"I got my Mojo workin'..."
amphead said:
Hey everyone,
Here's a link to an article I wrote for this month's My Rare Guitars newsletter. It's about whether amps might be better without tone controls. Bizarre idea I know, but check it out. I'm curious what you think.
http://www.myrareguitars.com/macktonecontrols.mht
Cheers!
This is an old, old debate! We're not really talking any improved sound, only something different to the taste.
Do tone controls cut tone? Of course! That's how they've worked since tone controls were invented. So what? Have amps all sounded like crap until the idea of an amp with no tone controls came along?
It's easy to get confused when "tone" can have more than one meaning. Tone can refer to simply having a good sound. It also can refer to the shaping of the frequency response in an amplifying circuit. The first definition is totally a matter of taste. The second is a technical definition.
We usually hear the idea of no tone controls from the audiophile world of high fidelity. These guys are often very anal retentive about getting the absolute clearest sound with minimum distortion. Any time you add complexity like tone controls to a circuit you add measurable amounts of distortion. By measurable amount I DON't mean enough for anyone to actually hear! I simply mean that if your lab equipment is good enough you will be able to measure it. Good equipment may let you detect a moth fart at a hundred paces but there's not a human nose on the planet that could smell it!

Again, it's important to keep perspective.
Take the tone controls out of the typical amp and yessir, the sound will change. In the immortal words of Jim Nabors:"Surprise, surprise, surprise!" Is this a good or a bad thing? How can one give an answer? It's totally a matter of personal taste!
Who in the world wants an unshaped electric guitar sound? It's SUPPOSED to be shaped! How you do it determines the distinctive sound of an amp! It's what makes a Fender sound different than a Vox, or a Soldano.
Do you really want to run an amp that has no tone controls? What an audiophile would do is run that amp and if he has something in his listening room that sucks out a portion of the treble frequencies or whatever he changes the room! He'll put time and money into different speaker enclosures, the length of the room walls and maybe even hang a drape across one wall to prevent a reflection or absorption.
That's if he actually knows what he's doing. More likely, he doesn't know enough about such stuff and doesn't want to make the effort to learn. So he goes to the hifi store and spends great gobs of money on stuff with lots of chrome and great reviews in the trade mags. Then he can impress his friends by constantly mentioning how expensive is his system!
Suppose you get someone to take the tone stack out of circuit in your amp. Immediately you get a dramatic difference in the sound. Odds are you'll love it for its novelty but what happens next month? A simple in/out switch might be a better idea but more likely a bit more gain on the boost pedal would have done as much.
By now I guess it's obvious that I find this idea a bit misplaced and over-rated. Especially when with the typical Fender/Marshall stack if you put all the knobs at 10 you essentially have dialed them out of the circuit anyway.
Not meaning to be totally negative. I just have always found this idea to be more about yet another way of making an electric guitar sound different. All these ways may work but it still is just personal taste.
The exact same debate has raged for years about guitar amps that don't use a negative feedback loop. To me it's quite simple. If you like the sound of a Vox with no nfb better than the typical Fender or Marshall then buy the Vox! You can't say one circuit trick is always better! It's just another option to shape your sound.
All that rant behind us, there's one application where having no or just a very simple tone control has merit. Vintage blues! That's why so many guys like those old Ampegs and such with only a single treble cut tone control. That sound was always just the raw sound of the guitar. If you want to nail that "tone" then build yourself (or get someone qualified) a single 6L6 class A (really class A and not just cathode biased!) amp with only a volume control. If you're lucky enough to have an old alnico speaker around then even better!
So let the flames begin! :2guns: