If you’ve heard guitarists talking about amps, perhaps you’ve heard the terms “head”, “cab”, “combo”, and “chassis”. Often, manufacturers will offer the same amp in multiple configurations to better suit the playing customers. For those of you who are new to the land of guitar gear, those terms refer to different formats for a single amplifier.

Chassis
For starters, the chassis is the pressed steel or aluminum metal box that all of the knobs and wiring go into. This is the brain and the power of the amplifier and consists of all of the controls, the wiring, the transformers, and the tubes (if it’s a tube/valve amp). Please keep in mind that removing the chassis from a combo box or head shell could expose you to lethal levels of electricity. If you don’t know what you’re doing, take your amp to a competent technician for any under-the-hood work. I know it sounds sexy to be able to say you’re working on your own amp. But it’s so much less sexy for your mom/wife/girlfriend/friends to have to tell people you’re no longer with us because you shocked the crap out of yourself and died. As a general rule, let’s just say the safest thing for you to stick into your amp chassis is a 1/4” guitar cable, deal? Anyway, the chassis is a the metal box that actually IS an amplifier. The wooden box that it gets stuck into defines the configuration.

Head and Cab
The first configuration is a head and speaker cabinet. This is two separate wooden boxes: one for the amp chassis and another for the speaker(s). Many players prefer this configuration and it’s because there are a number of benefits. For starters, it cuts down on the weight of the amp when lugging it in and out of gigs- not mathematically speaking, but when you can carry one part in each hand, it just distributes the weight and makes it seem easier. The second benefit is that it allows you to mix and match heads and cabs to see which speakers and cabs work for which gigs or recording sessions. I have a number of speaker cabs and I end up bringing different ones depending on the show and the amount of space I have on stage. Also, just a word of caution, some speaker cabs LOOK loud because of their size and it’s easy for sound men/women to ask you to turn down while you’re still unloading your gearwagon. haha In those cases, I bring a second, very small cab that LOOKS quiet so that I can maintain peace and harmony (and keep working so that my children have food to eat and shoes on da feet). In a head and cab format, you have the ability to mix and match components to better suit your gigs. Another benefit that I have heard from others is that a head/cab format is better for the amp itself. Namely, because you’re separating the chassis (filled with intricately soldered components) from the vibrating speaker box that could do some damage. Since a speaker cab is a resonant wooden box, it will vibrate when you put music through it (duh) and that vibration could wear away at the strength of soldered connections over time. I have not owned an amp long enough to actually see this happen and the old amps that I have owned have had plenty of work done to keep them updated and running in tip-top shape.

Combo
The second configuration is a combo (short for “combination” of both head and speaker cabinet). The combo amp is a favorite in metropolitan cities like New York where a player might potentially carry his or her entire rig on a subway or might have to carry the whole rig up three flights of stairs to the gig. Having the whole amp movable by one handle is a luxury. Also, lots of players talk about having a “grab-n-go” amp, which would be something easy to grab quickly and head out to a rehearsal or small club gig. Other benefits to a combo are that it’s normally less expensive than the matching head/cab version and it requires one less cable to carry since the speaker cable is often contained in the chassis itself and a head/cab version would need you to plug in a speaker cable between the head and cab every time you played. I’ll probably talk specifically about open back cabs vs. closed back cabs in a future post, but I should also note that just about every combo I’ve ever seen uses and open-back cab design because if it was closed back then the tubes would create too much heat in the closed container. Essentially, the open back creates ventilation for the chassis. If you prefer the sound of closed-back cabs, it almost forces you to choose the head/cab version.

Since each version has its own benefits (remember, everything in this world has a feature set), I’ll leave it up to you to decide which one you most prefer. If you’d like to see a comparison of the same amp in both formats, I recorded a video today of the Egnater Tweaker in both configurations and posted it on YouTube.

Love from the kitchen,
-The Tone Chef

I’d like to start with a couple of caveats:

#1) to each his own. what I love is just that- what I love. What I think is just that- what I think.
#2) Everybody’s playing situations are different and my evaluations are based solely on my own experience and playing situations. Yours will differ.

So I’ve been hearing a lot of guys talk about the Line 6 M13 overdrive and distortion sounds. I’ve heard that they sound digital or overly compressed or this or that. Personally, I’d like to talk about my experience with using the M13 in a band context. One thing that I’m continually reminded of is that tones are not really tones in a vacuum. Just like words are not words in a vacuum, everything must be taken in context. As they say, “everything is relative”. For instance, If I told you that you had 45 minutes to live, it would seem tragically and terrifyingly short. If on the other hand, I told you that you needed to hold bricks above your head for that same amount of time, it might seem like it might as well be forever. Everything is relative, right?

So drives work the same way. We have to understand drives in the context that they’re being used. Side story: I worked the NAMM booth for a large manufacturer that featured live acts all weekend. One band had two guitar players and while they were soundchecking, we all snickered at how one guitar player had the most glorious guitar tone and the other had the most awful tones during his line check. It sounded like an AM radio transmission of somebody dragging a cookie sheet through a parking lot. Holy crap it was bad. BUT, all of us ate our words when they were asked to play as a band to get the house mix dialed in. All of a sudden this guy that we thought was gonna victimize us with bad tone helped to create this perfect blend of tones, where there was no cancellation and everything was audible. It was beyond glorious. Totally inspiring. Afterwards, we all went and checked out his gear to see if we could possibly aspire to “suck with such great success”… haha. Again, in a vacuum, that tone was horrendous, but once mixed in to the context of the music, it was perfect. And I think if we look at the difference between dialing in tones to be the featured single guitar leader and being one musician in an ensemble of sonic contributors then we might start to broaden our scope of what is “good” tone and what isn’t.

Here are some examples (audio is linked in the title):

feels_like • Leann Rimes
This is standard pop fare from the young gal out of Nashville. She hired LA players to make her a pop record and this is one of the cooler songs on there. These tones are big. Plexi-style amps and 4×12 cabs big. But in the context of the band, it sure sounds like the low end is dialed out. I’m not sure if that happened in the mix or if the guitar player is really good at what he does (I’m sure it was the combination of both). These tones should probably sound good without the band…

slipped_away • Toto
This is great Lukather playing. So many of us love Luke’s playing, but question his guitar tones. Here’s what I love about them in the context of this song: they’re smooth and rubbery and they leave plenty of space for the vocals and keys to fill that midrange area. HOWEVER, I think this tone would sound unacceptable in my living room while I was dialing it in alone.If I heard these tones from my amp, I’d be frustrated, but here on the record, I love them.

let your glory shine • Lincoln Brewster
LB’s dirty little secret? Every guitar tone on this record was done with a POD product. haha. NO mic’d cabs on the whole record. And they freakin RAWK. In my ears, I can hear the resonance of the cab as he mutes the strings in the hook/riff. Or not. Maybe I hear a POD. And some people will say, “yeah, but LB was a studio engineer and that’s why it sounds so good”. This is just proof positive that in the right hands, this stuff sounds unbelievably good (warm, squishy, and resonant) which proves the opposite that if it sucks, it’s probably you.

everything_must_go • The Dailies
This is actually a record I got hired to do a couple of years ago, but it’s one of my favorite session stories. The session was at Eldorado Studios in Burbank and the engineer has been around and worked on some great great records. He was the Pro Tools guy on John Mayer’s Heavier Things over at Ocean Way, he engineered My Chemical Romance’s last record, Avenged Sevenfold’s last record, Ben Harper’s currently unreleased record, BFD drum sample library, and so on. He’s got really trustworthy ears in my book because he’s worked with some of the names that we speak in hushed and reverent whispers around here. So when I dialed up this tele sound for the chorus of this tune, he called me in to the control room to see if I wanted to use it. You see, it was this old Blue Flower Tele in major disrepair. Stupid amount of backbow on the neck and the strings fretted out at just about fret, but the pups sounded awesome and the guitar just had a cool thing happening. So when I asked what he thought was off about the tones, he actually used the word “sh@t” to better describe it for me.  I said I wanted to just try a pass at it to see how it sat in the mix. This was probably one of my favorite tones on the whole record for how well it lifts out the chorus. I just heard Lenny Kravitz all over this thing. On it’s own, this tone was “sh*t”, in the context of the tune, it’s awesome. And my little compliment and victory is that the engineer totally agreed once he heard it in context.

So the whole point of this is to speak generally about guitar tones, but specifically about my experience with the M13. If you aren’t digging it, by all means, please sell it and find something that inspires you. But if you haven’t yet tried it, I’d like to encourage you to really explore some of the more unique tones in this thing. I spent an entire gig on Wednesday using variations of the Colordrive because there was another guitar player and I wanted something that felt a little more like a HellBilly or Red Llama. If you have no desire to try or buy the M13, that’s cool too. In that case, I’d like to encourage you to try some more unique sounds on your board. We’re artists for goodness sakes.

I’d like to add a forum post from another player that I thought would add to the conversation. This is courtesy of user, StompBoxBlues out of Norway:

I’ve already told this here on this forum before, but it is apropos for your NAMM story.

I started doing a lot of home recording some years back. Played all the parts (even though I am definitely NO keyboardist) and sang, and bass wasn’t a problem, but also programmed drums, etc.

So I record my song (can be heard on my site in my sig) called “Shot in the Dark” and record and have a good mix, and all that is left (I save the most fun for last) is to put in the guitar solo.

So I have my (I think it was) V-amp2, and I loop the solo measures so I can just punch-in the solo. First round it isn’t sitting right in the mix so as it is looping over and over, I adjust tone, gain, everything, on my guitar IN the mix…after a while it starts getting how I want it and I record it and am happy with the sound and tone and all.

So I mixdown and “master” it, and make a CD, put it up on my web site.

Several months later, I happen to open up the song on my recorder, and just by chance I muted all the other tracks except the solo guitar…
Immidiately, I thought “oh…this must have been a throwaway take or something” because the guitar sounds like a misquito fart through a bullhorn…nasty, raspy, sounds like a lo-fi patch run through a meat grinder. AWFUL… In all that time i adjusted EQ and all on the V-amp and guitar, I realized I never heard the guitar just by itself, it was always in the context of the mix…

I unmute the rest and WOW…sounds just like I wanted it.
I literally spent 10-20 minutes just in awe as I lowered the faders of the rest of the instruments, and raised them slowly again…as I lower the guitar got nastier, nastier, nastier, nasty! Up again it got better, better, better, BEST…

It was like a magic trick…for my ears.

That day was a total revalation for me. I really ought to isolate the thing (if I can find the backup of the data again) and put it up on my web site just so folks can hear the difference…

Aurally It seemed like there was kind of a “honeycombing” happening as I raised the mix…like the nasty parts smoothed out like if you take your hands and have the fingers meet one after the other, staggered or something.

I leave tomorrow morning at 4am for the Worship Arts Leadership Institute Summit in Houston where I’ll be leading two workshops on “Tones, Tools, & Tips in Worship”.  Normally I don’t stress about travel gigs, but two things have me anxious about this one.

The first is that I’m teaching a workshop on tone- and normally I’d be just fine with that except for the fact that I have to backline (or borrow) much of the amps and guitars that I’ll need to create the tones. It takes some of the control out of my hands since I won’t be as intimately familiar with the gear as I would my own. The second thing that has me anxious is the fact that I’m bringing along some of my own valued gear and I am losing faith in the airlines with every trip I take. I’d love to carry on gear but there are strict regulations about the size and quantity of carry-ons so much of my equipment will sit in the belly of the plane while I’m making the 3-hour trek from SoCal to Houston. I have had the most random stuff stolen from my luggage while it’s in the hands of airline personnel and I’m experiencing some anxiety about everything making it to the workshop (and back home next week).

So, in an attempt to calm myself down, I’ve made a list of tips that will act as pacifiers and to make me less of a vain and fragile guitar player.

1. Pack a Woobie. A Woobie is a token, item, or keepsake that acts as your safe-place. Lots of kids hang on to a teddy bear or a blanket. Guitar players are just grown up children, so it stands to reason that you’ll need a Woobie as well. Mine is my good luck Jimi that sits on the board.

2. Have something to talk about. Normally on a gig, part of my anxiety comes from a fear that it’ll become a head-cutting contest. I don’t want people to stand there (or sit there) with their arms folded while they evaluate my playing for better or worse. A lot of times, you can break the ice by having a conversation piece. I’m bringing some of my buddy’s instructional videos because it’ll take the focus off of me for a minute, gets him some exposure, and generally gives me something to discuss other than the gig that I’m on. Remember that the biggest part of being a sideman or working musician is NOT your technique and/or mad guitar skillz. It’s your ability to be a cool person to hang with.

3. Have more than one purpose. My main purpose for being in Houston is for the workshops, but a secondary purpose is for me to beta test a new guitar on the road and in multiple gigging environments. If I am in town for one purpose and one only, it puts a lot of pressure on that one event to be perfect. Even if the workshops hit some snags, then I can still feel like the road-test of the Tyler Variax was successful.

4. Bring more than you need. I try to make it a point to show up early and to be more than prepared. I’ll bring more guitars than I need, back up tubes, sometimes a back up amp, an extra shirt or jacket, gaffer’s tape, extra cables, a toolkit, and some dry snacks like peanuts or granola bars to most of my gigs. The last thing I want is to forget some little-yet-integral part of my rig and have it psychologically spin me out for the whole show. If part of being a good musician and a good hang is being calm, then I need to know that I have the tools to cover any unexpected situations. Luck favors the prepared, and the desire to succeed is useless without the willingness to prepare.

5. Lastly, if you are backlining gear, then bring some items that you know inside and out. I may not have my full ego-rig pedalboard with me, and I may not have my beloved Egnater MOD50 with me, but I will be bringing along two guitars that I know intimately well. Sometimes the variables can be overwhelming but if you have a few personal pieces of gear over which you have complete control, it puts you back in the driver’s seat and boosts your confidence.

From the kitchen,
-The Tone Chef

Very few effects are more polarizing than the compressor pedal. I have some friends who believe that a compressor pedal is an inexpensive and very effective way to ruin a good guitar tone. I have met other people who consider the compressor an integral part of their sound and will never turn it off. I sit somewhere in the middle. I believe that a compressor is one of those pedals that has a good deal of power, and therefore must be used for good and not for evil. Keep in mind that everything in this world has a feature set. Compressors are no different and therefore do have something to offer guitar players. But without moderation, a compressor can lead you to a world of seedy motels, back room drug deals, and a loss of your civil rights. OK, a compressor can’t really do that to you, but it CAN rob your guitar tone of expressive and musical dynamic changes.

A compressor acts as a dual purpose pedal in that it works to limit the volume peaks of louder guitar passages and it also boosts the volume “valleys” of quieter guitar passages. As a hired gun/ sideman, I almost always use a compressor because I believe that it offers some reliability to the guy or girl running front of house (FOH) sound. I want my guitar parts to sound as if they’re studio quality and in a controlled environment. I have known more than one sound person who mixes by subtraction, which means as soon as somebody on stage gets too loud, they reach over and adjust that fader downward. This would be fine if they eventually bumped the fader back up, but with so much going on, they’ve often moved on to the next task and that fader gets left alone for the rest of the show. A compressor allows me to maintain a constant volume output, regardless of whether my tones are clean, dirty, delayed, dry, or dripping with the wetness of every effect on my pedalboard. As a byproduct of that limiting effect, your clean guitar lines can sound nice and snappy and spanky when you add a touch of compression. Funk rhythms sound much more tight and clean lines have a nice blossom in their attack.

In addition to limiting the volume peaks of louder guitar passages, a compressor also boosts quieter guitar parts. This can be beneficial when you have a light touch that is almost too light and you still want the nuances of what you’re playing on a live stage to translate through the house PA and to the audience. Compressors, when set in moderation, also act as a thickening agent. When using subtle compression, I always feel like my guitar tone has just a little more oomph and pow both of which are highly technical terms. One additional benefit of the boosting effect of compression is it’s ability to add sustain. If the pedal is making quieter passages louder, then it stands to reason that as your notes start to decay/fade, the compressor boosts their volume so that they last longer. In the 80’s, it was common for guitar players to add a compressor/boost during solos to add sustain to their lines.

I’m a bit of a compressor junkie, so I’ve been through a bunch of them. I have tried many of the boutique and esoteric compressors and I’ve tried some of the more readily available (and cost effective) ones too. I’ve even built and modded 3 or 4 from the ground up. While each one offers some unique charm (like I said, everything in this world has a feature set), I am partial to one named the RAF Mirage that I discovered while gigging in North Carolina. For a couple of years I used a BOSS CS-3 that I modded with the Monte Allums modification and I especially liked the fact that you could set it to get a Nashville-style brickwall squash (more common in 2000 than in 2010) or you could set it for a subtle fattening with a touch of extra sparkle on top via the tone knob. Recently, I received an MXR Custom Comp (which seems to share some of the circuitry magic of the much loved and very hard to find Way Huge Saffron Squeeze) that I’ll be testing out at gigs for the next season so I can do a write up here at The Tone Chef.com. At any rate, I would say that a compressor is probably my desert island effect. If I was marooned on a deserted island with just a guitar and an amp and I was allowed to bring one stompbox, it would be a trusty compressor, namely because it lets me get the same kind of response that I’d get from an amp turned all the way up, without the distortion and overall volume.

As is always the case with effects and tones, test them out for yourself and see what your ears want to eat.

If there’s one question that I get more than any others, it’s “Are you Tom Green?” But the second most popular question is about effects (fx) loops in amplifiers. What is an effects loop? What does it do? Can it hurt me? Am I still a Christian if I use one? These are all great questions.

Here’s the general idea of an effects loop. I would argue that the better amps in the world are tube/valve based amplifiers. Amplifiers are comprised of two internal sections: the preamp section and the power amp section. (*I’m oversimplifying an amp, but if you want to know specific details about how amps work, there are a good deal of other sites out there.) The preamp section is where the grindy distortion and overdrive is created and the power amp section is there just to create a louder version of whatever character the preamp is creating. When people talk about a “master volume” amplifier, they are talking about an amp that has a volume for both the preamp section and the power amp section. A master volume allows you to turn up the preamp section and get lots of cool overdrive and turn the master volume, or overall output volume, down to a comfortable listening level.

The need for an effects loop comes when you want to use effects like delay and modulation (chorus, tremelo, phaser, flanger) but you’re also using an amp that has some onboard distortion or overdrive. The order of your effects will make a huge difference on how your guitar tone sounds. Delay and Modulation effects sound splatty and uncontrollable when they are in front of the overdrive section. An effects loop allows you to insert some effects in between those two internal parts of the amplifier (preamp and power amp). Now you can run volume pedals, fuzz, overdrive, distortion, and compressors up front (or into the front end/ input of the amp) and then you can run the more refined and sophisticated effects through that effects loop so that they come after your distortion and overdrive.

Also, you’ll notice that people will refer to two different kinds of fx loops, a “serial” fx loop and a “parallel” fx loop. Many companies will offer a serial loop while some of the more elaborate amps out there offer the ability to switch between serial and parallel or they’ll over both kinds of loop in the same amp. The difference lies in how the amp routes the guitar tone. Serial fx loops will run the effects in line, as if everything is in a row. Guitar tone goes into the input, through the preamp section, through the delays and modulations, through the power amp section and then out the speaker in the form of facemelting rawk. A parallel loop splits the guitar tone off into two signals in the loop section so that you’re mixing in the delayed and modulated sound with the pure unaffected tone from the amp itself.

Not every amp has an effects loop and not every player requires the sonic benefits that an fx loop provides. The Edge from U2 has been running delay pedals into the front of a Vox AC30 amp for much of his career with great results. It’s important to note that there are some guidelines for guitar tones- but never any hard and fast rules. I particularly like the sound of some modulation effects going into the preamp section because they sound goopy and chocolatey. As always, experiment on your own and figure out what your ears want to eat.

I’m writing this at 37,000 feet on a flight  from Phoenix to Pittsburgh- leaving one gig and heading to the next. I just spent the weekend with my wife at the Biltmore Resort because I was asked to perform the music for a wedding ceremony. Now I’m en route to a week of in-store clinics for a guitar manufacturer where I’ll discuss and demonstrate the nuances of body shapes, tone woods, and onboard pickup circuitry and how they all work in coordination to affect the tone of a guitar.

I’m thinking back on the last couple days and looking forward to the next handful and I think I’m able to come up with some rules of tone just from the experiences of this span of seven days on the road.

Seize The Moment
For starters, Mrs. Tone Chef and I drove from our home in Orange County, CA to Phoenix on Friday. In hindsight, I realize that I turned on music for the first 5 minutes of the trip and then we ended up turning the tunes off just to enjoy five and a half hours of drive time together. Normally, I’d plan for a road trip like that by loading the iPod with all the new music I’ve purchased but in this case it was more important to enjoy the rare opportunity to talk with the woman who married me. As guitar players, sometimes we prepare for gigs by collecting stompboxes, collecting guitars, and learning tunes so that when the gig shows up we can enjoy that preparation. But it’s just as important for the performing guitarist to be able to put aside the preparation and just go with the emotion of the situation. I have gotten more nods for the times when I was able to add an in-the-moment guitar part than for the hundreds of times I acted as a good soldier and did exactly what was expected of me. You’d be amazed at how eye-opening a little vibrato-laden octave fuzz at the right time can be.

Killing It Softly

For the wedding, I was asked to perform all of the music for the ceremony which meant I needed to have pre-service tunes available for anywhere from 10-25 minutes depending on how late they started. I also needed to have facility with chord melody versions of 1) “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” 2) a Beatles tune, 3) a Garth Brooks tune, and 4) a James Taylor tune. I was the only musician and I was doing all of this on a James Tyler Classic strat through a small Line 6 M9-based pedalboard rig into an Egnater Tweaker head and cab. Not only is a wedding sacred, but also, when you’re the only musician, your touch becomes substantially more important. Everything should come off the strings gracefully so it’s important to know your gig material so well that you don’t have to fight the chords grips and changes out of the instrument. Tension in your shoulders, hands, and head will translate through your amplifier. Tone begins in your hands and a softer touch is better for your playing and improvisation. Take deep breaths, say a prayer, perform positive self-talk- whatever it takes to get your head and your hands to play nicely with one another.

Be Prepared to Both Zig AND Zag
Since I wasn’t sure of the venue, I needed to bring enough gear to cover any and every possible scenario. I wasn’t sure if it was indoor or outdoor, I wasn’t sure if there would be power close by or if I’d have to run 50ft of extension cord, I wasn’t sure if they’d hear the electric and then change their mind to want acoustic, I wasn’t sure of the weather so I brought a carbon fiber acoustic along just in case the weather created a scenario where i wouldn’t want my one-off custom acoustic out there, and so on and so on. On top of that, knowing that I’d be leaving one gig to fly right to the next, I packed enough gear to be able to do the fly-dates in Pennsylvania. Good guitar tone is not just about plugging the right guitars into the right stompboxes into the right amps. It’s also about having enough tonal options to cover any possibility. Of course, you’ll never be able to cover every possible scenario- but more often than not, I have found that bringing a couple of distinct tone options to any gig has made the hiring party feel like you’re delivering what they’ve hired you to do.

As a first article here at TheToneChef.com, I think it’s important to point out that good tone goes beyond your purchases. Please check back regularly as I’ll be diving deep into what it takes to serve up tasty tone in a variety of gigging situations.