Amp Comparison Part 1 – JCM 800 Styles

Over the time i established a guitar amp and cabinet collection that covers a wide variety of sounds. So to explore these options i am in the process of creating several comparison videos of amps and styles. The first bunch of videos covered my flavours of a kind of JCM800 rock sound.

Here is what i did:

guitars

To maintain a mostly similar signalpath i recorded the guitars as DI tracks and went into the amp via reamping. To prevent humming, there is a ISP Decimator as noisegate involved.

boost

Most of the 80’s JCM sounds used some kind of boost pedal and i wanted to have this covered as well. So beside the pure amp i used a BOSS SD-1 with a clean boost setting (level cranked, drive none, tone 12 o clock). These videos are labeled as „(boosted)“

cabs

It should be known by now that cabs have a huge impact to the sound, a lot more than different amps do. I’ll cover this in a cab comparison someday. For this investigation i wanted as little cab influence as possible so i used the same cab impulse response for every amp.
The IR i used was a Bogner Uberschall cab with Celestion Vintage 30s that were miced with two Shure SM57 at the cab-edge position in an on/off setting. As power soak and IR loader i used my react:IR unit.

post processing

None! This is the pure sound without any EQ and/or other stuff. The only thing i did was to record two tracks, one left, one right that fattens up the sound but that is so common in guitar recording that i think i get away with it.

The results

I started with my different Randall MTS/Synergy modules. No judging of personal preferences from my side. There is a place for every flavour.

cheers eighty