Guitar Amp Tone: Where’s the ‘Sweet Spot’ in a Vox AC15?

Just so you know where I come from, I play a ’72 USA Telecaster through a Vox AC15.

The sweet spot is the culmination of setting up your amp to better enhance and bring out the natural tone of your guitar and / or signal chain. So if you have a Fender Telecaster for example the sweet spot will be very different than if you are using a Gibson Les Paul. The Tele will ask for a sweet spot that enhances the guitar’s vibrant, vibrant sweetness, while the Les Paul will produce a sweet spot that brings out the softer, more powerful sound of that guitar.

You’ve no doubt been experimenting with your amp’s knobs and switches to get different sounds when it suddenly sounds great. Move a dial slightly and that sound will no longer be there; Sure it still sounds good, but it’s not hitting the sweet spot. Or if you find a sweet spot and then plug in a different guitar, you will find that the amp responds differently to the input signal it receives from the new guitar.

So with my Vox AC15, when I need it, I can get a variety of different sounds, all with the clarity and presence that you would demand from a true Class A kit. The other great thing about this amp is the character. Many people say that the Vox AC15 and, to a greater extent, the Vox AC30 tend to soften the sound, soften the edges and improve the brightness. But when set up for it, your Vox AC15 can be a real bitch. Try playing a high performance guitar (something with P90 or Humbuckers), through a BOSS OC2 octave pedal and driving a Vox AC15 quite hard, no sound like that, it’s brutal. Not quite as high a gain as an Ibanez through a Marshall, but the clarity and depth of tone are unmatched.

Reliability has always been an issue with tube amps. For those of you new to the world of tube amps, here’s a quick (very quick) breakdown. Tube amps are almost always superior to tubeless or solid-state amps. Simply because the valve is what produces the tone. Without tubes, your amp simply emulates a sound, rather than creating it. This is why tube amps have sweet spots.

As probably now, the longer you leave your amp on, the hotter the tubes heat up. And the hotter the valves get, the warmer and more pleasant the sound they create. But valves, a bit like light bulbs, burn out. In the old days, a blown valve could wreak havoc on the amp, short out fuses, and even catch fire. Today, changing a valve is as easy as changing a fuse. Once you have done it, it is simple.

So the key to understanding and finding the sweet spot for your amp is experimentation.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *