A Case for Clean
I think it is fair to say that most of us enjoy the sound of overdrive or distortion from time to time, and for some that’s all the time. Some get it from an overdriven amp, or one designed to give real amp distortion, some from pedals and more each day from modellers. However you choose to get that tone and you like it is the right answer for you.
There are some potential downsides to always using overdrive or distortion. Wait, put the pitchforks and torches down!
These tonal effects can act like masks for our playing. You might be ok with that, and if so, good on you and have a great day. However if your technique and accuracy are important to you as you improve in your craft of musicianship, the sound of a really clean amp hides nothing and is a great way to identify where any of us can do work and to improve.
Many professional and successful musicians use acoustic guitars to write their music and to build their hand and finger plans because they are so obvious, but not all players own acoustics or even if they do, they prefer the feel of the electric guitar. Fair enough.
What I propose is having some form of clean amp, even if the music that you play most is not heard clean. The old Unplugged series revealed how much of our playing can be masked by overdrive and distortion. Now I don’t know about you, but money is critical and it doesn’t fall from the sky so we all have to think about how we achieve this clean tone.
One route, and the oldest is to buy an amp that is clean at all volume levels. The Fender Twin Reverb is renowned for staying clean even when its volume is so loud, it hurts. The Twin is kind of unique in the Fender pantheon in that regard. My blackface Twin is a wonderful amp and stays clean, but can get too loud at home fairly quickly. Another wonderful clean amp is the JC-120 or smaller JC-40 from the Roland Jazz Chorus family. These are true analog solid state amplifiers that sound glorious and have no digital artefacts.
I have yet to find a “clean” pedal that does what it claims. If you have one or know of one, please post a comment to enlighten me.
The most recent option, and often the most inexpensive is in the form of a clean amp model. That can be a plugin for your DAW on your computer, or a selection in a modeller. We know of AXE FX and Kemper and Quad Cortex as excellent but frankly priced out of some folk’s budget. If you want to go on the frugal route because clean is not something that you spend a lot of time with, I recommend consideration of the TONEX ONE.
It is quite inexpensive and includes TONEX SE which has a pretty darn decent set of models included (250). It’s pictured above and as of this writing is about $170 USD during their sale. Please note, that I am not sponsored by IKmultimedia and receive no compensation for the recommendation. Hell they don’t know who I am.
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