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Sean T Barrett wrote the stuff with >, and Kim's quotes get > >: > > kim: > >I guess you're not a guitar player, right? An electric guitar > >by itself is only half the instrument. > [snip] > >That is also why a guitar through a flat PA system will sound > >very bad, and to the player, it will feel lifeless. That _can_ be the case, but isn't necessarily always true. It depends on the guitar's pickups, the impedance loading them, the strings, and the musical context. Most electric guitars have passive magnetic pickups. If they're loaded too heavily (i.e., the input impedance of the amplifier is too low), the high frequencies will be rolled off severely. The hi-Z inputs of most PA systems, typically 50K, will of course strangle the signal from most passive magnetic pickups. (The typical guitar amp's 220K is actually a bit low as well, but in this case it's a _feature_, slightly rolling off the upper harmonics so they don't clash quite so badly with the harmonics the amp has been carefully designed to generate.) Many if not most electric guitarists also use nickel or Monel strings; stainless steel strings are much brighter sounding (i.e., the harmonics are a stronger component of the total signal). (I'm a stainless string bigot-- been using them on _everything_ (acoustic as well as electric guitars, dulcimer, lap and pedal steels, banjo) since 1980.) So, yeah, the typical passive-pickup electric guitar will sound bad and feel lifeless through a flat PA. But let me plug my stainless-strung Peavey Generation solidbody directly into the flat PA of your choosing, and I guarantee you a range of sounds that will be absolutely delicious for 99% of what I do, which is folky or swingy strumming and fingerstyle. Or, if you'll allow me one stompbox if I swear I won't use it, I'll guarantee the same with my Casio MIDI guitars. The Peavey has active pickups-- tiny FET preamps in each, EMG-style-- which preserve the highs no matter what the amplifier's input Z might be. Playing a passive-pickup Casio, I'd go through a TS-5 Tube Screamer or PQ-9 (quasi-)Parametric EQ. Neither of these has true bypass-- the first thing the guitar signal hits is a very hi-Z FET preamp which is always on, whether the effect is engaged or not. On the other hand, that Matchless or Rivera or Mesa or Marshall, which sings so sweetly when it's fed single notes or "power chords", would probably sound pretty bad for my strummin' and fingerpickin'... > Well, this is an interesting theory and statement. > Maybe I'm just a moron; I've spent ten years playing > a cheap guitar through a chorus pedal, a little eq > and reverb, direct to a 4-track. It doesn't feel lifeless > to me, although maybe I don't know any better. There's a good chance your chorus pedal (or whichever your first effect is) buffers your pickup signal sufficiently to let your highs reach the tape. I gigged for several years with electric guitars plugged into an old MXR Stereo Chorus which fed the PA directly, and was quite pleased with the sound. > Still, I don't consider the guitar direct > "half the instrument". Is an acoustic guitar > only 1/3 of an instrument because it lacks a pickup > and an amp? Nah, it's just a _different_ instrument. Actually, most of what I do is acoustic guitar playing, only I do it on a solid-body electric. :-) > Another person explicitly raised the issue that > the advantage to amp cabinet coloration is that > the distorted guitar tone benefits from filtering. > I could believe this, but then why do we need > "speaker simulators"? Why not just a simple > low-pass filter on the output of your (possibly > tube-based) distortion pedal? Because the filtering that occurs is anything but simple, involving the complex interactions of cabinet resonance, cone resonance, the mysteries of Damping Factor, the phase of the moon, the price of frozen pork bellies on the Chicago Board of Trade, your gender, and (if you're Eric Johnson) the precise curves of the oxygen-free cable connecting head to cabinet. ;-) > I could go on, but this rant is mostly off-topic, so I > better stop. I think it's dead on-topic. The question underlying this thread is, "I wanna make my rig smaller and lighter; how much money must I spend to have it sound good?" Despite what I've said above, I am not immune to the charms of a good tube amplifier. I vividly remember the chills the first time I heard someone playing through a Matchless in a music store. I think, though, that many of the subtle nuances of such an amplifier are likely to be masked by environmental (dare I say ambient?) noise at the venues where one wants a small, light rig. For me, certainly, a simple low-pass filter would be sufficient cabinet emulation. John Troubador Tech (http://people.delphi.com/johnpollock/