OK - I get a 90 break in my choring for the evening so I run out to the practice space. Fire everything up. Fuck that sounds terrible. What happened?
Turn off one amp, listen only to the other. Sounds fine.
Same process in reverse, this amp sounds like garbage. Tone knobs aren't doing what they should. High pitched weirdness at volumes there where it should be clean, quiet. Ok - signal chain, anything unplugged, backwards? No? everything is off on the pedal board. Fuck with all kinds of settings for forever on the pedals to see which one might be causing it? Like a component dying? Can't make this thing sound right at all.
Fucking preamp tubes? that's some weird ass microphonic feedback at high levels and DAMN it sound BAD.
Turn off amp, inspect all connections in the back, turn on, check tubes, all *looks* fine. Those tubes are less than 5 yrs old, surely that's not it.
Plug in direct to amp, bypass everything. Hot damn that sounds good! But what's wrong? No pedals on, no LEDs, but it's the pedalboard somewhere.
I start going through and disconnecting everything one by one when I get to the end of row one and see a long patch cable that shouldn't be there going to.....I remember, oh yeah, I patched in a wah pedal way over there to test. Haha it's cocked all the way and on isn't it? You dummy.
35? minutes dicking around and that's all it was.
I need a wah pedal with an LED lol.
Re: Gear confessional - shames and blames
2
I feel this. Every single time I’ve had ‘amp’ issues at a show it was because some fucking pedal or power supply or cable or something. With every pedal you add an additional chance of failure.
I fixed this by adjusting my guitar style to where I could do everything with an overdrive (that sounds more raucous than it is because of the way the amp is set), a Jimmy Page style slapback, and a tuner. The guitar straight into the amp is my baseline sound and nothing ever stays on a whole song.
I started a different project and still stick to that basic setup because I think it just sounds better. It does take some experimenting but as long as your group’s basic sound is filled out w/o a PA you will sound good anywhere. In my old band our practice space was so big we had problems in smaller rooms, but I eventually figured out that I just needed a 4x12 or 2x12 under a 15-20 watt amp.
I fixed this by adjusting my guitar style to where I could do everything with an overdrive (that sounds more raucous than it is because of the way the amp is set), a Jimmy Page style slapback, and a tuner. The guitar straight into the amp is my baseline sound and nothing ever stays on a whole song.
I started a different project and still stick to that basic setup because I think it just sounds better. It does take some experimenting but as long as your group’s basic sound is filled out w/o a PA you will sound good anywhere. In my old band our practice space was so big we had problems in smaller rooms, but I eventually figured out that I just needed a 4x12 or 2x12 under a 15-20 watt amp.
Re: Gear confessional - shames and blames
3Mine's not as funny as a half cocked wah, but I run two amps also. This week at practice I kept feeling like one of the amps was anemic and quieter. We move fast and I could hear the other one so I tried not to obsess. When we wrapped up I went to unplug everything I noticed the instrument cable going to that amp was only partially plugged in.Frankie99 wrote: Wed Mar 11, 2026 9:33 pm OK - I get a 90 break in my choring for the evening so I run out to the practice space. Fire everything up. Fuck that sounds terrible. What happened?
Turn off one amp, listen only to the other. Sounds fine.
Same process in reverse, this amp sounds like garbage. Tone knobs aren't doing what they should. High pitched weirdness at volumes there where it should be clean, quiet. Ok - signal chain, anything unplugged, backwards? No? everything is off on the pedal board. Fuck with all kinds of settings for forever on the pedals to see which one might be causing it? Like a component dying? Can't make this thing sound right at all.
Fucking preamp tubes? that's some weird ass microphonic feedback at high levels and DAMN it sound BAD.
Turn off amp, inspect all connections in the back, turn on, check tubes, all *looks* fine. Those tubes are less than 5 yrs old, surely that's not it.
Plug in direct to amp, bypass everything. Hot damn that sounds good! But what's wrong? No pedals on, no LEDs, but it's the pedalboard somewhere.
I start going through and disconnecting everything one by one when I get to the end of row one and see a long patch cable that shouldn't be there going to.....I remember, oh yeah, I patched in a wah pedal way over there to test. Haha it's cocked all the way and on isn't it? You dummy.
35? minutes dicking around and that's all it was.
I need a wah pedal with an LED lol.
Happens to the best of us.