A little Signature Limited Love (and MDT too!)

[aristotle]

I was undecided as to if I should post this in the Electric Instruments section or the amp section... In any case, we were doing a private party yesterday and I ran a combination of my DG30 and MDT with my Radial Headbone head switcher. The idea being that I'd run the DG30 as the main amp, but switch to the MDT as the lead tone. It worked fine for a gig or two (as well as monkeying around while practicing) but somehow the headbone blew the DG30 (actually, I was concerned that it blew the Power Transformer, but looks like it was just a power tube...and to be fair to the Headbone, it may have just been the luck of the draw with the power tubes...)

On the same song that the DG30 took a dump, the "D" string on my DG Sig stop tail guitar broke. So, I'm left with the MDT and the backup guitar I brought...a Signature Limited.

Man...what a wonderful combination. Maybe I just like variation and it's been a while since I've gigged the MDT by itself and what seems like forever with the Signature Limited, but it couldn't have worked out better. I had to actually look through the clips that I did to see if I had done an MDT/Signature Limited one, and sure enough, I did.

One really could get by with a Signature Limited and an MDT (and a pedal or two for that extra something when needed) for just about anything you'd ever need to play....

 

[László]

One really could get by with a Signature Limited and an MDT (and a pedal or two for that extra something when needed) for just about anything you'd ever need to play....

I think that's true.

 

[justmund]

Sounds great! One of these is still on my "will own and keep forever" list.

 

[jfb]

Shame about the DG30, but you were well prepared it seems. Happy to see you managed to see the positive. I always dig reading these.

 

[aristotle]

Thanks guys. I suspect that the DG30 issue was related to the headbone, so it was likely self inflicted. And speaking of the headbone, while I haven't noticed any change in tone or feel running through it, it was definitely interesting when I ran the MDT without the headbone after the incident. For some reason, the output level on my dirt pedal had to be changed rather significantly when I wasn't running through the headbone. So there is definitely some interaction running the guitar through it (the way it works is that the guitar signal is routed through the thing so that it can cut off signal to the amp that's in standby...) Hmm....so maybe my ultimate gig rig isn't quite the ultimate rig I thought it was. OK...back to the drawing board...

 

[László]

Thanks guys. I suspect that the DG30 issue was related to the headbone, so it was likely self inflicted. And speaking of the headbone, while I haven't noticed any change in tone or feel running through it, it was definitely interesting when I ran the MDT without the headbone after the incident. For some reason, the output level on my dirt pedal had to be changed rather significantly when I wasn't running through the headbone. So there is definitely some interaction running the guitar through it (the way it works is that the guitar signal is routed through the thing so that it can cut off signal to the amp that's in standby...) Hmm....so maybe my ultimate gig rig isn't quite the ultimate rig I thought it was. OK...back to the drawing board...

I remember my tech explaining the difficulty of switching between two heads going into one cab, back before they came out with the headbone.

I won't be able to repeat his engineering-degree technobabble, because my understanding of it isn't very deep, but the gist of it was that there could be an instant while making the switch where the amp might not see a proper speaker load, and that could cause problems. He was going to design something that would prevent that.

Unfortunately he passed away a few years ago, so I can't call him to get a better explanation.

In any event, I got the impression that the safe thing to do would be to use an A/B/Y with two heads and two cabs, and do the necessary shlepping.

 

[aristotle]

I remember my tech explaining the difficulty of switching between two heads going into one cab, back before they came out with the headbone.

I won't be able to repeat his engineering-degree technobabble, because my understanding of it isn't very deep, but the gist of it was that there could be an instant while making the switch where the amp might not see a proper speaker load, and that could cause problems. He was going to design something that would prevent that.

Unfortunately he passed away a few years ago, so I can't call him to get a better explanation.

In any event, I got the impression that the safe thing to do would be to use an A/B/Y with two heads and two cabs, and do the necessary shlepping.

Yeah...the headbone does what your guy described. It takes the guitar signal in and feeds it to the head currently selected. The head that's not currently selected doesn't get the signal. Both amp outputs are fed into the headbone as well, and the head that's not selected is loaded....but the thing is that while the headbone load is capable of soaking the output of an amp that doesn't have a signal driving it, it can't adequately load an amp that's being driven by a signal. So the switching has to do the timing right when you switch heads...first removing the signal from the currently active head, then routing the standby head to the cabinet, and then applying the guitar signal to that head, making it the new active head. You can't run delay effects through the loop of either head because that would cause the timing to be off and there could be amp output for the new standby head even though the guitar signal was removed. For my PRS amps, this is a non-issue because none of mine have effects loops.

It's certainly possible that the headbone had nothing to do with the DG30 going belly up...but I've never had an amp failure before and this is only the second time that I've used the headbone live at a gig...and it just seems like too much of a coincidence. Oddly though, the DG30 was set as the "clean" amp. I'd have expected the MDT to be the one to take a bath because I set it as the high gain amp and would have thought that the high gain amp would have been more susceptible. On the other hand, tubes do fail, so you never know what the real problem was. For me though, the fact that my dirt pedal (Exotic BB in this case) had to be set so significantly differently when I was running straigt into the amp makes me think that this configuration isn't all it's cracked up to be.

And regarding "necessary schlepping" none of this is even remotely "necessary". The MDT (or DG30 or HX/DA) set cleanish with a dirt pedal in front of it sounds just fine for the gigs we do. All the rest of this is just part of the fun of experimenting around for me. Nobody (and I really mean nobody) would ever notice the tone difference with any of this when we're playing live. Carrying an extra cab just isn't gonna happen. Even if I wanted to, I suspect that I'd find my band-mates would set up some sort of intervention when I rolled out two cabs to one of our bar gigs :biggrin:

By the way, I chose "Aristotle" as my forum name for a reason. Aristotle had theories of just about everything. Most of them were wrong, but he presented them in such a way that they all sounded reasonable. That pretty much sums up me with guitars and amps...so forewarned is forarmed...just sayin'.....

 

[László]

And regarding "necessary schlepping" none of this is even remotely "necessary". The MDT (or DG30 or HX/DA) set cleanish with a dirt pedal in front of it sounds just fine for the gigs we do. All the rest of this is just part of the fun of experimenting around for me. Nobody (and I really mean nobody) would ever notice the tone difference with any of this when we're playing live. Carrying an extra cab just isn't gonna happen.

Yeah, I pretty much figured that.

By "necessary," I meant "necessary if I wanted to use two cabs and two heads." At the time I wasn't even doing gigs, just bringing my stuff to the occasional large studio when I felt that the right vibe for an ad track was to track a band live.

Since I had no intention of actually doing the "necessary shlepping" to gigs, that was a theoretical approach at best.

For me the shlepping was about simply putting amps in the recording booth.