HXDA
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John sullivsn
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John sullivsn
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Question I'm purchasing a HxDa head and cab I've heard it doesn't take pedals very well is this true thank you
A recording is better than 100 words...
On this recording, I used a buffer pedal, an overdrive pedal, an EQ pedal, a chorus pedal, a delay pedal, and a reverb pedal, all at once, and all on throughout the track. The HXDA doesn’t have a loop. All pedals went straight into the front of the amp.
I named the track Pedaland because I used 6 pedals on it. In fact, I wrote the tune to test my pedalboard a few months ago.
You decide if the HXDA takes pedals well:
https://soundcloud.com/lschefman/pedaland-4
The HXDA is a Plexi. Like all amplifiers, some pedals work well with it, and some pedals don’t. Try running a fuzz face into a Twin. I find it horrid, yet the Twin’s a good pedal amp. Now run the fuzz face into a Plexi, like Hendrix did. Different, right? Most people would like that combination.
Understand what an amp does, what its tone character is, and you can pick pedals that match up well with it. If a person can’t figure that out, and pick pedals that compliment an amp, then no amp will be a good pedal amp. If you know what you’re doing, and how to get the most from an amp, it’s a different story.
PM me when you get your amp, and i’ll share my settings. One thing to understand is that a Plexi is old-school. Ideally, you control the gain with your guitar’s volume control. Set up the amp for a mild crunch with the guitar volume a little past halfway up. Roll up for gain, down for clean.
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D
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Yeah, good posts on the topic so far. Some pedals are versatile enough to work with a lot of amps. Many aren’t. Fuzz pedals are the weirdest of all, like Les said. It’s almost hard to believe at times how bad my Fulltone 69 can sound with the clean channel of many amps (as I have them set normally, anyway) but boy, flip it over to the gain channel and it sounds great.
Half of the fun of owning an amp is discovering the pedals that compliment it. Luckily, there’s about 50 years of discussion and reviews of what works with a Plexi.
Couldn’t agree more! And lots of the best options were discovered by Hendrix, so Fuzz, Wah, Univibe (which is just a type of chorus), etc., are always gonna be killer choices. But heck, nothing’s wrong with Eddie’s phaser, a decent boost, Laurie Wisefield’s always-on compressor, and of course there are many more, though these are the usual starting points.
My guess is that whoever’s telling John Sullivan that the HXDA doesn’t take pedals well has never used pedals with a good Plexi, and/or simply doesn’t know how to work with one.
This is perhaps just me, but I love fuzz into an overdriven amp with a fat midrange. Put it into a clean amp, especially with a scooped midrange like a Blackface Fender, and it sounds like a can of angry bees.
D
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Oh no, it's not just you. I've played with everything from mild breakup to high gain and and can dial the 69 to be great with most of it.
And yes, if you have a brighter sparkly tone on your clean channel, it's a can of bees. With the ATMA, I turn the tone knob way over towards the "Tweed" side of the EQ and it's better and better the farther you turn it. Go back towards the Blackface side of the EQ and it gets bad quickly.
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shinksma
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So rather than start a new "I love my HXDA" thread, I'll jump back in to this one...
The other night we had band practice, and I played one of our (my) new songs a little heavier than normal through the HXDA. Not too loud, probably a loud-bedroom volume (we also use acoustic instruments like fiddles and when we practice we don't usually plug those in). Settings were both gains at 8 o'clock, presence at 1 o'clock, and everything else (including master) at noon. These settings allow me to use a guitar in clean mode through an acoustic emulation pedal to sound like a useful simulation of an acoustic guitar for practice purposes. And I use dirt/gain pedals to get some nice heavier sounds.
I would have used the Mojo Hand FX DMBL to generate a bit of dirt and push the amp, through the Keeley 30ms to get some reverb (no warble).
The guitar was an Al D Prism, both pups with the coils tapped.
I could get a nice medium-heavy rhythm sound, crunchy overdrive type by chugging on the EAD strings (or just AD, depending on the chord), hit the EAD strings for a nice firm growl and then immediately another strum across the GBe strings for a sparkly lighter sounding "jangle" while the growly stuff still rang out - it was like I was playing two guitars!
I have no idea how the amp got that sound, but dang it was glorious! Maybe something to do with how the HXDA and Bass Gains interact. I dunno...
The other night we had band practice, and I played one of our (my) new songs a little heavier than normal through the HXDA. Not too loud, probably a loud-bedroom volume (we also use acoustic instruments like fiddles and when we practice we don't usually plug those in). Settings were both gains at 8 o'clock, presence at 1 o'clock, and everything else (including master) at noon. These settings allow me to use a guitar in clean mode through an acoustic emulation pedal to sound like a useful simulation of an acoustic guitar for practice purposes. And I use dirt/gain pedals to get some nice heavier sounds.
I would have used the Mojo Hand FX DMBL to generate a bit of dirt and push the amp, through the Keeley 30ms to get some reverb (no warble).
The guitar was an Al D Prism, both pups with the coils tapped.
I could get a nice medium-heavy rhythm sound, crunchy overdrive type by chugging on the EAD strings (or just AD, depending on the chord), hit the EAD strings for a nice firm growl and then immediately another strum across the GBe strings for a sparkly lighter sounding "jangle" while the growly stuff still rang out - it was like I was playing two guitars!
I have no idea how the amp got that sound, but dang it was glorious! Maybe something to do with how the HXDA and Bass Gains interact. I dunno...
Sekunda
Music is life
I had to sell my HXDA head and matching cabinet to pay some bills... I miss her, but I filled the hole in my heart with a Boogie Mark V:35. Had a lot of great shows with my HXDA, it always performed admirably.
The amp can do an awful lot of good things. It’s magic!
I want one in 240V ... seems like an impossible dream at the moment
I want one in 240V ... seems like an impossible dream at the moment
Lots of US bands tour with voltage converters for their amps when they hit Britain. I just saw a 1000 Watt step-up/step-down transformer for under $70 on Amazon. It’s not like it’s terribly expensive.
You're right of course .. certainly worth looking for some good deals in the US, and ship it over
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