The Gain Wars.

Genghis said:
I was explaining to one of my students the other day that high gain and low gain have different challenges. You have to play clean in either case, but it’s a different kind of clean. I told him high gain requires as much effort with a light touch for making the notes along with a certain touch for muting the strings you aren’t playing to keep things from sounding like a noisy mess.
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thats good teaching!
 
KingsXJJ said:
It used to be (for me anyway) that my 17 year old Army A$$ bought the pawn shop practice amp with the most gain. To my newbie butt that was what gave me the “stack sound” and tube amp feel for what my poor Army guy could afford. I chose Crate at a time when when they looked like an actual crate with wood trim.

Nowadays it’s different, usually you can get more gain than you need or can use from many suspects.

The EVH Red channel, the Marshall DSL’s, ENGL, Diezel, many more too.

It’s almost like a nuclear arms race but for gain instead of missles. I think the key towards understanding this is using the sometimes true adage that “more is less” at times.

I’d have probably gotten along with the DSL’s in particular, and others too obviously by realizing that. But that “Dime It Already Mentality” is a hard reflex to kick when you were raised in a time of scarcity. And gain is addictive.

Just some rambling thoughts about my tone journey.
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As a metal player primarily, my take on gain isn't the amount of it but the quality and the filtering. I much prefer a lower gain, more toneful sound, to sheer chainsaw nightmare levels of gain that just compresses the heck out of the tone.

Mesa Mark amps allow you to do a lot of the filtering and gain staging on the amp because the lead channel has 3 independent gain controls. Volume 1 controls the input amount, Lead Gain controls the amount of saturation, and Treble controls the filtering and incremental gain staging.. So you have a high quality gain signal with the ability to filter it however you choose.

Then there's 5150s, SLOs, and Rectifiers. Amps with a ton of gain on hand, but you are somewhat responsible for your own pre-filtering. I prefer these amps ran with the gain lower and an overdrive out front, which gives a ton of freedom to shape the filtering how I choose. The amps' controls give enough function to sculpt a sound but it never deviates from the core sound of the amp. So you get a super harmonically-rich gain sound that blooms or cuts when you stick different overdrives or EQ boosts in front of them.

Some amps just have a ton of gain. I love the sound of EVH heads, but that red channel is basically a distortion pedal and I always wind up putting a 12au7 in place of the main channel 3 driver just to knock the gain back a bit and make the gain knob more usable.
 
Desertdweller said:
As a metal player primarily, my take on gain isn't the amount of it but the quality and the filtering. I much prefer a lower gain, more toneful sound, to sheer chainsaw nightmare levels of gain that just compresses the heck out of the tone.

Mesa Mark amps allow you to do a lot of the filtering and gain staging on the amp because the lead channel has 3 independent gain controls. Volume 1 controls the input amount, Lead Gain controls the amount of saturation, and Treble controls the filtering and incremental gain staging.. So you have a high quality gain signal with the ability to filter it however you choose.

Then there's 5150s, SLOs, and Rectifiers. Amps with a ton of gain on hand, but you are somewhat responsible for your own pre-filtering. I prefer these amps ran with the gain lower and an overdrive out front, which gives a ton of freedom to shape the filtering how I choose. The amps' controls give enough function to sculpt a sound but it never deviates from the core sound of the amp. So you get a super harmonically-rich gain sound that blooms or cuts when you stick different overdrives or EQ boosts in front of them.

Some amps just have a ton of gain. I love the sound of EVH heads, but that red channel is basically a distortion pedal and I always wind up putting a 12au7 in place of the main channel 3 driver just to knock the gain back a bit and make the gain knob more usable.
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Accurate. I currently have 2 Mk amps and an EVH EL34 5150 and that is kind of how I see it as well. I had the 6L6 version a few years ago and replaced that same tube you mentioned. I haven’t done that with the new one yet, but O probably should. I tend to use that with the gain around 9 o’clock for my super high rhythm guitar sound and use the blue channel with some kind of boost for leads. Just seems more open and flexible that way. That said, my Mk IIC+ probably has the best lead tone and feel of the three.
 
The gain on my X88ir channel 3 is probably the most I have had in an amp alone. It’s just about finding your lead voice across a variety of output pickups. You don’t need or would want a boost or OD of any kind. It’s every SLO tone you ever heard straight from the preamp alone. I would honestly have put less gain in channel 2 than it has but it still works for me. It’s more about sustain than more distortion.
 
There was certainly a bit of a "race for the most gain" going on in the 1990s and early 2000s. There's just tons of amps out there with "lead" channels that have unusable amounts of gain. I remember the Diezel Einstein I had was basically all the gain I'd ever need with the gain knob at around 10 or 11 o'clock, and the rest just added more noise.

I remember actually being impressed that an Orange Rockerverb let you crank the gain all the way and only then it felt like too much, so it had a lot of granularity to the knob.

Even on my BluGuitar I like to knock back around 20-30% gain using MIDI to set the max gain per channel. But that's mainly because the bright cap behavior is so tied to the gain knob position, where e.g gain on 5/10 might be enough but it's a bit harsh, whereas gain on 6-7 is the right brightness, but too much gain.
 
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Richie Castellano gave me my first “too much will fuck you up” lesson when I was a freshman in high school. We had ‘An Evening Of Guitar” which was basically a talent show focused around guitar with all the guitar students, some buddies and I did “Sweet Emotion” and though I was just using a Fender combo with no pedals, I had an EQ in the loop that I scooped the shit out of the amp with and had the Drive cranked on it, perfectly neutering the tone from being heard 5ft past the stage. I got offstage all pissed off and Richie walked up saying “That was great, too bad I was probably the only person that could actually hear it because I was right next to your amp. Too much gain, man!”

Then he got up and did “Bohemian Rhapsody” with the full opera section he recorded himself at home and smoked everyone who played that night, playing into a 1x12 combo, no mic, loud and clear as day. Perfect lesson/example within the same 10 minutes that definitely had an impact on me.
 
norminal said:
My rule of thumb is to turn the gain down until I can no longer rely on the saturation to produce the tone, riff or lick Im trying to achieve, then turn it back up a little.

Some riffs and licks require a certain amount of gain to say, nail that pinch harmonic, sustain, or long legato line. Any more and you’re just adding noise.

I use a similar method when tracking guitars. If I’m double tracking a rhythm track, I actually turn the gain down a lot lower than I would if I were just playing or tracking one guitar.

That said, some amps like the 5150 have way more hair on tap that the average person would ever use.
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That’s exactly it , gain can become a crutch
More importantly adding gain adds noise hum and string noise
So I agree with you try to get the least amount of gain you need to have an articulate clear tone almost to the point of starting to be uncomfortable then give it a slight bump from there
Especially true of Rythm chunky tones and if you are planning on multi tracking sounds
Leads I think you can be a little more liberal with gain
 
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