by geoff1711 » Fri Jul 01, 2011 1:55 pm
Hi
currently using Tesla, but a few years back I got a set from Watford valves, which they reckoned, was what S R Vaughan used which had a higher clean headroom, they sounded very good indeed.
Although despite what you might think a lot of the early Shads sound had a fair amount of distortion going on which gave the sound a nice saturation to it, think of the opening notes to Man of Mystery, and certainly a lot of Hank's later stuff was far from clean, of course that could have been the echo units overdriving the front end of the amp, or just purely overdrive within the echo unit itself.
Either way to get your guitar singing the amp needs to be "cooking" to some degree otherwise the sound is too acoustic and the sustain drops off too quickly, and muted notes are too quiet, at least that's my view.
All the best
Geoff