Chords for Tube Amps 1: Why Tube Amps?

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_ [N] Hey everybody, this is Anthony from Old Tone Zone and this is the first video in a series
of videos that I'm calling Understanding Tube Amps.
Now this is going to be essentially gear lessons where I try to explain to people who don't
have a very technical or engineering background _ _ _ why tube amps are so popular.
Why you're told that's what you need to have to get good tone.
And the ultimate goal is to help you understand more about the gear that you already own and
be able to use it more effectively.
So let's start from the very beginning and let's not assume for a second that tube amps
are everything they're cracked up to be.
So let's answer the question, why tube amps?
_ So to answer that question, let's look at the alternative.
Once upon a time, amps for guitar and a lot of other kind of amps were made using tubes
because that's what you had to work with.
Well a tube is basically a small amplification device.
It takes something small and it makes it bigger.
Wasn't chosen because it sounded great or anything like that.
That's just what was available.
At some point, engineers invented what's called a transistor.
And a transistor is just a much smaller piece.
It essentially does the same thing.
It takes something small and makes it bigger.
And they supposedly solve all the problems that tube amps have.
Let's think about the problems that come with tubes.
Now if you've ever felt inside the back of your amplifier when your tubes are, when you
got the volume cranked up and you're running it really hard, the tubes get hot.
Which means that sometimes the amp needs to be bigger so that it has more ventilation.
Often they end up being heavier than their solid state amp equivalents.
_ So think about, something that's getting really, really hot, it has to be bigger, it has to be heavier.
So what do we do with all technology?
Well we try and make it cooler.
We try and make it smaller.
We try and accomplish the same thing with less parts.
_ Well solid state amps, when they came along, appeared to be just that.
They were lighter, easier to carry, more reliable, all that good stuff.
So why after _ _ solid state amps come along, and they're supposedly better, why are we
now in a situation where half of the, more than half of the amps at your local guitar
store are probably based on tubes?
Well to answer that question, and that is essentially the question we're trying to answer,
why tube amps?
_ Let's talk about the differences between tubes and transistors.
Now while they do essentially the same thing, they amplify an electrical current, _ _ _ where
they primarily start to be differentiated is what happens when we ask them to work too hard.
What's coming out of your pickups is essentially music.
It is a note.
It [Eb] has a certain sound. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ And the tube tries to take that little itty bitty current coming through your cable, and
it tries to make it bigger.
But it can only make it so big.
So when you, _ _ if you let the full signal of your guitar come through, it tries to make
it as clean as possible until you put too much in, _ _ _ _ but if you step on a booster pedal,
_ _ _ _ _ _ _
you get what we call distortion.
Now what's happening when you hear that gritty sound of distortion, _ _ what's _ _ _ [N] physically happening
inside the tube is that it's unable to take what you're giving it and make it as big as
it's supposed to be, so it does essentially the best that it can.
It starts to make it big, and then it reaches its maximum, and it does all kinds of crazy things.
It changes the shape of the waveform that's coming in on the signal.
It chops off the top of it, and essentially what comes out the other end is a distorted
version of what you put into it.
Now it just so happens that because a tube is not a perfect device, when it does this,
it ends up sounding good to your ear.
So it produces distortion when you try and make it work harder than it's built to do.
Well, a transistor will do the same thing.
Transistors are very predictable.
It will reproduce whatever you're giving it perfectly, _ theoretically, up until its maximum,
and then it'll just chop it off.
_ The effect that this has on how stuff sounds is that it tends to be very grating because
there's no nice transition there.
It starts to sound not very musical.
So transistors do not inherently put out very musical-sounding distortion.
So what happened is that when all these guitar amps started being built using transistors,
_ _ people would want to play distorted stuff, you know, rock, heavy metal, whatever.
And so what you saw was this huge transition back to amplifiers built using tubes because
when you pushed them to the limit and made them distort, they just sounded better.
Now today we have digital modeling amps that are essentially, it's software that's supposed
to act like a tube, and those have gotten a lot better over the years.
But for a lot of people, nothing quite sounds like a tube because it's unpredictable.
It's not a perfect device.
It's a little glass bottle with some plates in it, and you're connecting a huge amount
of voltage across it and then sending your guitar signal through it, and it's essentially
a little unpredictable.
Next time we're going to take a look at all of the different sections of a tube amp, which
will lead us into some of the later videos where we talk about what each of those sections do.
But I hope this helped you understand why tube amps are so popular, and until next time,