Master Volume & Gain Controls On Your Guitar Amp – What Do They Do? [Cranked Amps, Drive & Headroom]

Thank you legends! Learnt a lot, as always!

I had a 60w super Sonic and a Vox AC10 that I tried wet dry with the same feelings as Dan. It seemed to be borderline inaudible. However, when I turned it off, I could tell a huge difference.

I love to crank the master volume when I can, gives a great fatness to to a clean or edge of breakup tone

so cool to see Mick so excited about Mesa. That’s how I feel about those amps they’re so underrated. I mean Joe Bonamassa could take all his dumbbells off and put a bunch of little one by 12 Mesa powerhouses on stage and nobody would know the difference in fact, it might even sound better.

Good episode gents! I have a couple weird ones: Mesa Boogie Mk IIB which has a fetron transistor in the first preamp tube position. It can be changed out to a 12AX7 but it seems like the preamp is “tuned” to the fetron. It also has a normal volume, a lead drive and a master. So you have to play with the three controls for lead overdriven sounds (as you demonstrated). I also have a mid-70s Silverface Bassman 100 head which has a master volume and a channel volume. Turning the channel volume up does nothing to clip the preamp. However, plugging into the normal channel and turning up its volume gets a wonderful output section overdrive. I think the old HiWatt heads from the 70s operated similarly. No overdrive at low output master volume.

This speaks volumes

So the Mesa with the Lead Channel engaged use the 4 volumen knobs?

I'd also like to see this on a 6L6 EVH 5150. Would I run the clean channel at max volume and use the gain knob to control volume (and thus headroom)? And how would that translate to the crunch and lead channels?

Exciting to see a Mark III on here. Amazingly engineered amps, with more tones than you can shake a stick at. Not to mention. So much gain.

While this is 101 amp knowledge, this is something I struggled with when I got my Marshall DSL100HR. It has a channel volume and gain, and two master volumes.

I am used to amps with just one volume knob, so it took me a while to figure out how to set all three to get the tones I wanted.
I was having trouble getting an edge of breakup tone out of it. It turns out I needed to have the channel volume at half and then set my channel gain to taste to get a low gain sound out of it.

You should look behind the amp left to the hiwatt, there is a pedal that fell in the last sequence of Dan playing the both amps ! Really great sound tho ...

Interesting!!!! Really interesting. Thank you very much for this show🙏🏻 I’ve learned so much from you already and still you continue to impress me with new topics. Just as a tangent, how about Hiwatts? Does the DR-series have a post phase inverter master volume as well? Because you used to turn the master down very low when you played the Hiwatt in former shows and it still sounded great. Aside from the fact that it is certainly existential being able to turn down the master volume on a 100 W Hiwatt 😂 Cheers from Germany

It sounds to me as though adding an effect loop to the AC152may be a solution to the issue of maxed out output power not being a good pairing for front end effect placement.

Hi Dan and Mick, I'm a long time viewer and occasional commentator. I would love to see you use that Dr. Z amp more often. This is all. Thank you.

wow
both those amps sound fantastic for different reasons but i soooo regret selling my maple cab 90’s mk4 and my leather clad Studio Cal DC2

Best TPM in a long time I learned stuff like I did when I first found the channel

I see a Mesa in Dan's future...

Congrats on popping your mk3 cherry, Dan. As you can now attest, the water's fine ;)

Mick - tweaked like a true mk series Jedi. Respect!!!

“Maybe we’ll have a look at attenuators.” These videos are always welcome.

I just play the EHX Dirt Road Special, anyone else love this amp? It’s been amazing

What mics are y’all using?

your picking is the first gain stage

Now if I wanna crank it like Soulja Boy, do I need to lay off the gain?..

Could you please explain the Presence control in an upcoming show? I have read a number of descriptions and can hear what it does, but I would like to know exactly what it is doing to the signal, and where it is located in the signal path in an amp.

I had a Peavey for a quick second that had the knobs labeled pre-volume and post-volume. I understood what that meant because it wasn't my first amp, but anybody who borrowed it needed to spend 20 minutes figuring it out

You know Dan likes your amp when he describes an AC15 as sounding anaemic in comparison. :)

Show idea- although it might be a bit boring. However, there's a world of preamps and modelers out there. I myself just got one of those Victory v4 Sheriff pedals. I've been looking into using it live with a power amp, but there's so many options. You have class D- but also Orange makes a class A/B power amp which they claim is better. But this raises a question- why no tube power amps on the market? (I have searched and can't find any..) Would a tube power amp sound better? Does the power amp choice matter? Would a class D power amp plus a nice preamp pedal like the victory ever sound as good as a full amp? If you had an emulator pedal that models the power amp as well, would a solid state power amp be a better choice because it's "colorless"? - Anyway- might make a good show, or good short episode. Thanks!

Dan said “there’s nowhere to go”. Obviously you need the amp to go to 11! 😂

Very interesting show! I have played a vox ac15 for a decade in an indie rock band. I like the edge of breakup thing and have no trouble with it not being loud enough. One thing I've noticed is that the amp sounds thin unless you turn the master at least halfway up. I always wondered why, but the whole phase explanation seems to answer that question- as mixing an out of phase sound would by nature reduce more bottom end- right? If I understood Dan's explanation, this seems to make sense to me. This is fascinating, as I think most of us believed that a master volume just took the full sound and "turned it down" - but in the case of the ac15 one could say that you are really diminishing the "full" sound of the amp by turning the master down. I'll have to experiment with that. Thanks guys!

Not 100% sure but i believe the first master volume was on Leslie West’s Sunn PA head first used at Fillmore West 1969. Cheers.

Congratulations for this video, and most of your videos and also for your channel.

Please be careful by the gain level of the mic, because I percieve a little clipping on the audio, maybe because saturated level input on the mic channel...

I didn't think that there was any point in me watching this going by the title, but I watched it anyway and I actually learned something.

If you do an episode about attenuators, please include in the discussion the attenuator circuit found on the Ampeg VL-1002. It sounds fantastic! I have never heard anything else like it and I don't know how it works. Cheers.

Great video as always! I remember when adding a power scale (and also a PPIMV, part of the circuit) and essentially breaking down Gain and Master Volume as preamp and power amp gain.

Something I’ve been thinking about, which might have been done sort of experimentally but wonder if it would work, is to build an amp with essentially a silent power amp; find some valves that has a decent gain structure to common valve and then feed that into something similar to a reactive load (again to get the speaker interaction) and have the actual power amp be something like a Class D stage for volume? It wouldn’t be to off from using an amp with a reactive load, but using dedicated valves to act like a ”sonic power amp” means you wouldn’t have to lower the signal as much and you could make a far lighter amp, because you could get some requiring lower voltage.

Hang on boys. To clarify… Are you saying that with an amp that has the inverter pre-master (like the AC) I can get close to a cranked amp sound at bedroom volume without an attenuator? And that’s because although the power section isnt ‘working’, the inverter makes it sound like it is because it provides the harmonics that we would get from a ‘working’ power section?
(Speaker breakup aside).

Great episode btw!

🤘👍🏿

Hey Lads! A surprisingly large amount of new info learned from this episode! Thanks! Never knew about how the phase inverter worked! Questions: are you still using the Sontronics Delta 2? If so, would you say this could be used in a live, rock band situation? What about volume level, bleed, etc? I'm trying to take more control of my live sound, so I appreciate the info. 
Cheers, Mates!
Darin

I really like when y'all take a step back and touch on the basics. Even veteran players can learn a thing or two.

I have a Mesa Boogie Mark IV. Love ❤️ it. When I saw Larry Carlton at The Baked Potato, he used a Mesa Boogie Mark III and sounded unbelievable. That's what made me get one. Love ❤️ the Vox equally. I can hear the subtlties on my phone.

you crazy kids and your toys Cheers from Canada
😎

Oh man, that Mesa. Covers so many wonderful sounds.

I had a Mark III in '88. When it was "on", it was glorious. But sometimes, same club, same settings, different night...it would be dull and lifeless. What I was told was that house power could affect the output. I'd love to hear TPS take on that.

So good to see Boogie featured, really helpful!

Learning to use my Morgan MVP23 taught me a lot since I bought it a few years ago. It has a preamp gain, master volume, AND power scaling. You can use the preamp gain and the master volume to get any flavor of clean or overdrive and set the overall volume with the power scaling. Power scaling, attenuators, and master volumes (regardless of how they're implemented) are 3 COMPLETELY different things. With a p90 guitar like my LP Special I can play absolutely anything by setting the amp dirty and using the volume controls on the guitar to go from clean to dirty without ever touching the amp. In guitar terms, it was life changing. I don't own an overdrive pedal.

You HAVE to do a show on that amp