How does adding reverb affect amps (tweed bassman) tone?

[gytyr1968]

I'm not a tech (I'll be saying this more than once on this forum...haha) but why does no one like adding reverb to tweed amps?
I've owned a Kendrick bassman w/reverb and just had a Blankenship FatBoy w/SC.
The reverb was decent.
The VanAmps Sloemate i had was actually really nice. Just about no noise and sounded just as full as the Blankenship. But i didnt want to deal with more ac outlet mess. I want set it and forget it. I'm always rushing to a wedding gig.

But other than adding a little hiss, does it affect highs/lows/etc.

From a tech standpoint, what can u tell me about reverb cons?

Thanx
- Robert

[Chuck H]

There's no real aversion to reverb per se. It's more about a few things. One is that a reverb does reruire that you pad the dry signal and re amplify to mix with the reverb. This adds noise, loss of fidelity, etc... Well, it's not so pronounced that you can really detect it by ear, but if your a purist... At least that seems to be the excuse. It requires more gain stages carefully managed. I personally don't notice any objectionable signal degredation or noise with a well implemented reverb. If you play the amp mostly clean or only slightly distorted I really like built in reverbs. The other reason...

If you get your heavy OD tones by cranking the amp then a built in reverb becomes a garbled mess. Many of the amps built by home brewers are all about good cranked tube amp distortion because there are no main stream amps (and only a few boutique) that can do it. Many vintage style circuits that don't implement a built in reverb can do it. So we built them for their merrits in this area.

Bottom line is that it's hard enough building amps from scratch without complicating the circuit and layout with reverb. As noted here many times, reverb becomes much less important when your amp produces big full tones. Amps that have a bunch of peripheral circuits, "bleeders" and pad/re amp situations as well as stability enhancing add ons tend to sound dry and bland. Reverb really helps these amps. Good players recognise that a good amp doesn't need a reverb to bolster the tone back to something dynamic sounding. Many boutique amps are based in these ideals.

Because my amps derrive their distortion from ODing the full amp I don't use a built in reverb, BUT... One of my customers REALLY wanted reverb. So I built him a "Satellite" reverb combo. The main amp speaker output plugs into the Satellite and then into the cabinet. In the Satellite some of the output power of the main amp is filched to drive a reverb pan and the pan output has it's own amplifier and speaker. This way the main amp has no reverb within the OD circuits and the OD from the main amp IS the signal that gets reverberated cleanly as a secondary signal. For amps that derrive their distortion from clipped power tubes this method seems to work very well.

[gytyr1968]

That covers it!
Thanx Chuck!