Quiet Prototyping Vs. Loud Gigging

[Bill Mountain]

When I'm working on effects (99% dirt boxes) or when I'm demoing new pedals from a manufacturer I play at home though headphones (with a cab sim) or through a few small amps I have around the house.  I get so little time at home to work on this stuff so it's usually late at night when everyone is sleeping and I play quietly.

Then I get so excited about a new effect that I bring it to my next jam session where my big rig is and it almost always disappoints me.

What sonic effect does the difference in volume have on my sound?  How can I reconcile the difference?  How can I plan for it when I build?

Thoughts?

[deadastronaut]

i have the same issue, as everyone does i suspect. ...especially with hi gainers, sounds great at home at moderate/quiet levels. (full of meaty chunkiness with a bite)

but  i have to back off the gain, bass treble, etc when loud....and becomes a very different animal..

i guess the only proper real life solution is to breadboard with a loud amp to compensate for those differences..(but with hi gain its going to squeeelllll like hell on breadboard. )

then when your happy with the loud sound,  you turn it down, and it sounds pants (not the same animal) again..

interested to read others solutions/ideas/thoughts too..

[GibsonGM]

Yeah, good one, Bill.  I have the same experiences, often.  

What strikes me as different, off the top, is that you're using different speakers that aren't made for loud signals (headphones or a small practice amp), and maybe a cab sim, which is actually pretty far off the mark in terms of what the real amp/speaker will do.

Most of the classic, big fat awesome tones we love were done using small amps (18 watts or so...) driven to absolute craziness in the studio.  This push created resonances and other goodness (some audio engineer can probably describe the tech aspects better than I) that just do not happen at lower drive levels.     A very similar thing happens when you run into a small amp at home....you're usually running it into overdrive in all its stages, not just the clipping you're doing in the pedal.

Essentially, the "power section" is adding crunch, and overdriving the speaker as well.

Then, you take your new pedal out to play with your 100W amp, and it falls flat...I believe this is mainly to do with the fact that you're NOT overdriving many gain stages, just your preamp (the pedal).  That clipped signal is then just amplified normally rather than undergoing additional clipping, and each stage is also doing its own tone shaping (often to the detriment of the awesome sound you just dialed in, inside the pedal!).  The electronics at work may also be different...FET-input opamp on the practice amp, maybe, with a tube stage coming first on your real amp, perhaps...different impedances at play...

In order to really get the sound you want, you pretty much HAVE to tailor your pedal to the amp you'll be playing most with.   Try putting a booster after your dirt box and see if that gains you some more good tone...experimentation is in order.    EQ, too!    >>EQ>>Distortion>>EQ>>>boost     might let you see what's going on, and where you want to go...takes some effort, but it IS possible to get the sound you really enjoyed after you built the thing from a bigger amp!

[Bill Mountain]

I take care not to overdrive amps when at home because that would not be a representation of my "loud" sound.  I have a little Crate and Traynor (both solid state) that have great overdrive tones even at conversation volume and I personally don't use those when working with effects.

I know that the cab sim (Behringer Sansamp copy) is not the same as my rig but I actually use the sim as part of my live sound and adjust my amp accordingly.

I think speaker limits/distortion (how ever minor - good or bad) plays a big roll and I think highs are more prominent at high volume but I don't know the science there.

I'd love to hear some more opinions as well.

[Jdansti]

Too bad that sound canceling technology for rooms has a way to go before it's a viable technology. It would be nice, but you probably couldn't get the family to wear sound cancelling headphones in bed.

[R.G.]

Some of what changes is you.

The human ear hears treble and bass differently as you change volume. See "Fletcher-Munson".

There is also a physical effect. Some hearing is through bone conduction from other parts of the body. Quiet sounds don't cause much of this. Loud ones do. And then there is the sheer effect of feeling sound waves on your skin. Again, small, but your brain notices in the sub-conscious layers before it's presented to the conscious ones.

And speaker response. Speaker response changes with volume.

At very loud volumes - and I hope you never audition sound at this level  - air itself is nonlinear.

[amptramp]

If you are not familiar with the Fletcher-Munson effect:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%E2%80%93Munson_curves

it accounts for why you have to turn up the bass and treble at low levels and turn it down at high levels.  Note that the curves are sound pressure level for a given response, so the are the inverse of gain curves that we are used to.  The ear has a peak in response near 3000 Hz (shown as a minimum in the graphs) due to resonance of the inch-long pipe that forms the ear canal.  There is a general trend to less bass response at low levels compared to high levels due to the nature of the neurological response - it appears to be roughly linear with the number of cycles up to resonance which makes sense if the ear sensors are tuned but only put out a signal pulse for each zero-axis crossing of sound pressure.

I always try to use a buffer at the input and another at the output so that any circuitry in the stompbox has a constant impedance to work into regardless of what is connected to it.  (Eight million Boss pedals can't be wrong.)  The Fuzz Face and the original Dunlop wah pedals don't have this and they need it.  You often see a design with a volume control at the output and a tone control across it, so that any change in input impedance of the next stage changes the tone.  Check the Marshall Guv'nor for unbuffered tone controls:

http://www.tonepad.com/getFile.asp?id=108

It may work over a range of input impedances of the following stage, but differences matter when the tone stack is left without a buffer and the level control is turned up.

[Bill Mountain]

It seems this effects everyone but in a different way.  One of the main issues I notice is that the sound has more than enough bass at low levels and is severely lacking bass when turned up.  Also the high end is no longer smooth and is sort of splatty.

[Mark Hammer]

My general "weapon of choice" when building and testing is my little battery-powered LM380 amp, that has a respectable thump, for its size, but IS, after all, only using a 6.5" speaker with modest frequency response.  On several occasions, I was unable to hear 60hz hum and stuff in the insect-noise range on it, that eventually showed up in even modestly larger/louder amps (a 5W tweed Princeton!).  I find the tone is usually every bit as good as it was in the battery amp - sometimes even better - but the stuff at the perimeter of the audible spectrum, where layout and other design issues can lie, doesn't always show up.

[rousejeremy]

Most people I talk to that own Big Muffs complain about this kind of thing. It sounds great at home but on the gig it just doesn't cut it.

A lot of people don't realize that mids are loud.

[Mark Hammer]

...or that in a gigging context, you usually need less distortion than you think you do.

[rousejeremy]

...or that in a gigging context, you usually need less distortion than you think you do.

Oh man, do you ever. Too many times I've heard a band with the gain on ten and there's guitars just whistling through quiet spots in songs.

[digi2t]

I hear what you guys are saying. In most of my videos, my tests and demos are done through a little 15 watt practice amp. Yet, when I plug into "Big Bubba", powered by a QSC1450, and pumped through two 2x12 cabs, the dynamics end up being totally different. The big left hook came when I swapped out all my speakers for new Texas Heats. I had no choice but to completely rearrange my EQ. I was really shocked at how much the frequencies changed.

In the end, I always tend to either swap out a cap or resistor here or there when "graduating" a pedal to the big rig. If it still doesn't cooperate, it tends to either;

A) End up in the closet, awaiting me to record something through the small amp.
B) End up on someone else's pedalboard.
C) Gets recycled into something else.

[deadastronaut]

...or that in a gigging context, you usually need less distortion than you think you do.

Oh man, do you ever. Too many times I've heard a band with the gain on ten and there's guitars just whistling through quiet spots in songs.

yep, need much less gain, ...but then it becomes a different animal altogether..

[Bill Mountain]

OK here's an add on question.  What effects have you built/owned/played that transferred flawlessly?

For me it was the Mesa Bottle Rocket.  Not my favorite all time dirt pedal but it's fairly consistent throughout my rigs.  I need to use a separate EQ pedal to make it work perfectly though.

None of my builds have made the transition to the loud rig.

[rousejeremy]

Plenty have worked live for me.
The most common ones that don't without a bit of on the spot tweaking.

Tremulus Lune. Getting that thing to unity at gig levels is a PITA
Germanium Fuzz. Sounds great at home, too quiet live
Big Muff. Too scooped most of the time

[digi2t]

The most successful transfers, for me, have been modulation type effects, i.e. tremolo's, phasers, flangers, and the like.

Since my big rig involves lots of buffering along the way, the least... interesting?... integrations have been fuzz pedals. The best one, requiring no tweaking whatsoever, was my WEM Project V. Worst one, Axis Face. Everything in between has required tweaking to get it to "play nice" within the rig. The best "in-betweeners", that ended up becoming staples are the Gemini III, and the Parallel Universe II.

Wah's have been especially problematic, since the more stuff I stick in the chain, the more it seems to dull the dynamics of the wah. Again, I used to need to tweak values, as compensation, to get a wah to work well in my rig. But, since I've replaced them all with the Wahoo, it's made compensating much easier. It fit's anywhere, so I don't worry about it any more. Build the chain, tweak the wah via the software, save the preset, and done.

[Bill Mountain]

I think people also play harder when loud and live.

[FlyingZ]

"What sonic effect does the difference in volume have on my sound?  How can I reconcile the difference?  How can I plan for it when I build?"
Play a tiny bit quieter than a loud stereo then you can easily tell what gets canceled out and where to focus.

"OK here's an add on question.  What effects have you built/owned/played that transferred flawlessly?"
- The first Rat I made is perfect. All 5 built after were recycled.
- Owned three factory TS9's used as a perfect boost for medium gain tube amps. Five clone attempts all recycled.
- No complaints about the Rebote 2.5, made 4 all sound good.

[davent]

... Worst one, Axis Face...

Maybe give this one a breadboard run-through, Axis Face with input/output buffers.

http://user.eduhi.at/aquataur/aquataur/musicstuff/pokerface-theory.html