Question:
In the "Why are amps judged by their ability to do metal?" thread, I noticed that people had rather varying opinions on what constitutes "high gain", and there's further disagreement on what a "good" high gain sound is.
So what's the cutoff point for you? When does a sound stop being merely overdriven and become high gain to you? It would help if you used references to certain artists to get your point across.
To me, a high gain sound is when you can hold a bend for a whole measure of music with little to no decay in the sound, with only a moderate pick attack. By favorite example of this would be Van Halen's first album. If there were any less gain, I wouldn't necessarily consider it to be a high gain sound, but there's just enough there to qualify it as a high gain sound to me.
How about you?
Answer:
Not a Peavey Classic 50, but a 5150 or Ultra.
I should probably put up sound clips of what I call high gain. But I like to describe my tones in about 5 gain stages: clean, slightly dirty, lo-gain distortion, high-gain distortion, and over-the-top. If I had to define them:
Clean: no distortion whatsoever
Slightly dirty: distorts when picked hard
Lo-gain distortion: sound is generally distorted, but cleans up with soft picking, held chords decay to clean after a few seconds
Hi-gain distortion: sound is always distorted, does not clean up when picked softly, and chords will not decay to clean if held for a few seconds
Over-the-top: more gain than typical hi-gain distortion
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umm easy.. any tone where the drive goes through more than 8 stages of gain...
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Umm... My amp only has 4 or 5, and it can pack high-gain and then some...
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Originally Posted by AXguitar umm easy.. any tone where the drive goes through more than 8 stages of gain...
Woah. 8 stages is insane. I think 6 is the most I've ever seen in an amp.
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i've heard of higher...
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Originally Posted by AXguitar i've heard of higher... I can't think of a single amp on the market with more than 6 gain stages, but I'd love to know who makes them.
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I don't know, I think the Peavy XXX only has six, and I always thought it had the most pre-amp gain stages in an amp.... Throw a couple pedals in front, and technically it's 8 but.... Do you mean pre-amp and power amp gain stages?
To me, high gain is where you've distorted your amp so much that if you feed a sine wave through it, it'll come out looking like a slightly rounded square wave. The more distorted it gets, the less it retains the characteristics of the original input signal.
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i know that theoretically 11 stages is possible... i don' know what each amp has, i just know what is possible, i figured it would have been implemented somewhere..
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Originally Posted by AXguitar i know that theoretically 11 stages is possible... i don' know what each amp has, i just know what is possible, i figured it would have been implemented somewhere.. theoretically I'd think the number of stages as no limit, though I'm sure at some point your ear would just hear square waves.
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Originally Posted by thesteve theoretically I'd think the number of stages as no limit, though I'm sure at some point your ear would just hear square waves.
exactly.
to me, high gain is when there's enough gain to get that hard-edged sound, that classic "crunch." beneath that there's moderate gain, which is all sounds in between high and low gain. i consider rainer's definitions of low and slightly dirty to be low gain, and claens are clean.
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Originally Posted by thesteve theoretically I'd think the number of stages as no limit, though I'm sure at some point your wear would just hear square waves.
no there is a point where it can't go any further... i am on the campus of a large engineering school, i have a friend who is a senior Electrical Engineering major and he's doing a specialization in music tech. and he told me 11 stages of gain was the maximum before it became impossible..
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Originally Posted by AXguitar no there is a point where it can't go any further... i am on the campus of a large engineering school, i have a friend who is a senior Electrical Engineering major and he's doing a specialization in music tech. and he told me 11 stages of gain was the maximum before it became impossible.. you also said that there's amps that have 8 stages, which you haven't been able to back up other than, "well 11 is the max, i figured someone has gone to at least 8."
Sorry. I'm not taking, "my friend told me" at face value.
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i'll talk to him... i'll get the answer from his textbook...
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i think it would be the "most possible" primarily because, as said before, the wave will become a square wave. after a while you can't distort anymore, but you can still add gain stages. it's not that you can't add more, it's more of a "why would you want to?"
also, i see no reason for a limit at a set number of stages, with different stages you could easily change the number of stages needed to get a full suqare wave.