Practicality of tube amps.

maybe we should wait another 60+ years and ask 8)

Tone is everything. Once you get a great tone you love with a tube amp, you can still do everything with it. You can add chorus, or delay, or any effect you like.

Everybody talks about great tone. What the heck is that? What I consider great tone might sound horrible to you. I love the tone of Neil Young's guitar on Farmer John. Neil Young likes to play one way. He turns his Fender amp up to max. It howls, screams, feeds-back, all distorted.... But it is a great tone to me. Total tube amp saturation. He is not getting his tone from a pedal, he is getting it from the amp. It is thick and full.

I absolutely love this tone, you may think it is terrible.

But there is tone most everyone agrees on. Play some clean guitar on a solid state amp. Play the same riff on a good Fender Twin Reverb. Believe me, you will hear the difference.

You can get great tone from a solid state. Many pros today use solid state amps. But most use tube amps. It is all what you as an individual are after.

wes,

amen brother, amen, there is nothing like the tone you get from a good tube amp at saturation, i'll never go back to a ss amp :D

I'll get back to you after I've tried all of them. :)

Yes. If you read throught this part of the forum you'll find some pretty creative signal chains that even use all tube power amps as a pre-amp. Then add effects post. Even using an old Gibson Falcon 12 watt with a equalizer and attenuator can keep myself and a good blues audience satisfied.

joe

well, i am becoming more convinced that tube tone is an academic pursuit. Saturated amps all the way up arent really what most guiarists can play with very often, right?
What I would like to know is, will a tubed fender be able to be used by an average guitarist in such a way as to get the toneal advantage it has (ie not to loud and versatile enough to keep you interested while not needing all of Neil Youngs talent to make it sing).
What kind of amp do you guys use say 90% of the time?

I know tone, practicality etc is all personal preferance, but experience has taught me to seek advice from the experinced and save myself the pain of silly mistakes.

It's easy to get the saturated sound of a tube amp at living room volumes, by using an attenuator.
Tube tone is no academic pursuit - just ask all the modelling amp manufacturers - they spend millions, just trying to copy the tone of tube amps. If that's not convincing enough, just ask the thousands of pro musicians, who prefer tube to solid state.
You don't need a 100W amp to practice at home, though - a 0.5W or 1W amp is more than sufficient - both of those will drive a 4x12" cab - they're also great for mic'ing situations.

Well, saturated tube power stages make a great sound, but you DON'T have to have a tube amp cranked all the time to sound good, and it's often inappropriate. One big disadvantage to it is that you lose nearly all of your dynamics when everything's cranked. Adjust your volume and gain for the music you're playing and the setting you're in. That's why there are knobs on the amp. There are knobs who don't need 'em, because they're just going to turn them up all the way, and 90% of the time it doesn't work well.

good tube amp + good eq + attenuater = great sound.

Ricochet is correct. When speaking of saturation, this is for an overdrive or natural distortion that you get from tube amps.

But what about a clean tone?? Clean tone is very important in many types of music like Country or Jazz, but Rock as well. In cases like this, many want a powerful tube amp that has a beautiful warm tone that does not distort or overdrive at all. The Fender Twin 100W and Fender Twin Reverb 85W are very popular with guitarists in this style because they can be turned up to extremely high volume and not distort. But they love the warmth and roundness of a tube amp.

But solid states are used by pros as well. The Roland JC-120 is a famous solid state amp used by pros for it's great clean sound.

Roland JC-120

All tube amps do not sound great. Some are awful. And many solid state amps sound great. You have to find an amp that gives you the sound you are looking for. A Rock guitarist is looking for a completely different tone than a Jazz guitarist.

Clean tube amplification is not really all that clean in terms of distortion. Even clean, instrument tube amps produce a fair amount of even order harmonic distortion (2, 4, 6 ...), all of which make the timbre 'warmer.' as even order harmonic products fall on octaves and (appoximately) fifths. Solid state amps with very low distortion are often accused of sound 'sterile' or cold by comparison. Roland instrument amps are one of the notable exceptions. Of course many jazzers prefer solid-state, lower distortion amps because they deliver more of the 'pure' sound of the jazz guitar, many of which have distinctive, dark tonal qualities of their own.

So the tube story is not all about saturation. Tube clean is distinctive and colored as well.