Chapter 4

Sweet Spots and Headroom

The greater the wattage between the same models of amp, the more headroom the amp will have. Headroom is the amount of clean sound volume range in any amp on any channel. It is the sweep between hearing clean to when the sound breaks up. A low gain setting achieves the greatest headroom sweep of the volume until the clean sound changes to break up. Why is this important? It is important if a clean tone needs to be turned up to cut through a mix or to fill the environment with the sound of the clean tone. If you don’t have enough headroom, you cannot play clean. You can try backing off the volume and upping the tone on the guitar, but the problem of not being loud enough can still occur. The solution is more headroom, which means more wattage of the same amp model or an amp with plenty of headroom.

The reason why wattage gives more headroom is complex, but you can understand it to mean that the higher wattage maintains clean signals at higher volumes without breaking up.

Headroom often correlates to clean channels on an amp or amps dedicated to clean tones. This is exactly the sort of foundation that many distortion pedals enjoy when used with amps. An am with a lot of headroom often makes for a great pedal platform.

The gain control on many amps will allow the user to break up much earlier at lower volume settings.

If the gain dial can be turned up very high and the amp maintains a clean tone, then it is more than likely an amp designed for clean playing and being a pedal platform.

If your goal is crunch, distortion, or high gain, headroom will not be important to you.

Identifying amp tones is something you learn about long-term. Anyone who spends enough time following up on electric guitar tones can list dozens of amps and tell you what each one is for and what bands or songs use them. Doing this and being interested in it is part of being an electric guitarist. Read the gear magazines. Attend the gear shows. Tune in. Look up what you like and see what other guitarists in bands have in their rigs. Download the manuals. The electric guitar should become a hobby that extends to activities like this outside of only playing guitar.

You can use digital software that tries to emulate the sounds of each amp on the market, so there are ways to get an idea of how each sounds somewhat quickly without needing to go to the store and try them all out. We will tell you how to do this to prepare you for thinking about the amps you believe will fit the genres you want to play in.

Learning about amp and pedal tones is how it goes and forms the conversation around most guitar rig discussions. It’s all part and parcel of the deal with being an electric guitarist. If you don’t know how to start, think of a song or band you like. Look up who the guitarist is and then research what gear they use (www.equipboard.com). Watch videos of the gear they use. Some interviews detail a lot with a guitar tech for the band, explaining what all the gear does and how they use the settings. Learn from them.

Now that we have some idea of how amp stages process a raw guitar signal, we can discuss an easy way to discover the identity of an amp. That is called finding an amp’s sweet spot and is a practice carried out by all expert sound engineers engaging any electric guitar amp. You don’t need to do anything with your guitar other than not maxing out the guitar pickups’ volume and tone dials. Roll the dials a bit back. You want a little room to go back and forth from this position. Be careful with thinking noon on volume is fine. Sometimes you need to engage more than that to hear some quality distortion.

The first thing to do with an unfamiliar amp is to turn everything down to just above 0. Do not start at noon. As you play guitar (or use a looping pedal to playback something you did), gradually increase the pre-amp and power amp gain and volume until you can hear something. While turning up both the volume and gain, the amp will take on a more organic breathing feel. NVM amps will get that by just turning up the volume.

Power Tube Breakup

First experiment with discovering the amps power tube break-up point. Turn up this volume, sometimes called a master, and you will hear the amp’s tone change somewhat abruptly at some point. That is the point of breakup into distortion. It is also your headroom limit.

Dial back and forward again over that abrupt change point. It should not be as subtle or gradual as other dial points on the sweep. That change can happen early, at 12 o’clock, or cranked to the max. It might be very abrupt or not so sudden, but the point is that the tone becomes noticeably different over this smaller range. It will likely start to break up (distort) at this point, also. Note where that breakup occurred. Now turn it down so you can hear the next breakup point on the pre-amp gain dial.

Pre-amp Breakup

Turn up the pre-amp gain next and try to discover the same type of noticeable change. Note the breakup point.

EQ sweetspots

Next go through each equalizer dial one by one with the other EQs at 0. Find where the amp changes tone abruptly as you turn up a dial. Note all the points. They could be anywhere.

Don’t judge this based on seeing other amps of the same model. It doesn’t work that way, as we shall explain more. For now, stop dialing in what you saw or read elsewhere. It is your amp connected to your gear, not someone else’s.

Presence and other dials

You may or may not have to engage these similarly to find an amp’s sweet spot. You may also have to have them somewhat on for the amp to react as the engineers intended. But, for now, know they are there and can help you out with fine-tuning.

Dialing in the sweet spot

Now try and turn everything up to the points you have noted. These sweet spots should be close to the intended tone the amps engineers had in mind. From here on, subtle tweaking is all you should do instead of trying wide-ranging changes to find the amp’s tone and character. You mostly do that from your guitar with the volume, tone dials, and pickup selection.

That does not mean that you never try those wide-ranging settings. You should. This process of finding an amp’s sweet spot is for amps that are not familiar to you. When you bond with an amp, you can discover other sweet spot combinations, usually involving EQ and Gain adjustments.

It would help if you tried out some common combination types: mids scooped (mids to 0), which is very popular for metal playing but only without a band because mids to 0 can sound bad in a mix and live. That is because the guitar is a mid-range instrument. More about that later, especially if you like the mid-scooped tone.

Mids up is very common with many guitarists, and sometimes they have the bass and treble down low and the mids up high, and that’s the setting they use that carries forward well in a band mix. Higher treble is another common setting done by lead guitarists when soloing to give their tone some sparkle on the high end.

Again it isn’t wrong to view an amp as having one sound that we must find with the dials. The dials in this view are just something to help correct and fine-tune your entire rig to find that sweet spot. Whatever values the dials are at doesn’t matter if you sound how you want to. If this doesn’t work, then there is a good chance the amp is unsuitable for the tone you want. The guitar may also be the cause, but the issue is often or not the wrong amp, not the wrong guitar. However, the most significant issue of all is just not dialing in an amp well.

Once you figure out how to find the sweet spots on one amp, you know how to do it on most others. It is not a replacement for finding a good tone through fine-tuning your rig, just a beneficial way to get to know an unfamiliar amp. Knowing your gear, but done a bit quicker. With additional information on how that amp could be played, this method is invaluable.

Stop dialing all at noon

If all your dials are at noon exactly, then chances are you aren’t fine-tuning anything. What are the odds that all the dials at noon make an amp sound great on any amp? Your guitar pickups will vary compared to the person next to you. The amp has a sound, and the dials help you match the rest of the rig to the amp to get it. The more dials, the greater the chances you need to dial even a fraction left or right of noon for at least one. All dials at noon are something you do casually, maybe when you first encounter an amp and then turn down the volume. Fine. However, this is not how to use an amp properly. Sometimes it might work. Some amp manufacturers sometimes go with noon being a good baseline for the amp’s tone. Still, the variable EQ range is designed to help find the right balance between your guitar and the amp’s tone you are chasing. Find it with your ears, never with your eyes.

Micro-variations

All amps have micro-variations between them. That is most noticeable with custom hand-wired amps, but assembly-line models can also vary. For example, two amps of the same model require their dials to be set slightly differently to achieve the same sound.

There is no such thing as a sound engineer just stacking ten amps and then dialing them all in precisely to the same configurations across the board, or else it is a suboptimal rush job. That’s just copying and hoping through random chance it’s close to what you want. What achieves a better tone is dialing in for each amp.

If you want to turn up and dial everything to some specific setting, use labels to set the dials. Writing on some tape and sticking it on the faceplate is fine. Keep notes so you can reference what you have done. Photos work also and may be the modern way to record all that important info.

Therefore, the inescapable conclusion is that no matter what gear is being used, settings will always be customized because subtle variations between equipment mean identical replication is rarely achieved by directly copying everything. In fact, the conclusion is much more profound than this. It means dialing in by seeing is a badly flawed way to set any amp. Only ears, not visual cues with dialings, can dial in an amp as it should be.

It is fun for the learner to read their favorite guitarists’ settings on their amps for their tones and dial in the same settings. However, nearly everyone who does this eventually realizes things aren’t quite the same, and they aren’t getting the same tone or maybe even a good one. So, when you advance, you stop doing this and experiment with your equipment to find your settings using your ears only.

Point of Breakup and Distortion

An amps gain and volume sweet spots may or may not be where distortion kicks in, but it usually is. If not, you choose an increase in gain for pre-amp distortion and volume distortion for power-amp distortion. You could have lots of preamp gain and little volume or a little preamp gain and a lot of volume. Some amps distortion sweet spots require both high preamp gain and high volume. Some amps require cranking, meaning everything on the highest settings. Sometimes, the amp’s tone will not change after reaching a point of total saturation that may or may not involve all the dials up to max.