Herreid Music Newsletter
The Tone Ranger
- Greetings, tonemeisters. Welcome to another column dedicated to the
pursuit of killer tone. Our opening topic is the Fender Blues Junior
tube amp. Upon recently purchasing the Blues Junior, I immediately
used it on a recording session. It did a great job of handling the
front end punishment my Tube Screamer pedals have to offer. It also
has that wonderful fender clean tone we all know and love. Turning
up volume one or kicking the fat footswitch adds more preamp gain,
resulting in a smooth ''Stevie Ray Vaughn'' type chunk. Less preamp
gain and more master volume results in a clean tone that is both warm
and clear. The bass, midrange, and treble controls are very well suited
to the amp and the onboard reverb sounds good.
- Even at a mere twenty watts, cranking the amp results in smooth musical
sustain. Its twelve-inch speaker seems capable of handling all the
amp can dish out while maintaining a kind of vintage distortion vibe.
Time will tell if the speaker will hold up to my continuous punishment.
(I punish my equipment not because I hate it but because I love what
I do)
- I've always been fascinated by the magic of the strings and speakers
when they talk to each other. Picture this: say you pick a note on
the guitar and it's vibrating 440 times a second. That is acoustic
energy, but now the magnet in your guitar's pickup senses that vibration
and converts it into alternate current. Now we are dealing with electric
energy that travels through your volume and tone controls, down your
chord and into the amp. When the speaker receives this signal, it
responds by vibrating at the same frequency as the note you're are
playing and amplifies that signal out into the air. Your strings are
still vibrating at 440 times per second and the speaker is sending
out a massive dose of the same frequency. The string is literally
excited by this duplicate vibration and the result is sustain. The
other bi-product of this is the sweet harmonics that seem to ooze
off of the notes as they sustain.
- The speakers talking to the strings is a very important ingredient in my own
personal tone recipe. Some other spices involved include using both pick
attack and volume selectively and having a good, clean tone as a base.
Switching channels on the amp and using a few distortion pedals gives me a
wide palette of tones to choose from.
- It's very important to hear what is going on around you when you play. What
fits the song at that point in time is very important. Controlling a number of
tones is difficult but can be very satisfying. If you are not careful, it can
interfere with the music. But if you learn to flow with it, there is never a
dull moment.
- Sometimes I coax great sounds out of my gear. Other times my gear makes me
jump around like a nervous lunatic trying to squeeze the sounds out of it that
I hear in my head. If that starts to happen, I pull back and play for the
song.
- And so I travel between these two extremes leaving with you these words:
- All or nothing, baby.
- The Tone Ranger
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