my best gear investment so far

[Luke]

Was not able to get the sound in my mind to come out of my amplifier, so I purchased a rack mount dbx EQ today. While different amplifiers have different parts, what makes one more desirible is the way it accentuates or deletes certain frequencies until someone decides, "this is the holy grail" this is it, this is tone. So I decided that while my amp maybe lacking in this or that, depending on the opinion of the person speaking, my goal was to get this amp to produce the sound I heard in my head and was not hearing from the amp.

It took two hours of tweaking, with several 5 minute breaks for my ears to settle, but I have to say that I have accomplished my goal for a mere $140 investment. I needed a scoop out about 15db around the middle, add some bass, drop the treble about 2db and add about .5 db of presecence, but now it is nearly perfect. I will retest tomorrow with fresh ears, but I can sleep this evening knowing I am 98% of the way to my tone for the first time in my life and I did it with the equipment I had with the exception of the EQ.

I am proud to say that instead of churning through tons of amps, cabinets or speaker configurations, I accomplished my goal. In the end we are dealing with sound which is a spectrum of noise and we alter the noise until it is pleasing to our ear, and with no idea of what I was doing other than pure experimentation I did it. I did not know what 1.6khz would do until I moved it from +15 to -15 and heard it. I'd settle on a place where it sounded better than flat (0db) and then I would simply move the next slider until it sounded better than 0db. Of course I had to go back and tweak the previous settings as the curve developed, but with no sound engineering background, no idea of what I was doing and just using my ears as my guide I slowly focused in on my tone. So get yoruself an EQ and see if it may just solve your tonal issues.

[kurtsstuff]

Believe it or not......Many,Many...well too many years ago I was getting tone to die for out of a Peavey Bandit......Was always complimented on it and asked how I was getting it with a "peavey"...well...now I can reveal my secret hehe.....I had a Rockman 1/2 rack 12 band eq mounted in the back of the bandit and ran it through the "line in,Line out" on the back of the amp and as I said...hard to believe but it frickin smoked!!!

[Jeff R]

I had similar results with a Peavey VTM 60 halfstack when they first came out. Sounded eh out of the box (I hit it because it was cheap) but I threw the half-rack Rockman EQ in the loop and it really transformed the amp into something nice.

Edited to fix poor grammer and speling

[tgoss]

and we alter the noise until it is pleasing to our ear,

You hit the nail on the head.

[bobsessed]

What about stomp box EQ's....anybody getting anything usable out of those? I've had 2, a Boss, and a Vesta-Fire,(Japan). the VF was great as a clean boost, but you can really invest some time dialing in a good tone with any of them,huh? They tend to confuse me because each band in the spectrum is directly affected by each other! Change one parameter, they ALL change....gimme some clues....-Bob-

[kselbee]

Very interesting... something I'll have to try. So how do you set the EQ on your amp? Just flat?

[bobsessed]

I've tried setting the amp flat, or using the tone stage knobs in all sorts of positions. you get different tones any way you go, but so far, I haven't found that setting that I'm gonna "nail down" and keep forever. Oh well....the quest continues.....and it's all good fun!