Firstly, I love what I’ve heard of Roccaforte amps. They seem to nail that classic Marshall tone, and better than Marshall has been doing Marshall lately.
But… I’ve found some amps to be less forgiving than others when it comes to playing fast. Some amps seem to spit out the notes as quickly as you play them, others seem a bit stiffer and less forgiving, forcing you to be really on your game technically.
Since it seems like you typically use your Cornford in the videos, could this possibly be the reason you favor it? If not, why do you seem to never play your Roccas?
I think this is an illusion! I can’t see how the amp has anything to do with picking speed in most circumstances unless you’re talking about legato type playing where you need sustain. I know some players use compressor pedals so they can get more level with a lighter pick attack, but even when I’ve seen this done, it really wasn’t necessary because the player sounded fine without it and fine unplugged / acoustically.
On some amps playing fast (edit: picking fast) in the lower register gets a sound where the notes almost blur together, whereas on other amps the notes, especially palm muted in the lower register, get very percussive and very defined. Is this what you mean? (obviously all the above assumes the playing is good).
That may be a component to what I’m suggesting. Some amps are stiffer/slower and don’t translate what’s being played as easily as others.
In regards to how an amp can “feel” a certain way: A tube rectified amp has more sag to it. This gives a sense of spongeyness to the playing. Most people recognize this.
I guess I’m suggesting that feel can affect how cleanly you need to play to articulate what you’re playing. A “slower” amp would require a higher degree of articulation to come across as it’s being played.
For example, a solid state amp is very forgiving in this respect. It translates what’s being put into it as quickly as it is being played .
Shawn Lane, if I understand correctly, preferred solid state amps for his rig. I think solid state amps are inherently “fast” amps, whereas tube amps have more of a broader spectrum in terms of how they relay the data fed into them (if I can use a computer analogy).
Clean is clean. The pick either hits the intended string or it doesn’t. It either avoids the unwanted strings or it doesn’t. The amp doesn’t affect the movement you’re making. I’m not even sure how you would play with “more articulation” in one case and less in another. Maybe muting of unwanted string noise? That’s definitely an issue with higher gain tones. But that’s not really the same thing as the picking movement actually being different. What do you mean by that exactly?
When we did the Albert Lee videos way back, we actually put in a section about this topic, more or less - first minute or so of this video:
Unless you were listening to guys like Albert or McLaughlin or DiMeola, a lot of players really didn’t know what “accurate” sounded like. It was just mushy playing with the gain cranked up, and that’s what passed for technique. Me personally, as a kid, I totally thought I couldn’t play without my Boss HM-2 pedal. It was this very voodoo feeling like my technique came and went unpredictably. When I stumbled across dwps the first time, all of a sudden my playing sounded way more consistent across amps, unplugged, and on acoustic. The whole fooling yourself with gain thing went out the window.
When an amp was not designed specifically with high gain in mind you can tell. Very often they cram the whole signal through all the gain stages and it gets super compressed and you can’t hear low notes clearly. There is no way to clean this up with your technique - it’s an amp problem.
To solve this, players used to use a Tubescreamer in front of amps like the Rectifier to shave off bass before the gain stages, so the low end doesn’t over-gain and the compression is avoided. People would say it “tightens up” the amp. Later, more modern high gain amps like the 5150 actually have a filter at the input that shaves off bass before the initial gain blast, and that clean some of this up. This is basically the same idea, but designed into the circuit.
Same thing for the treble - you need to bleed of high end strategically so you don’t get too much gain up there and cause massive static, or “fizz”. The Rectifier had this issue as well, and players would mod the amp to remove it. Again, a high gain problem, not a technique problem.
As an aside, the Roccaforte amps did not do any of this when I first got them. And I was not super knowledgeable about amp stuff at that point. This is what I learned by sending the amps back and forth twenty times to be modded, trying to explain in my idiot-speak what was wrong. Eventually I learned a little about what goes on at the circuit level in a high gain amp, and I realized that amps are designed specifically to avoid these issues. And I also realized that the reason I never had any of these issues with Cornford is that it already does all this internally. To make life simpler, and because people like the sound of it, it’s the only amp in the new studio now. That, and a vintage JCM 800 and some OD pedals for players that want that.
As an aside, this is a great one-pager on some of the design decisions that get made for high-gain amps - and explains more clearly than I can why the bass compression problem occurs:
What I’m thinking about this doesn’t have to do with clean tone versus gain. With all things being equal, meaning the amount of gain, some amps seem to relay the information they are getting in a different way than others.
Really, the matter is highly debatable, but it appears the phenomenon is apparent to some players. It certainly is likely in how the amp has been voiced for gain.
Oh I don’t doubt that at all! The bass compression issue is certainly one example of that. But you’re saying players have complained about their amp affecting their technique - I’m just trying to understand what exactly the complaint is. If I’m playing something simple like the Yngwie six-note pattern, and I’m doing it on a single string, I don’t imagine my ability to do that changes based on what I’m plugged in to - or even if I’m plugged into anything at all. I can certainly imagine how it might sound different though.
That’s what I was getting at in the Albert Lee piece. I was certainly was guilty of mistaking the distortion pedal for a magic box as a kid. I was mildly afraid of clean tone and acoustic playing because I could hear I didn’t really have the technique. The magic box seemed to fix it. But in retrospect, it was indeed backwards.
That might be a little unfair. Even though the amps have a lot of gain they were not designed to do what modern high gain amps do, which is to sculpt these ranges for metal riff type playing. Doug is technical and also a good guitar player, and he knows what he wants his amps to sound like. He wanted a more full frequency response even when cranked. He probably wasn’t trying to make another Cornford or Engl. That’s on me.
I would simply say in general there are a thousand amps out there. Buy one that already does what you want, don’t try and mod it into what you want unless amp circuit hacking is your hobby.
