The Steel Guitar Forum

Jerry's "Budman"!!!

128 lbs of beastly McIntosh power!!

This looks great! It's not for sale yet on your website I guess? I see the SMS without the dwell knob but not the spectrum up there. The Dwell is on the Spectrum mostly because the Dwell (aka reverb send level) affects the quality, smoothness, character of the reverb response. It doesn't affect dur...

Updated title. Oops. This is a PREAMP, not an AMP.

B

I'll try to gather more Spectrum samples to share. Not many yet. Here's me on steel on the latest Son Volt tribute to Doug Sahm. I'm no session guy or pro, just fake-it-till-you-make-it. But it's my 69 Sho-Bud into a ZB pot volume pedal into the Spectrum into a McIntosh MC75 driving a JBL D120F mike...

To celebrate our 20th anniversary since we launched the Steel Guitar Black Box tube buffer here on this forum, I wanted to do something I've always wanted to do, to make a no-holds-barred, hand-wired tube preamp with real spring reverb. We finally got the new Spectrum going this year. The Spectrum i...

I've been using my Sesh pedal into a tube amp or tube preamp, mostly Fender style preamp (Revelation, SMS Classic, SMS Spectrum) There is a redundancy here, a preamp into a preamp. But I'm keeping the Sesh output way down, and I'm kinda balancing the the Sesh EQ with the preamp EQ settings. So most ...

wasn't the ross stuff just MXR clones? Kinda. Their famous Ross Compressor that has been cloned and copied by Keeley, Analogman, and a few others was Ross's take on a MXR Dyna Comp. They actually improved the Dyna Comp. You can modify the MXR to get there, just a few things, but it's a legit improv...

There's a great video where JHS tells the whole story. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJKrIUNXVv8 It's amazing to me watching this evolution since the 90s. I'd argue that this entire Ross phenom is because of Trey Anastasio of Phish. He's literally the only famous player to have built a sound aroun...

Ken Pippus wrote:For what it’s worth, none of those tone settings are for a Session 400.

Right. The Sesh and Session 400 (and its little bro the LTD 400) had a very different circuit, different midrange EQ, etc from the modern opamp-based Nv400 and Session 400 LTD.

The FreeLoader does not have an on off switch. I treat the top input jack as the on/off switch. It's endlessly reliable and gives a good visual from a distance whether it's powered on or off. Also, it gets about 500 hours on a fresh battery, so it's not really a big deal to leave it on for extended ...

Yes. It's a low power pedal and runs for a good length of time on a fresh 9v battery.

Brad

The F2B has gotten expensive in recent years. It's simply a pair of non-reverb channels from an old Fender preamp. Pretty straightforward, not magic or exotic necessarily. If you want that same Fender classic tone and circuit but with reverb, we do have the SMS Classic that's every bit the F2b and w...

Jack. I once did a pot and volume pedal comparison, graphing the actual curves relating to pedal movement. The orignal AB or Clarostat mil-spec types had really good curves, smooth, no kink. The Telonics had that neat variety of curves, but due to the nature of the sensors, the curve wasn't perfectl...

Thanks Noah!

Cyanoacrylate - Super Glue

I'm wanting to tune up this little old Regal 6 string lap steel with an open E tuning: Low to high: E B E G# B E Scale length is 23-1/4 inches Plenty of string gauge/tension calculators out there. My main question is how many POUNDS OF TENSION per string should I be after for a good lap steel feel? ...

Good looking design. Should have plenty of gain and steel friendly tone shaping, even with insertion loss of the EQ sections.

And exactly what Scott said regarding final follower stage and bootstrapping the bias.


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Hey Brad I have a Mullen RP guitar and a Session 400 and a Session 500 and I get harmonic distortion on both. Where is a good place to look? Well there's the good kind of harmonic distortion those are known for, that musical halo they make. But if it's audible distortion, the first place to start i...

To me, the problem I have with graphic EQ's is not nearly as much about the phase distortion problems, which are very real the heavier you EQ, but it's all the many electronic stages of crap the sweet guitar signal has to go thru, being degraded at each capacitor, each opamp, over and over again. Wh...

that weird taper behavior kinda suggests the volume pedal is wired or connected backwards.

It should behave with the exact same taper regardless of a buffer there or not.

B

There's kinda an often broken EQ rule in audio: EQ is your enemy. It introduces phase distortion, and that phase distortion can sometimes be a greater problem than what you're trying to fix. The takeaway is that other than our preamp EQ/Tone Section where we initially shape the voice of our instrume...

We made the Earth Drive without a big midrange boost, more flat and open so a steel still sounds like a steel instead of suddenly being converted to bottleneck slide tones. And it has the clean headroom to handle hot steel pickups. You can really dial the dirt all the way down if you want, unlike ma...

Brad: Okay, I'll be sure to do that. But why. Thanks, Tommy..... Because reverb only sounds right when its tail naturally decays, like the way sound does in a reverberant space. If we put it before the volume pedal, then the reverb tail goes for that wild ride of the volume pedal up and down which ...

But

ABSOLUTELY

Put the Reverb AFTER the volume pedal!!!


B