Tilt-leg amps - winner or loser?

[radioguy]

I recently acquired a vintage fender piggyback with tilt-back legs and while sitting here looking at it, I realized something I never thought about before. The amps sits at an angle of about 35-40 degrees from vertical which means that the acoustic axis of the speakers is pointing up from horizontal at this same angle. But it is well known that single cone speakers become increasingly directional as the frequency increases and above a few hundred Hz, they can become more directional than horns. So - tilting the amp back like this pretty much guarantees that the frequency response at the location of the audience has serious HF rolloff. Aside from maybe giving the player a better blast onstage directly in front of the amp, the overall effect is pretty negative. Seems pretty stupid to me and Fender's better idea may not be such a good idea at all ?????

[The Dude]

On the upside, when the cabinet is aimed at your ears instead of your knees, you can hear it better. Thus, you can turn it down and give your soundman better control. There are many other variables in play in any live situation- i.e. stage height, materials used to construct the floors and ceilings, stage curtains or not, distance to audience, etc., etc. No live situation is perfect. There will be times when the tilt-back works well, and times when it doesn't. Every situation is different. So,......I would call it a winner idea simply because it IS advantageous sometimes and when it's not, you don't have to use them.

[bob p]

If you've got a good PA, then your amp is really going to be functioning as a monitor, and it's there for you. The mic is what's there for everyone else. As an example of this, I noticed the Phish guitar player (forget his name) using what looked like a Vibrolux Reverb positioned in front of him on the floor, tilted back, pointing at him like a floor monitor. The tilt-back legs were helping him a lot.

Even if you don't have PA support, I find the tilt-back legs to be worth having. I've had many an occasion when my 2x12 cabinets were blasting sound at my knees, and I wish that they had tilt-back legs so that I could hear them better without having to lift them up onto a stand.

My Twin Reverb has tilt-back legs. I can't remember a time when I've ever wished that it didn't have them. When I didn't need them I just didn't use them.

I'm seriously considering adding tilt-back legs to all of my Avatar 2x12 cabs.

So I guess I'm going to side with the Dudester -- It's better to have tilt-back legs and not need them than to need tilt-back legs and not have them.

[The Dude]

I find that a lot of guitar players don't realize how loud they are until you aim the cabinet at them instead of the audience. Most of the time it can solve the "You guys are too loud" problem.

[Enzo]

And how about that audience? I've been on stages where an amp on the floor would still shoot over their heads, but most little dance bars have a stage about a foot tall, so the amp is blowing into their legs and asses anyways. The drunks and dancers don;t come to the bar to listen to that exquisite guitar amp tone, they come to drink and get laid. Tilt back is all about hearing yourself.

[jpfamps]

I used to use the tilt back legs on my Fender Twin until I felt the temperature of the front panel after a long gig.

Not sure that heat rising into the amp is great idea for long term reliability.

[trevorus]

I use tilt back legs on the Plexi combo I built, because it is great for actually hearing yourself on either a cramped stage, or one where you have to keep a check on volume.

[J M Fahey]

Let's get back to the early 60's to understand this.
The actual reason for tilt back legs (and Fender themselves stated that) was to to point the amp some 45º up, and have the sound bounce into the roof and reach the back of the audience.
Forget PAs and Theaters/Stadiums, think the average crummy dance hall, where 95% of *working* musicians played, and where the backline was all you had.
The (**voice only**) PA was usually something like this:

FWIW, many British VOX amps or WEM PA columns also were tilt back, for the exact same reason.
And when Fender introduced separate head amps (Piggiyback), they had to add some clamps so the head was firmly attached to the cabinet.

[mhuss]

IME, most guitar amp/speaker combinations are too bright on axis anyway. I have been leaning back my speakers for a while, even when using a cab that has no legs. As others have commented, you can hear exactly what is coming out then, both volume and tone wise. What sounds good to you way off axis probably is a ice pick experience for anyone on axis. I find the sound disperses better in a small room too. One additional plus, if you stash your cover behind the amp, leaving room for air, it limits blowback from open back cabs and the resulting "too loud" complaints from the drummer. ;-)

--mark

[Paleo Pete]

I use the tilt back legs on my Super Reverb any time I'm on a stage where I can't get at least 10 feet in front of it...which is most of the time. I don't need it playing to my knees, I need it pointed at my ears...It also does bounce off the ceiling some, which helps get sound out back when you're not running through the PA.

So I built a tilt back stand for my Fender Champ, both for band practice, which works great since we play at low volume, usually at 8 on the Champ, and for some of the low key places we plan to be booking. I won't need a high power amp, but the Champ on the floor is playing to my ankles...Here's what it looks like, not as much tilt as the Fender amp legs, but perfect if I'm 6 to 8 feet away.

[R.G.]

This is an issue we attacked with the Workhorse amps.

10" and 12" speakers have problems with beaming highs. The highs come out of the speaker in a "beam" that's less than 45 degrees wide. If you're right in front of the speaker, the sound is noticeably - even painfully! - more treble-y than off-axis. In general, your choices are to turn up the treble so you can hear it, and put icepicks in the audience's ears, or to point the speakers at you and sound dull to the audience, or to lean the amp back and sound good to you and PART of the audience, but let the others hear muffled treble.

People have done various cures for this, including stuffing something in front of the speaker to soak up the treble, and the "beam blockers" suspended in front of the speakers to reflect the treble back into the speaker.

We used a rounded-top cone suspended in the center of the face of the speaker by a decorative frame. I poo-poo-ed this idea when I first heard it described, thinking that the acoustics would make it more intricately lobed and less useful. To my surprise, it worked GREAT. This thing forced the treble to spread out in a wide cone in front of the speaker. There was subjectively little difference in treble for about 90-120 degrees around the speaker axis.

More to the point, you could stand anything more than about 3 feet in front of the amp, and the treble spread UP to your ears at about the same level as it did to the audience. Having done a lot of study on acoustics, acoustic spreaders and lenses, and speaker cabs in general, I was very surprised. But it did work very well.

We took a lot of flack about the looks of the grilles that held the cones; people compared them unfavorably to hubcaps, which they did resemble. But they worked.

[bob p]

PVC FTW!

[bob p]

10" and 12" speakers have problems with beaming highs. The highs come out of the speaker in a "beam" that's less than 45 degrees wide. If you're right in front of the speaker, the sound is noticeably - even painfully! - more treble-y than off-axis.

15" speakers do it too -- if you look at polar response charts for any MI driver/cab combination, 45-degrees seems to be a common number. It's funny that if you read the threads on this at TalkBass, everyone is up in arms about off-axis polar response on bass amps. The prevailing wisdom over there is that all of your speakers should be in a vertical line array to maximize dispersion and to minimize horizontal nodal effects like you'd have with a 4x12. Everyone there is worried about the audience not hearing your tone in terms of it's full power spectrum.

I think those guys worry way too much. While the vociferous few complain about beaming (much like we're doing here), I don't find "beamy" cabs without the tilt-back legs like a 1960B or a "fridge" to be a huge problem -- when it comes to what I hear on stage, I actually think that it's helpful / relaxing to be able to step out of the beam now and then.* (see below)

There were solutions to the beaming problem that came along a long, long time ago. Leo had a good idea with the V-front Super and the tilt-back legs in the BF era, and Jim had a really good idea with the 1960A.

* And at the risk of speaking heresy -- maybe beaming isn't so bad. In the kinds of places that I play, getting away from the mix isn't such a bad thing, even for the audience. My audiences don't consist of people paying $100 to be confined to a seat, and expecting a perfect mix. Most of the people that I'm playing for are freely mobile, and like the ability to move into and out of places where the mix is goodor bad or loud or quiet.

[g1]

There are a few companies building "wedges" so you can tilt back amps that don't have the legs.
Here is one that offers several different angles up to 20 degrees:
Ampwedge Polyurethane Amplifier Isolation Floor Wedge | Musician's Friend

[bob p]

There are all sorts of fancy amp stands that you can buy to replace tilt-back legs. They're pretty popular among the guys who want permanent installations in their music rooms.

As far as gigging setups go, I've seen some pretty clever solutions. Like pulling the two back casters out of an amp, so it just sits on the two front casters and tilts back. Or my personal favorite -- wedging a couple of empty beer bottles under the front of the cab to tilt it backwards.

I particularly like the tone that you get from empty beer bottles. I can attest to the fact that the amp does sound better... though I have to admit, I'm not sure if it's the process of emptying the bottles or shoving them under the cabinet that resulted in the tonal improvement. I'll have to do some more testing and get back to you on this...