Being a guitar tone snob is not easy. Sometimes you have to admit you were wrong. I was a tube bigot for many years. But consider Digital Guitar Rigs, or DGR's for a moment. The tone you can get from digital preamps and processors like the Boss, Zoom, TC Electronics, DigiDesign, Digitech or my personal favorites the Line 6 products, can be amazing. I know, I know you tube purists are thinking no DGR sounds like your nirvanic tiny tubed magic tone charmer. Well, it depends. It depends on the person setting up the parameters. It depends on how you reproduce the sound. The tone coming out of these pedals is very good with the necessary tweaking. But of course, you may not realize that since you tried to play it through your guitar amp.
You can't take a modeling preamp and run it through your guitar amp and cabinet and expect to hear the nuances of the tone that the DGR produces. Why? Because your amp and cabinet and speakers and even the room you play in affects your tone. It colors the tone. It may sound great and it may be the tone you were looking for. Or it may not suit your aural tastes at all. But it carries the sonic personality of your guitar gear. Now as tone snobs... do we stop there in our quest? I say nay, nay! It is an evolving process. The search is the important part, not the end results.
I've owned 20 different guitar amps, and who knows how many pedals over the years looking for tone, mostly in all the wrong places. I've only had a couple of DGRs. But I like them for several reasons. The tone is good now. It was less so 10 years ago. But things have changed. Better hardware, faster processors, better software and advanced digital signal processing have completely changed the face of DGRs. I like other things about digital rigs. The repeatability. It will sound the same tonight as it did last night. Not always true with tube type amps. I like the ease of setup and tear down. I like the fact that you can achieve your tone at almost any volume level. Whether you are playing at the coffee house 3 feet away from a few couples or playing a dance in a college stadium. I like the variety of amp and cabinet models. I like being able to find optimum tone for my electric guitar, my acoustic guitar, my fiddle and my mandolin all on one rig. So DGR's have some appealing traits.
We played a show in Nashville and our guitar player ran his Line 6 Pod XT Live into the house pa and also into a small pa amp and a Peavey SP-5 on stage for a monitor. He went on and on about the tone he got from his XT Live. It got me thinking that maybe we need to run these rigs thru more of a PA system than guitar amps.
The tone of a DGR is arguably better thru a sound system than a guitar rig designed to work within a more narrow range of frequencies. But I am a guitar player and I didn't want to give up control of my stage volume to the sound guy. I wanted an amp I could control on stage. I tried the XT Live thru power amps and into guitar cabs. 1x12's, 2x12's and more. I turned off the cab modeling on the Pod and let the cabs sing. It sounded great but it was a pain dragging all those cabinets and rack cases and guitars and processors around. I wanted simple tone. I wanted compact tone. I wanted to lighten my load. I always said I played for free. I got paid for lugging all my gear!
What is it they say? "necessity is a mother..." So here is what I dreamed up...
This is basically a PA cabinet and speakers with a rack on top for my tuner, power supply, wireless and power amp, plus a couple extra spaces. The speaker cab is roughly 14dx16hx19w. It is a sealed ported/vented design. I want to share the construction process with you, in case you feel the need to seek tone on this path.
The speaker is an old Celestion 70/80 that I had laying around. I didn't expect much from it since it's a general purpose speaker made for guitar and small PA applications. Boy was I surprised! I have ordered an Eminence Delta-lite II 2512 and it should be here next week. So I built the speaker cab to the specs on Eminences web site. http://eminence.com/pdf/cab-deltaliteII2512.pdf The 2512 has a pretty smooth roll off after 2k so I added a Boss TW-30 tweeter to the cab to get my desired sparkly twang. The ports are 4 inch in diameter and 5.2 inches long.
Construction notes follow...
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