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NAD - Friedman Smallbox


LucSulla

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Got here 10 days early...

Do I really have to give a full review?

It is exactly what it is supposed to be.  Sounds great, and it is daunting as hell.  It hides NOTHING, which I think is cool because part of the reason I wanted to go back to the mid-gain Marshall thing was to coax myself into being a better player. To be honest, I'm kind of over my playing right now.  It's the same bunch of shreddy crap with no real feel.  Somewhere along the way, I completely forgot how to phrase a solo because I guess I was so insecure about my playing.  You guys know how that works - everything because a party trick.  So yeah, every wart in my playing is there, and I am going to have to step up my game.  

The other side of this is that I think less gain sounds better these days, even in metal and hard rock.  I'm also a bit tired of all my guitars sounding the same - that kind of uniform, high-gain lead sound.  It sounds good, but it doesn't sound particularly unique.  It's the guitar tone you'd here behind particularly peppy background music for the Weather Channel's "Local on the 8s."  

(I also hold a pick like George Benson, and I'm really divided on what that may be doing to my playing. But good lord it is hard to change to the proper way after 25 years of playing. That's another story.)

Any way, this amp delivers the goods.  You definitely have to work with it, but man, it sounds great when you do.  And rhythm?  Just pack it in... You'd have to be an idiot to not find a good rhythm tone on this thing in about five seconds.   The amp sounds pretty much like a really rad plexi on one side and a hot-rodded-plexi to a hot-rodded early 2204 (seriously hot rodded at that) on the other side.  It's one of those amps where you can feel the quality just by turning the knobs with the amp off.  I won't go all hyperbolic, but if you read what the amp is supposed to be and that sounds like something you want, you'll love it because it nails it's mission statement. 

The knock I see on TGP is that is still doesn't have that Marshall "bite."  I think that is horse shit.  I just played a really fine sounding 1987x two weeks ago that I raved about here.  This amp sound every bit as good, very much in the same vein, and the master volume is absolutely spectacular - not one of things where at around 1.5 - 2 the power tubes drop in and rip your face off.  It smoothly turns up, which is very nice.  That said, it really starts doing the Marshall thing at around 9 o'clock on the old master.  I have a feeling some people griping about the tone are playing it in their bedroom, at which point it sounds like most every other tube amp that you've chocked down to a whisper and are trying to milk everything out of the preamp tubes. 

All in all, very impressive amp.  Between this and the Shiva, I think I've got pretty much all the Marshall flavors I dig in two amps.  To that end, while the Smallbox and the Shiva both have a Marshall vibe, they are different enough that having them both isn't all that redundant.  Shiva gives you a cleaner clean and a more modern gain structure, the Smallbox gives you more of a classic sound but at more workable volumes and with a bit more gain.  I'm looking forward to getting better acquainted with it. 

 

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17 minutes ago, LucSulla said:

The knock I see on TGP is that is still doesn't have that Marshall "bite." 

Most of those old fucks need hearing aids to get back what they lost. I know. I am one of them and now have a pair of.

 

Congrats!

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2 minutes ago, murkat said:

Most of those old fucks need hearing aids to get back what they lost. I know. I am one of them and now have a pair of.

 

Congrats!

Ha! Yeah, if you can't get enough bite out of a Smallbox by goosing the treble and presence controls, your ears are probably shot.

I tell ya, you can't win with aging guitar nerds. Old Marshalls sounded too thin for them (playing with a band instead of alone in Madison Square Basement helps fill things out) and more robust modern takes don't have enough bite.

And yes, as a Smallbox and EL34 Shiva owner as well, I can say that neither of them replicate a Marshall (of the two the Friedman gets closer).

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9 minutes ago, MCChris said:

And yes, as a Smallbox and EL34 Shiva owner as well, I can say that neither of them replicate a Marshall (of the two the Friedman gets closer).

Which makes me wonder if I what I was looking for is the Marshall thing or a thing you most often hear Marshalls doing.  I haven't played enough NMV and older 2203/04s to know how well the Friedman stacks as a duplicate, but it does do what I wanted them to sound like.  I have played a lot of 800s, from the old vert inputs through the diode versions, as well as a bunch of 900s, and I definitely like the Shiva better.  It does what I wanted those amps to do.  Newer Marshalls, and even the later 800s and Jubilees always sounded kind of brittle and harsh to me, and I feel like the Shiva gets that nice creamy thing going on without the harshness.  So while it doesn't sound the same, the parts that are missing might be parts I don't like. 

My favorite "older" Marshall tone in "Drop Dead Legs" by you know who.  The more that comes out about that amp, the more it would seem that it wasn't all that modded.  Friedman has been building racks for him forever and has said multiple time that, aside from the 90v, variac trick, the amp was pretty much stock. Since my hands don't sound like Eddie's, I feel like the Smallbox will be "close enough for government" work in that regard.  I could play his rig and still not sound like him.

For whatever reason, my favorite JCM 800 sounds is Slash's tone in "Locomotive"  or those big, whole note chords in "Breakdown" which the consensus is was probably an 800 from S.I.R., but probably not the same amp on AFD. No accounting for taste I guess.  The Shiva definitely gets into that territory.  Same deal though, regardless of gear or talent, I'd never sound exactly like him anyway.  I think chasing exact duplicates is a bit of a Sisyphean task anyway.  If I can nail the vibe well enough to feel like overall it has that kind of attitude (I guess that word makes sense), then I am plenty happy. 

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It's also funny that you can see where my taste in amps has gone from the number of buttons on the foot switch.  Starting from what I moved to Austin with in 2014 through most recent purchase of stuff I still have at them moment. 

Mesa Mark V - 8
Mesa Mark III - 4
Bogner Shiva - 3
Mesa Royal Atlantic - 2
Friedman Smallbox - 1

 

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1 hour ago, LucSulla said:

It's also funny that you can see where my taste in amps has gone from the number of buttons on the foot switch.  Starting from what I moved to Austin with in 2014 through most recent purchase of stuff I still have at them moment. 

Mesa Mark V - 8
Mesa Mark III - 4
Bogner Shiva - 3
Mesa Royal Atlantic - 2
Friedman Smallbox - 1

 

You still in Austin? I’m up in Cedar Park. Let’s go grab a beer!

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1 hour ago, kurtsstuff said:

I hear ya!..As my umm....age progresses it seems the gain knob on my amps has slowly but surely been being turned to the left...

I wonder if that is also not a product of just getting better.  I started noticing my strats sounded more like strats and my Lesters more like Lesters rather than over thing sounding the same when the gain peeled back a little, but that was more from playing rhythm.  Then I go back and listen to my albums and think, "Man, you can really hear the twang of that 25.5" neck in old EVH," or "Man, you can really hear that Les Paul thing in 'Brown Sugar.'" Then I discovered that I didn't really need all the gain to do 90% of things, and that last 10% was probably a combination of just getting used to it and practicing more.  I'm really down on my playing at the moment as a result, but I really enjoy the personality I'm getting out of my guitars now.  I think it will be worth it. 
 

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1 hour ago, Kurt L said:

You still in Austin? I’m up in Cedar Park. Let’s go grab a beer!

Nah, I took a job at Ole Miss back in 2016.  I lived in Austin from 2005 to 2010 and moved back after wrapping up my doctorate in 2014.  I found it to not really be the place I left.  When I first got there, if you and a roommate had a combined income of around 30K, you could still rent a decent house and have enough left over for guitar strings and Wild Turkey.  When I moved back, I was living in a shoebox up at Far West and paying almost as much for the privilege as renting a 3200 sq.ft. home in South Austin in 2010. 

I looked around at the shitty cubicle job I had in order to keep up with the Jones' and my ever expanding waistline due to sitting on my ass all day and thought, "You have a doctorate; why are you doing this to yourself just to stay in Austin?"  And I checked out.  I miss it, but I still manage to keep it Tejas out here! :D 

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Our bass player is actually a 69-year-old man who is 6' tall and maybe 130 lbs soaking wet.  I'm pretty much never 100% sure that he isn't about to die.  Here's a picture of him virtually disappearing behind our 5'6" alto sax player



 

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Awesome.   Enjoy.    I don’t know about techie stuff but my buddy who pretty much has every nice pedal you can imagine. (Think he uses em too much imho but let that go)  played my pink taco with last weekend.   After 30 seconds he was like.  Am gettin one of these.   I was like dude, I told you.    

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11 hours ago, DaveL said:

Awesome.   Enjoy.    I don’t know about techie stuff but my buddy who pretty much has every nice pedal you can imagine. (Think he uses em too much imho but let that go)  played my pink taco with last weekend.   After 30 seconds he was like.  Am gettin one of these.   I was like dude, I told you.    

I almost got a PT20, but I decided to just go all in on the SB.  

 

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OK, I've drank the Kool Aid.  Not only is that amp basically Channel 1 Jimmy Page, Channel 2 the first 6 Van Halen albums, Dave Friedman is awesome.  

I had an issue with the way the amp sounded when running an effects loop.  Dave himself has emailed with me back and forth all day - on a Saturday - helping me track down the problem (which happened to be the MXR Carbon Copy).  Problem resolved.  Resume peeling the paint off the walls of my third bedroom. 

Good fucking luck finding that kind of customer support from Marshall or Fender. Even Mesa, whom I've always had a ton of respect for, isn't that damned good.  

I'm not saying you should buy one of these amps, but if you dig things Marshall and British and have never checked one out, do so.  These are great amps run by a dude who genuinely gives a damn about his customers. 

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