There's some reading of a free issue of the Tone Quest Report of Larry Cragg & discussing Neil Young's Deluxes, opinions on tone, etc. -
http://www.tonequest.com/pdf_pubs/samples/TQRSep06_Proof.pdfExcerps: Guys are into stuff like Amp Farm now and they don’t understand or appreciate the bloom of a 6L6 output tube. I like small amplifiers that don’t have preamp controls, so you can get output tube saturation rather than getting your 12AX7’s to distort and then have a nice clean amplifier to amplify that. I hate that sound… That takes me back to Boogie… Carlos came in one day and he wanted more sustain, so I boosted the pickups in his guitar with ceramic magnets. Randy started boosting Fender amps, and they’d come out saying “Boogie” on the front and “Prune” on the back… “Prune Boogies.” We were partners together at Prune music throughout the early ‘70s until he launched Mesa Boogie, and
Randy is the one that hooked me up with Neil…He was working for Neil, going through his amplifiers, and
I’d get these calls from Randy on the road. He went out for a week at a time working on Neil’s rig, which was an insane thing with all these tweed amps plugged into each other. I started doing surgery over the
telephone on Old Black, and after that I started riding down to Neil’s ranch with Randy. That was in 1973, and I’ve been working for him ever since.
… I installed a bypass switch and now instead of getting 85% of Black, you’re getting 100%. With the bypass switch all the volume and tone controls are bypassed. It’s just shocking. People don’t realize how much of the sound is getting wasted through the controls. On Old Black there are remnants of a phase switch that is long gone and I got the proper switch that would fit in the old space right between the four knobs and put it in. People were amazed that I had Black all apart in the studio 30 minutes before recording was supposed to start, but I got it together and he never switched it back during all
of the sessions. The tone and volume controls remained bypassed and he loved it. Once you’ve heard it, it’s kind of hard to go back. On my Super Reverbs that I rent I used to turn the Vibrato intensity control to a negative feedback control. When you change it back and put the negative feedback back in, everybody says, “Oh, no!” It sounds like it’s in a straightjacket.
TQR: When you bypass the volume and tone pots, does anything get lost?
No. More highs for sure, and it makes the guitar sound closer to you. Neil told his manager that with the bypass switch Black goes to ‘11’ now. On the current CSN&Y tour he’s playing his completely freaked out Deluxe on ’12’ with a capo and the bypass switch and the combination of all that stuff makes for a very unusual sound. Stephen (Stills) was standing off stage during a song Neil plays solo called “Roger and Out” and he said that it sounded like Neil was playing three chords at once. All the inter modulation/distortion makes it hard to know what’s going on, but it is a very cool sound
...Neil could mix the sound of the tweed Deluxe versus the sound of the Magnatone 280 amp. His private PA was sitting inside the huge Deluxe prop on stage, and the volume on stage was so loud that the guitar
would start vibrating and the sound would swirl around and around…
TQR: But you weren’t slaving the Deluxe…
Definitely not. We pad down the speaker out and run that into the Magnatone and the Baldwin Exterminator, which is two 15’s, two 12’s and two 8’s. We’re not slaving it in the traditional way, and what you’re hearing are the 6L6’s in the Deluxe. Neil is so into this… Every little switch contact between the guitar and the amplifier for the effects loop are these great big RF contacts that go “clunk.” Sometimes he’ll have me bypass all of it and just run straight from the reverb to the amp, which is how the last album was cut. He can hear everything… He knows when the rig is running at 117 volts instead of 120. He’s known for busting me on that, although that doesn’t happen anymore. We keep it at 120
volts all the time.
TQR: Some might wonder why go to all that trouble instead of just turning down the guitar volume…
Are you kidding me? No! When you turn down the volume of your guitar you’re dumping so much of the tone and high end to ground that it’s just a terrible thing to do. A volume pedal does the same thing. You’ve got to leave the guitar volume on 10 and control it from the amp. Remember that both volume controls on the tweed Deluxe are interactive, so we have controls on both volume pots. With the volume on the input that the guitar is plugged into cranked, you get some something extra special from the second input being turned up as well, in a very special way. The idea for all this was Neil’s, and it was up to us to figure out how to make it work.
Topic: 5E3 interactive volume controls (Read 8549 times)