Extreme Tube Compression

[guitician]

In this clip the guitarist is getting a type of extreme compression that was used in the seventies by rock bands. Did they just play amps that needed fixing? A mismatched set of power tubes? A bad transformer? I don't think any amp that is working 100% will get this sound, will they?
Whiskey.mp3

[teemuk]

I would go from considering "amps" to considering treble booster and fuzz effects...


IMHO

[guitician]

Thanks, got all that from boxes... I have built everything there is. And I have built some tube pre-amps that will get a fat fuzzy tone, but it's not the same as the output section compressing from some unusual type of operation.

[riz]

Sounds like "ten" to me...

[DRH1958]

Agree with riz, small amp on ten. Natural distortion or a small amount of fuzz box effect pushing the front end hard combined with power tube saturation.

[guitician]

I know its turned up all the way.... It has a tone that your not going to get turning it to ten on correctly operating amps. Do you think that sounds like Joe Perry, or Billy Gibbons, or Jack White?

[DRH1958]

What does a tweed Deluxe sound like on ten? It could sound like that and be operating fine or at least operating without something being wrong. They never dreamed people would dime these amps back when they made them, so nothing is wrong, it's just operating at a level never intended by Leo Fender. So it depends if you call this "correctly operating" or not. Think Neil Young "Cinnamon Girl".

[loudthud]

To me this sounds like a tweed Champ or Princeton and a Les Paul. No scooped mids and something with a 6 or 8 inch speaker. The key is how the low notes sound around the 1:35 mark. They kind of fuzz out like a small speaker would. A Deluxe would have clearer bass with it's 12 inch speaker. The Volume the amp was played at doesn't sound that loud to me. No hint of any kind of feedback like you get in a high SPL situation.

Much of Led Zeplin and ZZ Top tracks were recorded on smallish amps but those tracks don't have the fuzzed out bass like this one. No telling what tricks were used.

Edit: Part of the weak bass might be light B+ filtering.

[g1]

I don't know if it's worth noting or not, but this is a studio recording.
One thing that crossed my mind was the "herzog" idea, where a small amp is overdriven and used as a preamp for another amp.

[bsco]

I like the sound of that recording....It has a distorted sound that is not over-bearing and all the notes are clear...Maye it isn't distortion but overdrive??and with a small tube amp maxed out feeding a small speaker?? I think you would have to experiment a bit to see what you could come up with....you would have to find the right combination of guitar, pedal, amp and speaker....but whatever it is the guitar player is using in sounds very good.....

[Enzo]

The recording process is never invisible, it always leaves its mark.

[J M Fahey]

It sounds, to begin with, like an American amp, played loud enough to reach clipping and a little beyond, not "extreme compression" by any means, sounds "little" like a mid/small combo, open back of course.
A Twin, even if also open back, would have had a much more solid and full sound.

That amp has a problem: there's a horribly biased gain stage, probably by a leaking coupling cap, the affected triode is practically into cutoff, and working like a sort of poor noise gate (or plain gate) but strong signal it receives makes it pass signal anyway, just chopping the trailing edge, so it's not the first triode.

That's why the amp does not show much sustain, if any at all.
Natural power tube compression is counteracted by the gate.

It's heard very clearly, the sound which gets buzzier with decay, and the gate type cutoff at: 1:34 , but in general notes played have a buzzy distortion, not clipping but more related to what crossover distortion does.

There is other possibility, very dead power tubes or them biased very cold, which would also cause a buzzy noise gate type effect, but trust more the leaky coupling cap possibility.

It *might* be a fuzz pedal with dead batteries, but trust more the poorly maintained tube amp.

I remember when I started doing this, in the 70's , and met tons of amps sounding like this or worse: low power, dirty in a bad way, chopped sound, plus being hummy and buzzy, plus too large/heavy for their power.

Sold tons of loud and clean SS amps to pro Musicians who were sick of their old tube stuff.

Besides, everybody thought tubes were on their way out.

The era of the mighty Acoustic, Peavey, Sunn, Kustom.

[Pedro Vecino]

I see nothing wrong with the equipment for this sound. It could be achieved with a Les Paul Deluxe with minihumbuckings, a Mesa Mark and a small compressor type Dynacomp or similar without much problem. Also remember that the recording is crushed by the compression of the tape and mp3 format. The style of the guitarist also collaborates to it (certainly heard Mick Taylor) :-)

[guitician]

OK, the Cinnamon Girl reference is a good point that brings up the fact that out of all the Tweed Deluxes that Neil owns only his #1 sounds like it does. When all the others are operating normally, why would one sound so much better? And the way the clip sounds @1:34 is another thing that had me wondering, why so flabby? But I think that the speaker may be bringing out what the amp is doing, not the speaker breaking up. Juan, you say "Very cold" and "Horribly biased", wouldn't they be considered extreme? I have an old tube PA amp from 1958 that is stock and it will sound like a Maestro Fuzz when the output section is going full power. Most other amps that I've played cranked never get fuzzy, they just sound like Ibanez tube screamers basically. It may be that this guys amp is like Neil's Deluxe and that it has a special character all it's own.

[guitician]

Here's Don Felder getting a very similar tone live... https://youtu.be/4XWxyQVqP-M?t=2m6s