Learn Your Guitar Amp & Settings

Beginner Grade 3 Module 16: Playing Melodies & Moving Chords Up
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Understand your amp and the best settings for the perfect guitar tone.


View the full lesson at Learn Your Guitar Amp & Settings | JustinGuitar

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An affordable alternative to a Kemper would be a Boss GT-1 Guitar Effects Processor.

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Well I have just watched this lesson and am now slightly confused as to what to use going forward. At the moment I use the same settings on my amp (Cube 20) for whatever song I am practicing/playing - ‘JC Clean’ with a bit of delay, and base, middle & treble set. They don’t change.

As suggested in the lesson I have tried the other settings using ‘Lead’ with a bit of delay, but don’t use these.

To be honest I don’t know what settings to use for songs so just keep the same ones! How do you know what settings to use?

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That’s part of the learning and skills development.

To be totally honest, as long as you are happy with the sound, it doesn’t matter.

But it does, to a degree, depend on the type of music you are playing and the song.

The Cube and other amps (Katana, Fender Mustang, Spark, and many other modern digital amps) differ from conventional amps of the past in that they offer multiple voicings. Most conventional guitar amps only offer one or two.

With a conventional amp, if you want a different voice, you would most commonly put some sort of pedal in front of it, for instance, a Tube Screamer which boosts the mid frequencies, but also pushes the amp input to create more distortion.

The different voices on the Cube are roughly equivalent to using completely different amps, but also to putting different drive pedals in front of the amp.

There’s two main aspects to this: the voicing (which is largely about which frequencies are more prominent) and the amount of distortion.

I would focus on the distortion aspect, as it’s most important.

If you are playing a Black Sabbath or most Metal songs, it’s not really going to sound right with a low-distortion setting like JC Clean.

In that case you have a choice: stick with JC Clean and turn the gain up as far as you can. That may not be enough, so you could buy a drive pedals and put it in front to increase the distortion.

Or, on the Cube, you could switch to a higher distortion setting. The “Lead” setting, effectively, emulates a higher-distortion (aka “higher gain”) amplifier with a drive pedal.

Conversely, that setting isn’t going to work for songs that demand a clean tone.

So it really depends what sort of music you are playing and, to a degree, what sort of sounds you want.

The best thing is to try each of the settings and fiddle with the gain and EQ settings to explore the differences.

Cheers,

Keith

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It depends on the song and what you want it to sound like?

The original? or just what you want to hear?

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Thanks for your responses to thi.

So I’m finding out :slight_smile:

Not really by bag but I know where you are coming. Note that the ‘gain’ control doesn’t work with JC Clean as far as I can tell. It only works with ‘Lead’.

I’ve seen that and have tested it, although not really playing songs that require a lot of distortion.

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If you don’t need it, then you don’t need it.

Ah, yes. I had to go and check out the controls on my old Cube 20X.

I do think it’s worth checking out some of the lower-distortion options in the “LEAD” section which, by the why, is really badly named, as there’s tones in that section that are more than suitable for rhythm playing.

If you have a setting called “Tube Drive”, that’s where I would start (and, probably for you, finish). That should give you a pretty good range of tones from clean (similar to the JC Clean) to quite overdriven, just by messing with the gain control.

Depending on your pickups, I would start with gain at around 25% (about the 9 O’Clock position) which should give you something pretty clean, even if you have the volume control on your guitar full up and strum pretty hard.

Then, adjust that upwards until you start to get some break-up when you are strumming hard. At that point, if you strum more softly, it should clean up. Somewhere around there you should be able to get the famed “edge of breakup” type of tone where it’s mostly clean but, if you pick hard, you hear some slight “hairiness”.

The idea is that, around this point, you are driving the amp enough to create a more harmonically rich sound without actually going to full-on overdrive. Plus you can control how much overdrive there is by picking harder or softer, or by using the guitar volume control.

You probably need to experiment with this a bit to find what works for you.

Either way, if you dial back the gain knob a bit, you should get a much cleaner tone, and if you up it a bit, it will start to overdrive.

At this point it’s going to be a long way from the “high gain” tones you expect from Metal and Hard Rock songs, but it should just introduce a little “dirt” that works well for individual picked notes on Blues type songs, or even Pop songs.

Also, with a little overdrive, this works well for power chords. Too much gain will not be good for open chords, especially those which use 5 or 6 strings. But a small amount can work. As an example, Bryan Adam’s Summer of 69 has a some overdrive.

Cheers,

Keith

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@Majik Thanks for the reply. A lot to take in that’s for sure but will give it a go. My amp has a lead ‘overdrive’ setting but no Tube Drive.