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In Defense of TransistorsNov 21 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
Popular Products in Amplifiers and Preamps
The Bottom Line Tube is king, but for metal, solid state might do the trick.
Tube amps are king, period. For general purposes, they give a richer, smoother, and more responsive tone. Nine times out of ten, making the extra sacrifice to own a more expensive tube amp will pay off in the long run. Having said that, I'd like to outline a couple possible scenarios where solid state amps might be just as good, or even preferable. There is a certain school of aggressive heavy metal that relies on edgy, cutting distortions played at tremendous volume. Pantera's early albums were an example of this approach, and a good deal of their guitar tone was accomplished with solid state amps. This tone is flat-out attack, a very powerful sound. There isn't a lot of tube amp subtlety to the sound, but this type of music doesn't care about being subtle. Another example of solid state tone is White Zombie and later, Rob Zombie. The guitarist uses a cheap (but very well-regarded)Fernandes guitar called the Vertigo X which you can get for about $200, and has used Marshall Valvestate (solid state) amps on many songs. Without dragging this out, the point is that if your approach is pure aggressive metal, solid state tone will work, even at professional levels. If you're going to go into anything remotely resembling 'classic rock,' even the heavy stuff like Sabbath and Maiden, you'd better go with tube. At the professional level, solid state just won't do for music which requires a lot of tonal expression from the amplifier. I've also been told that solid state amps can be useful for jazz tones. I don't know much about this personally, since I'm a metal player, but it seems to make sense given that a good deal of jazz is played on clean channels. As others have pointed out, the chief advantage that all solid-state amps have over tube amps is that they are almost always more reliable and can take more punishment. Again, this is attractive to metal players in particular, since we tend to dish out a good bit of abuse to our amps, whether on purpose or not. I have a solid state amp. If I suddenly come into a bag full of money, sure, I'll buy a tube stack. But until then, I'm in no hurry, because solid-state actually works for my style of music.  |
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