Dave’s Corner: Crank It Down. Getting Great Tones At Lower Volumes

As rock’n’roll and music made by the electric guitar in general grew from fringe to mainstream throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the trend in amplification was consistently toward the louder, the bigger, the more powerful. Along the way, the benchmark for great rock tone was set somewhere in the “sweet spot” of the many great tube amps of the day: clean-verging-on-crunchy for roots rock, rockabilly and country; crunchy verging on wailing for classic rock and blues rock; wailing verging on meltdown for heavy rock and metal.

Fast-forward to the 21st century, though, and the volumes produced by great tube amps when set to these levels—let’s call ’em around 11 o’clock, 1 o’clock, and 5 o’clock respectively—are just too much for many venues and studios to tolerate.

Often the simple and wise advice is, “Just use a smaller amp!” I’ve presented that solution countless times myself, and there’s a lot to be said for it. In one sense, simply by taking out an amp that’s sized to hit its sweet spot at a volume that is correct for the room in question, you’re eliminating the problem in one fell swoop.

But there are lots of legitimate reasons to want to solve the inherent Catch 22 of achieving the sound and feel of an amp that’s too loud for a particular playing situation without scrapping that amp entirely.

• Maybe you just like the sound of a particular type of amp, and that’s the size it happens to be.
• Perhaps you like the feel of “big iron” and big tubes, the weight and body they add to your tone, and the low-end girth they enable.
• Maybe your band really demands a 2xEL34 Plexi Lead tone or a 4x6L6 Twin Reverb tone, but you gig in venues that can’t tolerate that kind of power.
• Perhaps the one amp you have is a big 50- or 100-watter, and you dig its tone… and simply can’t afford another, smaller amp.
• Or possibly your are using a smaller 15- to 20-watt amp, and it’s still too loud for many playing situations, so you need to dial that down to make it sound great in smaller rooms.

Fortunately, whichever is your reason for needing to crank it down, so pervasive is this problem that you’re not tackling it alone. Thousands of guitarists have gone there before you, and there are plenty of decent solutions afloat out there as a result.

Be aware that nothing will ever enable your amp to sound exactly like it does cranked up but at lower volumes, and that’s for a lot of solid reasons. Some solutions add a little darkness to the tone, some add a little compression, some color it in other ways—however slight—and all introduce the simple fact that nothing sounds the same to the human ear quiet as it does loud (not to mention that your speakers sound different pumped hard then they do pumped slightly less hard).

That said, many of these possible cures do great service for countless demanding, professional guitarists every night of the week.

Conventional Cures

Output attenuators are connected between amp output and speaker to soak up some of the amp’s wattage. These things have come a long way from the old Altair units that were notorious for burning up and, too often, taking your amp’s output tubes and/or output transformer along with them.

Units like the Aracom PRX-150 Pro, the Scumback DBL (formerly Alex’s Attenuator), Tone King Iron Man, Komet Air Brake, Dr Z Air Brake, smaller Dr Z Brake Lite and Swart Night Light and others have proven real game-changers for players seeking old-school, big-amp tone at reasonable volumes, and they tend to be no more of a danger to your amp than is the strain of running the amp hard in the first place.

They sometimes add a little compression and darkness (some have controls and switches to compensate), but often it’s a worthwhile sacrifice for the juicy lead tones you get in return.

Reactive Load/Re-amplification devices are, like attenuators, connected between amp out and speaker, but instead of sucking out some of the power via large resistors or reactive devices, they run your entire output into a load device to soak up the wattage, while tapping it off to a line-level signal that is fed to an internal power amp that re-amps it back into your speakers at your selected volume, from whisper quiet to—in some cases—far louder than your host amp’s capabilities.

This means the sound coming from your speakers is powered by a second power amp, rather than by the one in your host amp, but this is usually a clean, hi-res amp designed to accurately reproduce the overdrive saturation and playing feel of your cranked tubes-through-output-transformer tone that’s being injected into it, and the best ones do a darn good job of it.

Among these units, the new Fryette Power Station has already received raves, and the recently revamped Bad Cat Unleash V2 has a lot of fans, too.

Voltage-reduction controls reduce the DC voltage levels within the amp’s circuit that the tubes run on in order to reduce the amount of power they put out. The theory is that if you turn down the voltage while simultaneously adjusting other operating parameters that determine how the tubes perform, the tone should remain the same.

The key in how well some of these function—and how accurately they enable cranked-down tone—is often in that latter part of the equation. The voltage level at which a tube operates is a big factor in determining it’s response to your guitar signal, and therefore the resultant tone, so just altering the voltage without also changing, for example, the tube’s bias level or other driving factors might not always do the trick.

That said, the better-conceived of these circuits do a very good job at helping you turn it down while cranking it up, and voltage-reduction controls from the likes of 65amps, Mojave Ampworks, Tone King, London Power, and Hall Electronics have won many fans.

Tube converters were subject to a flurry of popularity when they first came out a couple decades ago, leading many players to install these devices in their Twins and other amps to achieve “instant AC30 tone.”

A tube converter plugs into your amp’s output-tube socket and, as the name implies, lets you use lower-powered, nine-pin tubes in place of higher-powered eight-pin tubes (usually converting from 6L6 to EL84, but sometimes from 6V6). At the same time, they convert the amp’s output stage from fixed bias to cathode bias (nominally referred to as “class A”).

While successfully dropping an amp’s output power—from 100 watts in a 4x6L6 amp using four converters to around 30 watts—the change in operation from what the amp was designed to do can sometimes sound a little unnatural, to my ears at least, but plenty of players enjoy the results.

Isolation cabinets are like a studio isolation booth in a box. By enclosing a speaker entirely within a sealed box—with an input to receive the amp’s output, and an XLR jack to connect to a microphone mounted inside—the sound of a full-blast amp is reduced to a whisper (or less) in the room, and you can run the microphone to your recording setup for studio use or to the house PA for live use.

In either case you will need to monitor your playing through some external device, but this can be done at far lesser volume than that which is raging inside the cab. Complaints about the smaller units in particular is that they can sound, well, “boxy,” although larger efforts like Rivera’s Silent Sister go to great lengths to overcome this shortcoming.

Master volume controls are the granddaddies of volume reduction. Many amps are made with them these days, but if yours doesn’t have one, and you don’t mind subjecting it to a little modification, you can usually get a qualified tech to add one.

Do some research on the more popular master designs afloat in the amp world these days, talk to your tech about it, and decide whether it’s right for you. Scads of players still swear by the good-old master, but be aware that the amp rarely sounds “exactly like itself with the master cranked” when you turn the master down (then again, that caveat applies to many volume-reduction techniques).

Less Obvious, Alternative, and Downright Whacky Solutions

Less efficient speakers are one of the simpler, yet often overlooked, means of reducing your amp’s volume. Check out the specs of several popular speaker types and look for a rating listed as “efficiency” or “sensitivity.” This tells you how much sound any given speaker puts out with 1 watt of power injected, measured at a distance of 1 meter. If you note that a Celestion G12H-30 is rated at 100dB or an Eminence Red Fang at 102.2dB, changing to a Heritage Series Celestion G12M Greenback at 96dB or Jensen C12Q at 94.6dB is going to knock down your volume considerably.

Of course the swap will also change your overall tone—whether for better or worse depends on your objectives—and you’ll need to calculate power-handling and other factors into the equation, too.

Crazy speaker-in-a-box trick as a parallel output to reduce your “live” speaker’s volume. Put simply, any two speakers wired to your amp in parallel (or in series, for that matter) will share the output between them, so, for example, a pair of speakers in a 2x12" connected to a 50-watt amp will receive 25 watts each. What if one of those speakers is in a box, padded down heavily so you can’t hear it? Voila, the remaining speaker behaves as if it’s connected to a 25-watt amp (or somewhat so, at least).

You need to observe the rules for impedance matching between speaker and amp, and both speakers need to be of the same impedance rating (connecting two 8-ohm speakers in parallel to an amp’s 4-ohm outputs, for example), but the speaker you box up doesn’t have to be the same type or size at all, or even a guitar speaker.

For such purposes I have a small but sturdy bookshelf speaker with a 4" driver capable of handling 75 watts, with foam padding stuffed inside its small cubular cab, and more foam wrapped all around it, with the whole contraption sealed in a box with a handle, and a speaker cable with ¼" jack coming out one corner. The rig only gives you a preset amount of volume reduction, of course, but sometimes it’s just right for knocking off enough to let you hit the sweet spot.

Turn your closed-back cab backwards on stage to take the directionality out of it and majorly reduce your perceived stage volume and the “beaminess” of your amp in the first several rows of the audience. You usually need to be miking amps at a show for this to work quite right, but it’s an easy fix that a lot of guitarists use to maintain their big-rig 4x12" tone in the mix, without blowing their bandmates and fans right out the door. Some players also achieve similar effects, but with a little more on-stage volume, by tilting their cabs way, way back and aiming them toward the ceiling.

Stick something in front of the speaker cab to soak up some of the volume and directionality. So, you show up at the gig with your amp and 2x12" cab expecting to be able to crank it up as usual, only to find the room is much smaller than you expected, or the soundman or club owner is going apoplectic over the volume levels that you normally consider merely sufficient to achieve your tone. What do you do?

If none of the former fixes are handy, try propping something soft and semi-sound-absorbent in front of your cab. Lean a pillow or cushion in front of the speaker, put your jacket over it, or put the cab’s slipcover (if you have one) partially back on while you’re playing (though without covering any ventilation for the tubes if it’s a combo cab). I’ve used a similar cure by propping my pedalboard case in front of the speaker, or by putting my 2x12" cab’s cover on from the side so it entirely covers one of the speakers and just part of the other, quickly reducing perceived volume enough to get the job done.

You will probably need to tweak your amp’s EQ with cover/padding in place so all sounds fine out front (such fixes absorb a lot more highs than they do lows), and if you’re miking on stage you’ll need to wedge that in there somewhere, but this is a simple and free trick that actually works surprisingly well in many cases.

Use your imagination, crank it up, cut down the volume, and have fun with it.