I use a Fender Blues Deluxe Tweed NOS edition for most shows, and a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe for larger gigs.

The Tweed NOS Blues Deluxe that I bought had better tubes ( Groove Tubes ) and a better speaker ( Fender Special Design ). I compared it to a regular tolex version. The tone on the tweed edition was brighter, had more musical sounding distortion, and felt more “alive”. I calculated that if I bought the standard tolex edition, and then bought a new set of power tubes and a new speaker, I’d probably spend the same amount of money as if I had bought the Tweed version, but still have the tolex cover instead of the Tweed. Since I liked the Tweed look better, I bought it instead of dealing with replacing tubes and speakers.

Preamp tube distortion is when your amp is receiving a larger signal from your guitar than the preamp tubes can amplify. If a preamp tube can multiply the sound by a factor of 5, but it’s upper limit is 25 millivolts (not real specs), than the highest input you can give it without it distorting is 5 millivolts. If you put in sound at a level of 10 millivolts, the tube cannot amplify it cleanly. It causes the tube to cut off the highest peaks of the sound wave, which we call distortion.

The same is true of the power tubes. If the preamp tubes are sending more voltage to them than they can amplify cleanly, then they too distort. However, they sound distinctly different than preamp tubes when they do this.

Preamp tubes tend to sound small, and fuzzy when overdriven. You can hear this in most amps that have a “distortion” channel. By turning the gain all the way up, and the master volume all the way down, you are effectively pushing a lot of voltage through the preamp tubes, but cutting it to a reasonable level before sending it to the power tubes. Thus, the preamp tubes will distort a lot, but the power tubes will not. The resulting sound is heavily distorted, but like I said, will tend to sound fuzzy.

Power tube distortion is quite different. If the preamp tubes are operating cleanly, and creating a large enough signal to push the power tubes into distortion, the resulting tone is smoother, sounds more muscular, and is much “brighter” than when the preamp tubes are distorting.

In reality, good tone is usually a combination of both. Stevie ran his amps pretty much on 10. At these settings, the preamp tubes are distorting some, and the power tubes are distorting a lot. This created a rich, thick, muscular tone that so many people have tried to copy since.

A compressor will not add any clean headroom to a small amp, it might actually take it away! Here’s why: Once you get the amp cranked, when you strike a really strong chord, you send a lot of signal to the amp, and cause it to distort. If you pick lightly, it cleans up really nice. The reason is because when you pick lightly you’re not sending much signal to the amp, so even though it’s cranked, it’s able to amplify the small signal without distorting.

A compressor pedal evens out the signal level between your hardest picked notes and your softest picked notes. On an amp that’s not cranked, this can ensure that you’re getting the most volume out of every note regardless of how hard you pick it. However, for an amp that’s already cranked, what you’re essentially doing is taking away your option to pick lighter and clean up the distortion for some notes because every note is close to the same volume.

I hate to say it Billy, but a Marshall amp is always going to limit your ability to get the tone you want. The Marshall amps are wired differently in the tone section and they’ll never sound like a Fender. I used to own a THD Univalve amp which was very nice, but sounded very much like a Marshall. I eventually had to sell it because the high end was too brittle, and I couldn’t get a Fender-like tone out of it.

If I were playing through the Deluxe, my approach would be similar with one big exception. I could not use my boost pedals with the clean channel of the deluxe because the amp is not being overdriven very much there so the volume would get much louder. I’d have to switch to the overdrive channel, which I would have set for a mild amount of distortion, the use the pedals as I do with the Blues Junior.

A Blues Junior with the Gain knob almost all the way up, and the Master volume way down gives some beautiful tone at low volumes. Also, the Nobels ODR-S with the distortion pretty much maxed out will give you decent tone at low volumes too. The part you’re eliminating is Power Tube distortion, and the effects of the speaker being pushed hard, so it won’t be the same, but it beats getting evicted

The speaker jacks are a little hard to get to, but if you look under the back panel of the amp, you can see where the cord connecting the internal speaker plugs into the amplifier chassis. There might be an extension jack there, but if not, you could disconnect the internal speaker, and connect an external cabinet, make sure it’s 8 ohms though to be safe. Should probably ask someone at your local store to check it out first and make sure it will work.

Ni Nicolas,

Check out the gear demos videos to see the pedals I use.

My mexican strat is from approximately 1996 and originally came with a humbucker. I have no idea what kind of wood it is, but I do know that it’s fairly heavy. I didn’t buy it on sound because at the time I was a college student, I bought it on price, sub $600. It actually sounded quite bad with the stock pickups. The Texas Specials were an improvement, but the Rocketfire pickups have made it a great sounding guitar.