Four irresistible combinations every guitar junkie's gotta try.
To get inspired by someone's guitar playing, I need to bond with their tone. Perhaps other guitarists and tone nerds feel the same way? I believe most people will appreciate and recognize a great guitar tone even if they're not into guitars and not able to express what they like.
Not even the best boutique guitars sound good when played through poor amps. But cheap, simple guitars can sound good with a great amp. I use amps as clean tone platforms and then get specific tones by choosing different guitars and pedals. This is why I love vintage Fender amps. They are transparent and pure. What you hear is really the guitar and the fingers. Clean Fender amps can be brutal in how they reveal even the smallest playing mistakes. You won't get any help from saturated distortion or even effects. But this makes you a better guitar player, like it or not, and is a good reason for playing clean.
Now, let me share my favorite amp and guitar combinations.
Princeton Reverb and Telecaster:
My '65 blackface Princeton Reverb with a Jensen speaker is my go-to amp for twangy country Tele licks, which I think can be used in all kinds of genres. The small cabinet and the lack of a bright cap enhances the mids and gives a less-scooped tone than bigger Fender amps. Turn up the reverb and the powerful tube bias tremolo and you'll make the audience shed a tear during the set's last ballad. In older blackface and silverface amps with Oxford speakers, you might consider swapping in a more powerful speaker—possibly a 12"—for a bigger low end and more volume.
If you like Hendrix but prefer Fender amps, you should try the narrow panel 5F6-A tweed or blackface/silverface 50-watt Bassman.
Super Reverb and Stratocaster:
This combination will give you a powerful, bright, scooped, funky, chunky tone. The Strat's neck position will never sound better, with bright sparkle and a full low-end. Not to mention the liquid-clear and quacky second and fourth pickup positions, which make you sound like early Mark Knopfler. For some SRV, set the amp carefully in its cranked sweet spot without farting out the speakers, throw in a Tube Screamer or similar overdrive with a little gain, and tilt the EQ toward more bass and treble. Depending on the brightness of your guitar, flick the bright switch on. Firm and punchy loudspeakers will take an SRV-style beating from your picking hand and provide a tight low end from even a half-step down-tuned .056 E string.
Deluxe Reverb and ES-335:
If effects pedals were forbidden, I'd go with this pair. The ES-335 sounds brilliant and nuanced through a Deluxe Reverb. The amp has no bright switch, meaning the bright cap is always on and lets fingerpicking or pick details shine through. The amp's brightness and 1x12" medium-sized cabinet will provide great EQ balance to mellow and dark humbuckers. The Princeton Reverb is slightly small and boxy for an ES-335, but the Deluxe provides full tones with nice, clear treble. This combination excels at jazz, soul, and blues soloing with bell-clear single-string tone, and at dirty chords and multi-string licks. You'll easily get a fat, sustained, and cranked tone at lower volumes with this guitar and amp complement.
Bassman and Stratocaster:
If you like Hendrix but prefer Fender amps, you should try the narrow panel 5F6-A tweed or blackface/silverface 50-watt Bassman. Think of Hendrix's tone on the compilation Blues, where he occasionally tuned down to D and had a slightly cleaner sound. For this, you need an amp that can distort more than the typical Fender Deluxe, Super, Pro, or Twin. The Bassman's extra 12AX7-fueled preamp gain stage will provide a good amount of distortion with volume at 6 and beyond. Sadly, at this level the volume is intolerable with the matching 2x12" cabinet. Luckily, we have a solution. Get a semi-closed 1x12" and put in an 8-ohm 20- or 25-watt Celestion G12M. You'll get a fabulous Hendrix tone, just between a Marshall JTM45 and a Bassman, for the best of both worlds.
Trying these combinations with a variety of effects pedals should give you plenty to experiment with until my next column.
[Updated 7/26/2021]
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The giveaways keep going! Enter Stompboxtober Day 25 for your chance to win today’s pedal from SoloDallas!
The Schaffer Replica® - BASS-X
After introducing the Schaffer Replica Storm low end legends like Rudy Sarzo, Billy Sheehan, and Pino Paladino discovered it to be equally amazing on bass. Based upon their input we made a few minor changes to this beloved circuit to make it more conducive to higher amplitude and lower frequencies. To our loyal bassists who have waited so patiently, we proudly introduce The Schaffer Replica - BASS-X.
Vintage-style reverb, tremolo, and vibrato sounds abound in a 3-in-1 stomp that might be the only box you need.
Here’s part two of our look under the hood of the funky rhythm guitar master’s signature 6-string.
Hello and welcome back to Mod Garage. In this edition, we’re continuing our journey through the Fender Cory Wong Stratocaster wiring, bringing it all together.In the previous installment, the last feature on the funky 6-stringer’s signature axe that we discussed was the master volume pot and the corresponding treble-bleed circuit. Now, let’s continue with this guitar’s very special configuration of the tone pots.
Tone pot with Fender Greasebucket tone system:
This 250k tone pot is a standard CTS pot with a 90/10 audio taper found in all U.S.-built Fender guitars. The Cory Wong guitar uses the Fender Greasebucket system, which is added to the pot as a ready-to-solder PCB. The Greasebucket PCB is also available individually from Fender (part #7713546000), though you can use conventional electronic parts for this.
Fender introduced this feature in 2005 on some of the Highway One models and some assorted Custom Shop Strats. The Greasebucket name (which is a registered Fender trademark, by the way) is my favorite of Fender’s marketing names, but don’t let it fool you: Your tone will get cleaner with this modification, not greasy and dirty.
According to Fender, the Greasebucket tone circuit reduces high frequencies without adding bass as the tone knob is turned down. Don’t let that description confuse you. A standard Strat tone control does not add any bass frequencies! As you already know, with a passive system you can’t add anything that isn’t already there. You can reshape the tone by deemphasizing certain frequencies and making others more prominent. Removing highs makes lows more apparent and vice versa. In addition, the use of inductors (which is how a passive pickup behaves in a guitar circuit) and capacitors can create resonant peaks and valleys (band-passes and notches), further coloring the overall tone.
Cory Wong bringing the funk onstage.
This type of band-pass filter only allows certain frequencies to pass through, while others are blocked. The standard tone circuit in a Strat is called a variable low-pass filter (or a treble-cut filter), which only allows the low frequencies to pass through while the high frequencies get sent to ground via the tone cap.
The Greasebucket’s band-pass filter is a combination of a high-pass and a low-pass filter. This is supposed to cut high frequencies without “adding” bass, which has mostly to do with the resistor in series with the pot. That resistor means the control will never get to zero. You can get a similar effect by simply not turning the Strat’s standard tone control all the way down. (The additional cap on the wiper of the Greasebucket circuit complicates things a bit, though; together with the pickups it forms an RLC circuit, but I really don’t want to get into that here.)
The standard Fender Greasebucket tone system is used in the Cory Wong Strat, which includes a 0.1 μF cap and a 0.022 uF cap, along with a 4.7k-ohm resistor in series. These are the values used on the PCB, and without the PCB it looks like the illustration at the top of this column.
Push-push tone pot with preset overwriting function:
The lower tone pot assigned to the bridge pickup is a 250k audio push-push pot with a DPDT switch. The switch is used to engage a preset sound by overwriting the 5-way pickup-selector switch, no matter what switching position it is in. The preset functionality has a very long tradition in the house of Fender, dating back to the early ’50s, when Leo Fender designed a preset bass sound on position 3 (where the typical neck position is on a modern guitar) of the Broadcaster (and later the Telecaster) circuit. Wong loves the middle-and-neck-in-parallel pickup combination, so that’s the preset sound his push-push tone pot is wired for.
The neck pickup has a dedicated tone control while the middle pickup doesn’t, which is also another interesting feature. This means that when you hit the push-push switch, you will engage the neck and middle pickup together in parallel, no matter what you have dialed in on the 5-way switch. Hit the push-push switch again, and the 5-way switch is back to its normal functionality. Instead of a push-push pot, you can naturally use a push-pull pot or a DPDT toggle switch in combination with a normal 250k audio pot.
Here we go for the wiring. For a much clearer visualization, I used the international symbol for ground wherever possible instead of drawing another black wire, because we already have a ton of crossing wires in this drawing. I also simplified the treble-bleed circuit to keep things clearer; you’ll find the architecture of it with the correct values in the previous column.
Cory Wong Strat wiring
Courtesy of singlecoil.com
Wow, this really is a personalized signature guitar down to the bone, and Wong used his opportunity to create a unique instrument. Often, signature instruments deliver custom colors or very small aesthetic or functional details, so the Cory Wong Stratocaster really stands out.
That’s it! In our next column, we will continue our Stratocaster journey in the 70th year of this guitar by having a look at the famous Rory Gallagher Stratocaster, so stay tuned!
Until then ... keep on modding!
The Keeley ZOMA combines two of iconic amp effects—tremolo and reverb—into one pedal.
Key Features of the ZOMA
● Intuitive Control Layout: Three large knobs give you full control over Reverb Level, Tremolo Rate,and Depth
● Easy Access to Alternate Controls: Adjust Reverb Decay, Reverb Tone, and Tremolo Volume withsimple alt-controls.
● Instant Effect Order Switching: Customize your signal path. Position tremolos after reverb for avintage, black-panel tone or place harmonic tremolo before reverb for a dirty, swampy sound.
● True Bypass or Buffered Trails: Choose the setting that best suits your rig.
Three Reverb and Tremolo Modes:
● SS – Spring Reverb & Sine Tremolo: Classic spring reverb paired with a sine wave tremolo for that timelessblack-panel amp tone.
● PH – Plate Reverb & Harmonic Tremolo: Smooth, bright plate reverb combined with swampy harmonictremolo.
● PV – Plate Reverb & Pitch Vibrato: Achieve a vocal-like vibrato with ethereal plate reverb.
Reverb: Sounds & Controls
● Spring Reverb: Authentic tube amp spring reverb that captures every detail of vintage sound.
● Plate Reverb: Bright and smooth, recreating the lush tones of vibrating metal plates.
● Reverb Decay: Adjust the decay time using the REVERB/ALT SWITCH while turning the Level knob.
● Reverb Tone: Modify the tone of your reverb using the REVERB/ALT SWITCH while turning the Rate knob.
Tremolo: Sounds & Controls
● Sine Wave/Volume Tremolo: Adjusts the volume of the signal up and down with smooth sine wavemodulation.
● Harmonic Tremolo: Replicates classic tube-amp harmonic tremolo, creating a phaser-like effect withphase-split filtering.
● Pitch Vibrato: Delivers pitch bending effects that let you control how far and how fast notes shift.
● Alt-Control Tremolo Boost Volume: Adjust the boost volume by holding the REVERB/ALT footswitch whileturning the Depth knob.
The ZOMA is built with artfully designed circuitry and housed in a proprietary angled aluminum enclosure, ensuring both simplicity and durability. Like all Keeley pedals, it’s proudly designed and manufactured in the USA.
ZOMA Stereo Reverb and Tremolo
The first sound effects built into amplifiers were tremolo and reverb. Keeley’s legendary reverbs are paired with their sultry, vocal-like tremolos to give you an unreal sonic experience.