Twenty-Seven Corrections

Corrections (27)

The pattern that recurs: the mechanism is usually real and the attribution is usually wrong. Sag exists but is mostly the transformer rather than the rectifier. Presence exists but is a feedback control with a hard ceiling. Buffers do change a fuzz, but by raising its gain rather than by taking anything away.

• The blackface clean rig — The bright cap across the volume pot means the volume control is also a tone control at low settings — the amp genuinely gets darker as you turn it down, and it is not your imagination.
• Plexi at full volume, no pedals — Jumpering the two channels sums the bright and normal preamps so you blend brightness rather than choosing it. And because power-stage compression and transformer saturation are load-bearing here, an attenuated Plexi never quite matches a loud one — the electrical half survives attenuation, the mechanical half does not.
• Fuzz into a cranked amp — Sources disagree on where the Octavia sat — before the Fuzz Face in one account, after it in another, and after the wah in a third. Wah first and Uni-Vibe last are the consistent elements; treat the middle as contested rather than picking one.
• Treble booster into a cranked amp — A Rangemaster is on the same low-input-impedance list as a Fuzz Face, so it interacts with the pickup the same way — which is why it sounds wrong through a buffered board and right straight into the guitar.
• The pedal platform — The commonly cited 30 W floor for a pedal platform is guitar-press consensus, not a physics constant — and the claim that Fender-style circuits work because of a scooped midrange is received wisdom; no rigorous account of tone-stack placement and its consequences for pedal platforms appears to exist.
• Tube Screamer into a saturated amp — With drive at zero the pedal is barely distorting at all. What it is doing is stripping everything below 720 Hz before the amp's preamp ever sees it, so palm mutes stop turning to mud. The tightening is the high-pass, not the diodes.
• The Nashville hybrid rig — Pete Cornish puts the compressor absolutely first and warns that a volume pedal in front of it “will defeat any compression.” Bob Bradshaw puts distortion early instead. Dave Friedman calls order “a very subjective thing.” The standard chain is a strong prior, not a law.
• The wet/dry/wet three-amp rig — Joel Korte's own wet/dry rig used deliberately mismatched amps — a high-headroom solid-state amp plus “a gnarly-little-homemade tube amp.” Two identical amps versus two different ones is a creative choice with no technical consensus behind it.
• The shoegaze board — Kevin Shields' “glide guitar” — holding the vibrato arm through strummed chords so the whole chord bends — appears on You Made Me Realise and Isn't Anything in 1988. It is a playing technique, not a pedal, and it is the single most-imitated and least-understood part of the sound.
• The doom and sludge rig — The Muff's 1 kHz notch is why a rig that sounds enormous alone can vanish the moment a band starts. The fix is an overdrive after the fuzz to put the midrange back, not more fuzz.
• The djent direct rig — The word was coined by Fredrik Thordendal of Meshuggah as an onomatopoeia for the sound. Also worth knowing: an IR is a linear capture and cannot reproduce cone breakup or compression at all, so a direct rig is missing exactly the parts of a loud cabinet that change with how hard you play.
• The silent rig — A purely resistive dummy load records “far too bright and buzzy” because a tube amp's frequency response depends on the load impedance curve. The load box must be reactive, and the IR is a separate job it does not do.
• The surf rig — Dwell is not a decay control. It sets how hard the tank's input transducer is driven, so turning it up makes the springs distort rather than making the reverb longer. That overdriven-tank crash is the surf sound.
• The Texas blues rig — The Vibratone is a rotating baffle mechanically Doppler-shifting a real speaker. No phase-shift circuit reproduces it, which is why a chorus or phaser never gets close.
• The dotted-eighth rig — The AC30's Cut control is not part of its tone stack. It is a treble filter across the phase inverter, downstream of everything, which is why it behaves unlike any other amp's top-end control.
• The Echoplex-front rig — The EP-3's preamp is a simple JFET stage getting only about 6 dB above unity at maximum — a tone conditioner, not the legendary boost. Van Halen also said “brown sound” originally described his brother's drums, not his guitar.
• The scooped Mesa rig — The scoop that sounds enormous alone disappears in a band mix, because the guitar has vacated exactly the band the vocal and snare occupy. It is the best-known live-versus-studio trap in the instrument.
• The profiler and modeller rig — Profiling captures a snapshot, which is why Liquid Profiling had to pair profiles with a modelled tone stack — the original method could not make the knobs behave. Also: no authoritative cross-vendor latency measurements exist, and analogue-to-digital conversion accounts for over half of round-trip latency, not the modelling.

• Point-to-point versus PCB — Randall Aiken: "Either construction method can be good or bad, depending upon the way in which it is done." True point-to-point means components suspended between socket lugs with no board at all. Vintage Fenders are eyelet board and Hiwatts are turret board, so almost every amp marketed as point-to-point is neither.
• Matched power tubes — Depends entirely on the bias topology. Fixed bias with a shared supply is where it matters, because unmatched idle currents partially magnetise the output transformer core. Shared-cathode-resistor amps are partly self-correcting; individual cathode resistors are genuinely self-correcting. A 500-tube batch spanned 15.8 to 32.5 mA of idle current.
• Cryogenic treatment — The most damning source is a company that sells cryo tubes. The metallurgical basis is completing the austenite-to-martensite conversion in quench-hardened steel, and tube electrodes are not that: "there is no conversion to complete." Their own engineer suggests buyers are hearing hand-selected tubes, because the weak ones were weeded out.
• Expensive instrument cable — The variable that matters is capacitance per foot, and price does not track it. In one measured comparison a $15–25 cable came in lowest at 25 pF/ft, beating a $200 one at 33 pF/ft. Above roughly $20 the differences are small; length dominates. Lower capacitance is not automatically better either.
• Gold-plated connectors — The usual justification is backwards — gold's bulk conductivity is 73.4% of copper's. The real reason to specify gold is that it forms no oxides. And never mate gold to tin, which is what most amp and pedal jacks are, because the electrode potential difference drives galvanic corrosion at the contact.
• Power conditioners — Three products sold under one word. Surge suppression is real and tonally inert. EMI filtering is real and your amp already does it. Voltage regulation genuinely changes how a tube amp behaves — B+ tracks the mains — but almost nothing marketed as a conditioner actually regulates.
• Tube amps being louder per watt — A watt is a watt, but four real mechanisms sit underneath: different THD rating conventions; a clipped wave carrying up to 3 dB more RMS power than a sine of the same peak; a tube amp's 1–10 Ω output impedance interacting with the speaker's impedance peak; and different harmonic content. Matched on a meter they are equally loud. The difference is where you stop turning up.
• Pedals needing break-in — Capacitor reforming is real and applies to decades-old electrolytics in a power supply, not to a new pedal. Film and ceramic capacitors have no forming mechanism, and a pedal's signal-path coupling caps are almost always film. Transistors, op-amps, resistors and diodes have none either.
• The wah inductor — Dozens measured on an LCR meter: 507–759 mH, DCR 15.5 to 30.7 Ω. The spread within one nominal type across production years matches the spread between types, and Q — which is what actually changes the sweep — tracks DCR rather than brand. The same project concluded pot taper matters at least as much.