When you read all the forums you find some pretty smart technical people.
I is interesting to note that the advent of guitar sound was by ear. Leo, Jim, George and Adolph all were about different, but particular sounds ranging from clean to distorted. They didn't know the first thing about the physics of the wood in the guitars or the physics of the vacuum tube. They all played it by ear. They designed by ear. The players we all admire and want to emulate looked for what could be done with what they had and how they could get more.
Jimi played the amplifier. He was from another planet. It was a combination that did not come out and evolution in tube technology, but a sound desire that brought pleaseure to our ears. Amps do not make great guitar players, hours and ours on the fret board make great guitar players.
Great amp builders change and arrange components to meet a desired sound. There is not a formula a piece of paper on earth that can produce a great sound. Only a build that has been "dicked with" can do so. Have fun building and innovating. Don't get caught up in the math. Blow up a few things. That will learn ya.
Regards to all my amp building friends, Chuck Harrell
I is interesting to note that the advent of guitar sound was by ear. Leo, Jim, George and Adolph all were about different, but particular sounds ranging from clean to distorted. They didn't know the first thing about the physics of the wood in the guitars or the physics of the vacuum tube. They all played it by ear. They designed by ear. The players we all admire and want to emulate looked for what could be done with what they had and how they could get more.
Jimi played the amplifier. He was from another planet. It was a combination that did not come out and evolution in tube technology, but a sound desire that brought pleaseure to our ears. Amps do not make great guitar players, hours and ours on the fret board make great guitar players.
Great amp builders change and arrange components to meet a desired sound. There is not a formula a piece of paper on earth that can produce a great sound. Only a build that has been "dicked with" can do so. Have fun building and innovating. Don't get caught up in the math. Blow up a few things. That will learn ya.
Regards to all my amp building friends, Chuck Harrell
I have spent many hours trying to get good guitar sounds.
I tried with valves but couldn't get a good sound with one or two stages.
In the 1980's I found a circuit in Wireless World for a valve emulating soft limiter circuit.
Even then I had to experiment with it to get a good range of sounds.
I tried with valves but couldn't get a good sound with one or two stages.
In the 1980's I found a circuit in Wireless World for a valve emulating soft limiter circuit.
Even then I had to experiment with it to get a good range of sounds.
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Yes, in late 70'Th I come to the similar design, but instead of transistors I used diodes in feedback, counter-parallel. Then added one more in series for asymmetric distortion. And later in 1980'Th I come across BOSS HM-2 pedal, and found there some improvements. They had a couple of Ge diodes in series after the opamp, and one more pair of Si dodes shunting the output. Plus, they added a 2-band EQ, on quite interesting "guitar" bands, to emulate guitar cabs. I consider it, the best guitar tube drive pedal I ever heard.
Electric guitar sound seems to have started with standard RCA audio amp circuits from the back of their tube catalogs - and those were designed by audio engineers working with slide rules and data-sheets, not by ear!
Leo took those circuits and tinkered with them, sure, tweaked them to suit the tastes of his customers (country / surf musicians). But he needed a starting point, audio circuits that actually worked, produced audio, were reliable, and used the cheapest tubes he could find.
In America, there is a tendency to glorify the solitary ignorant tinkerer, and reject educated knowledge. In most of the rest of the world, it is the opposite. Reality is somewhere in between, certainly some fantastic things have come from ignorant tinkerers, but most progress in the world comes from educated people working in organized teams.
Going a bit further back than the RCA catalog, there is the story of the vacuum tube itself. The vacuum tubes that Leo used were the product of lots of hard work by teams of scientists and engineers and manufacturing specialists at places like Bell Labs and RCA, who took Lee De Forest's "Audion", figured out how it actually worked, improved it, shrank it, and worked out ways to mass produce it in factories. So that story started with a tinkerer, but only progressed once educated people jumped in.
Fortunately for us, the world contains both educated scientists and engineers, and inspired tinkerers. Sometimes both are the same person, sometimes not. Either way, the world benefits from both mindsets.
Here is a page full of crazy guitar-related circuits from an inspired tinkerer. I haven't built any of these, so I can't offer any perspective of my own. Perhaps you will enjoy some of them: Tim Escobedo's Circuit Snippets
-Gnobuddy
The beauty of this circuit is it isn't hard clipping.
The pot changes the sound from almost clean to quite a good valve sound.
The output waveform is soft clipped.
Yes, and the next step is mystification. If you peel of all that marketing BS of the last decades around audio, there remains very little substance that justifies high priced materials, components or equipment.
Brian May used physics to design his guitar to feedback easily. Is has resonant cavities inside, and gives Queen their unique guitar sound.
Leo's values seem to be the GE tables, not the RCA tables. (The differences are very small, mostly in Rk.)
Probably means the GE book was closer to the top of the pile.
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