Solid State Guitar Amps book

[Steve Conner]

Hi all

I recently discovered this book available as a PDF:
http://www.thatraymond.com/downloads...ttala_v1.0.pdf

Anyway, it's "Solid State Guitar Amplifiers" by Teemu Kyttala, who I'm going to guess is "teemuk" on the forum. It's going to take me quite a while to get through it, but what I've seen so far looks great. Though I started out as a tube purist, I began to suspect that there was nothing fundamentally superior about tubes over transistors, and when I dared to try some solid-state designs, I was surprised by how good they sounded. And the author seems to agree with me, at least...

(my apologies if it's not supposed to be available! )

[daz]

I never had a problem finding ss amps that sounded good. It was always the feel/dynamics that didn't work for me. I couldn't tell tho till i'd try them in a live situation then every time no matter how good they sounded something felt horrible to me in that context. Yet at home i couldn't tell at all. I still am not at allsure what it is. i've even had some that cleaned up well with guitar pot, but something would always just not work for me live. There was one however that did seem to work for me, tho it was so long ago i'm not sure i'd feel that way about it today being a far more experienced player than i was then.

But for practice at home they can be really good and fun.

[Steve Conner]

If they sounded good (I class "feel" as being an aspect of tone) at home but not live, that would suggest that the power section didn't emulate tube behaviour properly. Reason: At home the power amp is turned down and making negligible amounts of distortion, so almost all the tone comes from the preamp. But at the gig you're cranking it up to full power if not beyond, and it gets a chance to show its character.

SS amp makers have been doing the current-feedback speaker damping thing since the 70s, but there's more to an overdriven tube output stage than that: sag, transformer saturation, intermodulation from ripple, crossover distortion from self-biasing of the power tubes, and so on. All of these could theoretically be modelled, and the book shows circuits to do it.

I've had a similar experience with one of the old CBS Fender solid-state amps, it was fun to play at home, but had a strange, wooden feel at stage volumes. I assumed it was too clean and powerful, and didn't squish and distort enough. I've also tried playing bass straight through a high-powered PA amp, and it felt just the same.

If you're just building amps to please yourself, then tubes are very attractive. If you copy a classic tube amp, you know you're going to get good tone with a minimum of head scratching. I'm just interested in solid-state out of curiosity: is it really fundamentally bad, or is it just prejudice?

[daz]

is it really fundamentally bad, or is it just prejudice?

At the risk of sounding cliche, It's not bad or good, just different. like i said, at home they can not only be fun but as good or better than tube amps. i also think it has more to do with things aside from the cranked PA part of the equation because i always used amps that rely on preamp distortion and have PA's that are too loud to really get burning in the small bar gigs that were what we mostly played. I figured that because i'm used to using my hands/playing style to make my tone fit into the mix just right, SS amps didn't allow me to do that. I dunno, it's still hard to explain, but i think SS always felt super stiff to me in a band mix. And you know, come to think of it that makes sense because when i used huge filters in my now infamous () EL34 build, that was exactly what happened. In a mix it stuck out like a sore thumb and i could not make it fit, and that was part and parcel of the amp feeling very still and less dynamic. Thats very much part of what wasn't right with SS amps for me when played in a mix.

but like i said, they are just different and ss amps have thir place. they can be even better for recording because you can easily create circuits that allow tonal adjustment that tube amps can only dream of. Sweepable mid knobs and things like that where you can tune them to get the exact sound for a recording or just as a change of pace when practicing and becoming tired of the same tone. I purposely added thing to my build to make it as versitile as possible for the same reasons, but i could never create as much variation as a SS can with a few pennies worth of parts.

[Enzo]

Teemu has his book posted for free download over at Solid State Guitar Amp Forum | DIY Amplifiers - Index in that forum as well. I downloaded it some time ago buy haven;t finished reading it yet. A little editorializing in the opening chapter, but otherwise looks good.