Pignose amp?

[Ross]

SO I have recently spent some time readng about some of the gear used by some of the guitarists I revere. It seems like a lot of guys have gotten interesting sounds by taking the output of one amp and feeding it into a second amp, Dave Davies and Terry Kath both seem to have done this to good effect. So I am thinking about buying a little pignose to do this with - I hear the distortion can be pretty interesting?

Anyone done this? Have a pignose? Thoughts?

Thanks.

[Paco Del Stinko]

I have a Pignose and have actually never used it in front of an amp. (But I will now!) However, I've used it countless times both on its own as an overdriven amp, slammed in the front with distortion, and even to sing through like a bull-horn. Sometimes as a second amp for true stereo recordings. It's noisy, but very versatile and produces a big recorded sound that's somewhere between skanky and creamy-very 70's, when pushed. I've had it about 12 years and the volume knob is crackly, but it's gone through severe punishment and lasted pretty well.

Check back tomorrow, and I'll put something together for you.

[Ross]

Check back tomorrow, and I'll put something together for you.

Looking forward to it!!! Thanks!

PS - did you do the paint job on your les paul yourself?

[Billy's Little Trip]

I have done this. Not with a pig nose, but an old Crate combo. It over boosts the hell out of it. It also blew my Crate up eventually, but sounded cool. But I am a die hard pre amp to amp player. When everyone went solid state, as I did too, I missed my Marshall 100 watt tube head. So I started playing around with tube pre amps. I stopped looking when I bought my Peavey Rock Master tube pre. The best pre amp I've ever had in my life.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Check back tomorrow, and I'll put something together for you.

Looking forward to it!!! Thanks!

PS - did you do the paint job on your les paul yourself?

I know, I want to see full pics of it, that thing looks sweet! Paco, post some pics please.

[Ross]

So if I mainly play through a solid state head (Sunn), that has both a gain and a master volume. Is this basically the same as using a preamp, or would I still benefit from using a pre-amp in front of this?

[Billy's Little Trip]

Funny, my solid state is a Sunn also. *high five*.
If you have a "head" or combo, it has a pre amp in it. When you start getting into rack mount amps, then you see them separate quite often. The amp is just your main power amp for the speakers. The built in pre is your tone, etc. A guitar needs like 1 Mohm I "think", or something like that.
When you use an external pre amp, you are only using the heads power amp and doing all of you controlling with the pre amp. It has a higher output than the head pre amp, in most cases.

[jb]

I "think"

hahaha

[ken]

When you put an amp in front of another amp, you are basically boosting the output of your guitar CRAZY amounts. Imagine the difference between using a single coil pickup vs a high output humbucker on the same amp with the same settings. The level is much hotter, so it will be louder and possibly more distorted.

You may get some interesting tones from doing this, but you risk damaging your amp. Classic tones were innovative out of necessity. These days there are sooo many high quality, well made, thoughtful stomp boxes and amps, I think you are better off exploring those options.

[Billy's Little Trip]

I "think"

hahaha

What, that I actually think once in a while, or that I'm giving advice and I'm not sure about it myself, lol.

I said I think, because I can never remember if the impedance is 1.0 mega ohm or 10 mega ohm.

I made a line noise reduction box many years ago from a schematic I found in a heath kit book. I thought I did everything perfect, and it did cut my line noise. But even if I turned my amp to 10, it sounded like the volume knob was all the way down. Long story short, I had the wrong resisters on the board and I wasn't meeting the mega ohm requirement for the pre amp. Even after I made it right, I didn't really like it because it killed my tone. Chalked it up as a learning experience.

Why is this relevant? It's not, I just felt like reminiscing.

[Paco Del Stinko]

Ken is right, you don't want to put an amp in front of an amp. However, today I used the pre-amp out on the back of the Pignose, into a volume only tube amp. Check it out below. Ken is also right about pedals, including this one. HA! I have one too, but did not use it today. If you like the amp sounds here, you may like the pedal. Though portable ampage is cool, too.

I remember JB saying that he had one for gigs or something, didn't you as well, BLT?

Anyway, I can't build a good web pagey type thing, so here are some links. No compression etc. just amp, mic, recorder, and very sloppy playing . Kept the mic the same distance and opened the back of the cab away from the amp face. The 3rd sample is longest, and gets a bit loud.

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... _riff1.mp3 Pignose 1/2 way up. Back closed, then back open 45 degrees, 90 degrees.

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... myriff.mp3 Pignose cranked, then cranked with a tube overdrive in front of it. Smoosh!

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... _riff2.mp3 Bedrock amp low volume, then with tube OD, then with Pignose pre-out cranked, then pignose pre-out and gain boost on amp pulled.

Notice how the OD sounds better on the tube amp, but the Pig sounds good too. Hope this helped, it was fun to do.

Pics of the two amps being recorded are here. They are the last pictires of under 20, so scroll left on the photo stream to see the guitar and, if you dare, me cheesily posing for Nivs' year end countdown. Goof!

[Billy's Little Trip]

Great examples Chuck! I personally like the bedrock with the tube overdrive. But the last one with the pig and the gain pulled on the amp is pretty awesome too.

By the way, this picture made me pee a little.

[obscurity]

hahaha

What, that I actually think once in a while, or that I'm giving advice and I'm not sure about it myself, lol.

Are you sure those are the only two options? If I had to put money on it, I'd bet on it being the scare quotes.

[jb]

I "think"

hahaha

What, that I actually think once in a while, or that I'm giving advice and I'm not sure about it myself, lol.

I am laughing at your use of quotation marks, and I am laughing alone by myself on Punctuation Island where the trees are made of exclamation points bearing semicolon fruit, and irony lives underground, rumbling subtly through the earth like a sandworm from the extended cut of Dune, where they didn't bother to add the glowing-blue-eye effect.

[Billy's Little Trip]

That's it, I'm headin' out to jb's island.

[Ross]

Thanks for the sound clips, Paco. Pretty interesting and enough to convince me that it's worth the 74 bucks to get one to fool around with.

Side note to anyone following (or who cares). I've done very little electric playing except for Songfight! in the last 20 years. As soon as I started trying to record my electric, I started trying to figure out how to get it to "sound good" with various pedals and post recording effects.Tonight, based on continued interest in this area, I found myself for the first time in a VERY long time (at least 14 years) plugging my Telecaster straight into my Sunn Stagemaster half-stack with nothing in between, and god-damned if it didn't sound bitchin!!!!

So I think a take home message for me is to keep it minimal, and I think a return to some stomp-boxing may very well meet many of my needs.

Thanks for this conversation. It has been good for me to fool with the sound, since I am usually in sort of rushed "Recording mode."

And thanks for listening.

PS - Hey Paco - did you do the paint job on the Les Paul yourself?

[Billy's Little Trip]

Ross, you probably by now have noticed something strange about your Sunn head. As you said, you plugged in and used it for what it is. That is the beauty of the Sunn. Have you ever noticed that the bass and treble are more like volume knobs for those frequencies, instead of eq knobs?
I love the Sunn amps, they are like no other. I honestly would have never developed my sound with out the combined electronics of my Sunn head with my Peavey pre amp.

[Paco Del Stinko]

Ross - You're welcome for the clips, they were fun to do but I'm sorry my playing is so sloppy. Naked and sloppy does not sound like a good combo. I'm not picking a fight or dissing the digital marvels that surround us, but there's nothing like plugging into an amp and doing whatever it is you do. Good luck with your Pig. (ya know, I've used it on several SF! songs, but can't remember which ones)

Gibson snobs avert your gaze now: The guitar I did myself and is actually prints from magazines. It's a long story, but I ended up stripping the paint off of the front of the guitar after it got ruined (by me). Around the same time, I found a bag filled with pages from mostly early 90s SPIN magazines that I had stuffed in a trunk. So I cut them and applied them with water diluted Elmers glue and several coats of clear sealer. It took a marathon day to collage them all together. Once, it was an ebony beauty, now it's....I dunno, but I'm pretty sure it's the only one that looks like that, good or bad. It's held up very well for the 4 or 5 years since I did it, too, but if it one day peels off in a big sheet, I'll paint it with enamal.

When the weather gets nice enough, in months, around here, I'm going to take my entire guitarsenal outside for a family portarit. I'll put up some detailed shots of all of them at that time as well.

But, speaking of amps, check out this ridiculous collection. But man, what a house to jam in! http://www.vintageamps.com/va/showroom.html

[blue]

Ken is right, you don't want to put an amp in front of an amp. However, today I used the pre-amp out on the back of the Pignose, into a volume only tube amp. Check it out below. Ken is also right about pedals, including this one. HA! I have one too, but did not use it today. If you like the amp sounds here, you may like the pedal. Though portable ampage is cool, too.

I remember JB saying that he had one for gigs or something, didn't you as well, BLT?

Anyway, I can't build a good web pagey type thing, so here are some links. No compression etc. just amp, mic, recorder, and very sloppy playing . Kept the mic the same distance and opened the back of the cab away from the amp face. The 3rd sample is longest, and gets a bit loud.

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... _riff1.mp3 Pignose 1/2 way up. Back closed, then back open 45 degrees, 90 degrees.

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... myriff.mp3 Pignose cranked, then cranked with a tube overdrive in front of it. Smoosh!

http://www.nubsy.com/wp-content/uploads ... _riff2.mp3 Bedrock amp low volume, then with tube OD, then with Pignose pre-out cranked, then pignose pre-out and gain boost on amp pulled.

Notice how the OD sounds better on the tube amp, but the Pig sounds good too. Hope this helped, it was fun to do.

Pics of the two amps being recorded are here. They are the last pictires of under 20, so scroll left on the photo stream to see the guitar and, if you dare, me cheesily posing for Nivs' year end countdown. Goof!

everyone should own at least one e609. terrific mics for the money.

[Dan-O from Five-O]

But, speaking of amps, check out this ridiculous collection. But man, what a house to jam in! http://www.vintageamps.com/va/showroom.html

Damn. I felt pretty good about my collection of amps up until about a minute ago.

I guess I've got me some buying to do.

EDIT: More on point, I'll see if I can swing some quick recordings of these various amps and combinations thereof vs. my POD which a lot of people rail on (not mine specifically but POD's in general) and see what the consensus is. Should be interesting.

[Billy's Little Trip]

Nice collection Dan. Is that Fender twin, vintage or a reissue?
I need to get pics of my stuff one of these days. I have a pair of 6X10" Sunn cabs. Funny story about those. They were originally made for bass, but they made much better guitar cabs than bass cabs. They sound really good, but they are big and heavy. I had a poster years ago of Jimmy Hendrix with a wall of those suckers.
You can kind of see them in this crappy capture from a video. I'm on the far left and you can see one of my old 6X10s behind me.

[Paco Del Stinko]

everyone should own at least one e609. terrific mics for the money.

I totally agree, although I must point out that it was Blue who suggested this same microphone for drums. Still, I typically reach for that before the SM57. Just point and shoot.

Dan-o: Don't feel too bad, that's a nice amp collection you have there. Wall of combo. But everyone must feel a little limp after that guy. Sheesh. Also, a POD/amp shootout sounds pretty cool.

Chris: You have two of those cabs? Run them in stereo! When I was in high school and played out for the first time, I had to borrow and amp off of an old hippy turned accountant who lived near by. It was a Coral 6x12. I have pics but no scanner.