker.
One of the best tones I ever got on a gig was a Crate GFX15, which I bought new for $99, mic'ed thru a good PA. That's an excellent sounding little amp, but it's only 12 watts.
My experience is that there are real-world issues which are bigger factors than tube vs. solid state.
One thing is the room and setup. My trusty JC55 usually sounds fine, but I've played in rooms where I simply couldn't get a decent sound. My ears? The room acoustics? Beats me, but clearly there was something affecting my appreciation of the amp.
Another thing is the application. What sounds good in a big band may not be what you're looking for in a solo guitar gig or a small group. For solo guitar I want a lot more low frequency energy than I want in a group (in a group, I usually roll off the bass so that the guitar doesn't make mud with the piano and bass).
And, although it's probably inappropriate to mention for this thread, all the player variables also are dominant. Your touch, your lines etc. So you could say that's independent of the amp, except I notice I play way better when I'm getting exactly the sound I want. So, there's an argument for picking whatever amp sounds like you want to sound, at your ears - if you can figure out which one that might be in any given room.
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when I play a solo/duo gig I use a first edition AER Acousticube , about 20 years old. It gives me a solid tone, warm and still airy and I can carry it to my car with one arm ;-) For gigs with horns and generally larger bands I have an EVANS RE150 , also solid state, 150 watts and the 10" driver gives me enough bass and punch but the low end stays manageable at higher volume. At home and for recordings I like to use a JUKE "Coda" amp, a modern take on the old Ampeg and Magnatron circuits. It's a hand built unit with tube driven reverb and tremolo, a 15 - 30 watt poweramp driving a Celestion Gold 12" - that amp has a truly beautiful sound for low volume playing/recording but since I have a rather heavy pick attack and use heavy strings the headroom of most lower-wattage tube amps is simply not high enough - plus the tube amps are more delicate, heavy, they pick up hum and they cost more to replace... I usually get my sound with most amps but the volume is always the most critical factor. YMMV
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To: rpjazzguitar:
your explanation above is one of the best short essays I've read on Tone, and all the things that go into producing it!
Nice job. JM
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Man, this is a great point. And I find at the gig that once the bass, drums, horns, etc., are going then no one can hear those nuances of tone anyway. All that stuff I was dialing in and out in my living room is washed away and covered up. Originally Posted by rpjazzguitar
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Those are all the reasons I use a Bose Compact and have a few pedals to choose from for the various guitars I play, most of which will also run a Roland GR-55. Everything is solid state, but somehow sounds really great most of the time.
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Ron, You mention you use a Bose compact. I use that as well. I recently purchased a Cremona 16 and it sounds nice through the amp but I feel the high register doesn't have that rounded tone I am looking for. I attribute it to the 2 inch speakers in the array. Do you have the T1 mixer? What settings are you using? I recently have been looking at tube amps and now this thread has me re-thinking that. I would like to use the amp for my strat as well but in reality it is only for playing at home. (love the Strat and tube combo), I was looking at the GB hot rod deluxe made in Mexico. I have a concern about the quality of the PC boards Fender uses. Rivera is coming out with a newer version of the 25 watt 10" Jazz Suprema in about two months but that is mainly for clean Jazz tones which I want for the Cremona. Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks RichLast edited by Patriots2006; 09-19-2017 at 11:27 AM.
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