Review: Laney GH100L

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to review an amp which I have played for years, since it was in the rehearsals room we were going to weekly with my band: the Laney GH100L!

I must admit that I didn't love this amp (or its smaller version, the GH50L, which was in the room as well), and it's partly because I didn't really understand it.

Laney is a legendary British brand, one of those that really created the British guitar sound (along with Marshall and Orange), and the GH100L was their answer to the Marshall JCM 800.

The amp is a very heavy (21kg) 100w tube beast, with EL34 tubes and which belongs (together with the other classic British amps) to the old school, a school in which the power amp roar is even more important than the preamp one, and it belongs to a time in which the preamp did not have a huge amount of gain, but it was the interaction between the preamp and the power amp that was creating that typical rock n'roll sound of the '80s, with that creamy sustain given from the tube saturation, and with the best tone achieved at unbearable volumes.

The amp, tone wise, had a lot of high end definition, not different from a Marhall, but it had also a rattling, clanging type of response to the picking, which was quite distictive.

The gain was quite old school, meaning that the distortion was a bit less defined than a Marshall, but not as fuzzy in the low end as in an Orange, and it tended to become noisy at high levels, making it an amp difficult to tame for high gain styles.

What I would have done now is to lower the preamp gain, to use a noise gate and an overdrive to boost it, and I'm sure I would have loved the powerful, roaring EL34 power amp...

...But back then I was trying to play metal just plugging the guitar cable, and the amp wasn't just enough to play it decently.

The amp is now discontinued and it has been replaced by the GH100R, which is a similar version but that features many more functions (MIDI control, Digital Reverb, push-pull mids, cabinet simulator etc), and I'm sure that if I would have the chance to play it today, I would obtain a totally different tone, and I would build a better memory of it.

Thumbs sideways!

Specs:

- Channels: 1: with footswitchable Gain

- Class: A/B

- FX Loop(s): Yes (Switchable Insert / Side Chain) with return level

- Inputs: Hi & Lo Jacks

- Link Jack (Line Level Slave): Yes

- Master Presence Control: Yes

- Output Valves: Premium EL34

- Power: 100 Watts

- Preamp Valves: Premium ECC83

- Speaker connections: Connections for 1 x 16 ohm, 2 x 16 ohm, 1 x 8 Ohm, 2 x 8 ohm

- Switchable Resonance: Yes

- Switchable valve bias (5881 EL34): Yes

- Weight: 21 Kg

- Unit Dims - for int. case (HxWxD mm): 240 x 678 x 253

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How does a synth work?

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are proceeding with our overview about synths with a new article, in which we will go a little bit more in depth on how they work.

As we have already seen in our first article on the subject, synths start from a wave, which can have different forms (it can be a sine wave, a sawtooth wave, a square wave, a triangle wave and so on), and every form with have a different sound, for example one same note according to the wave type can sound a bit more nasal, a bit smoother, a bit more harsh and so on.

This is the basic building block of a synth sound.

Frequency modulation is the thing that happens when you use one wave to modulate another wave, meaning that for example we can put a slower wave (one that is so slow that is not audible, it doesn't create a note but it works only as a mean to modulate our original wave), which we will call oscillator (in this case a slow frequency one), to modulate our initial sound, which is a note (ore a serie of notes) played using the wave we began with.

What does this interaction do? For example our original sound can obtain an oscillating, pulsating effect, the speed of which depends on the speed we set the oscillator to.

At the beginning of this chain we can link a third oscillator, let's imagine a super slow wave, slow to the point of sounding basically like the following oscillation effect is slowing down; we can add several oscillators, according to how our synth is done, and each one with modify our sound furthermore.

So far we have talked about slow frequency waves, but we can actually modulate our initial sound also with waves fast enough to create a note, for example if our first wave was a sine one we can add a different type, like a square one, and see the result.

The initial wave is also called "carrier", while the oscillator that modifies it is also called "modulator", and the way they interact is set by a control called "ratio" which sets the speed of the modulator, and there are certain proportions between the two that are particularly pleasant to hear, for example a ratio 1:1 (which means the 2 waves have the same speed), or 2:1 (which means that the speed of the modulator is twice as fast as the one of the carrier makes the operators (another name to call all these modules that interact among each other) sound good, while the further we move towards more complex mathematical ratios, the more the sound will get weird 

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Review: Audiority L12X (With video sample and free Vst download)

 

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to revierw an interesting new Free Vst amp simulator: the Audiority L12X!

The L12X is a simulation of the Marshall Lead 12, a 12w solid state amplifier produced in the late '80s, and it represents quite a simple and complete solution if you're looking for a free Vst amp simulator: it features an interface which is a modded version of the original amp (it has, besides the original controls, also a contour knob to make the sound more scooped and a boost switch to add more gain), and a cabinet section with a Marshall impulse provided by SeaCow Cabs, with Celestion Vintage 30 speakers.

In our sample I have boosted the amp with the Audiority Dr.Drive and I have used the bundled Cab Simulator, and the tone as you can heas is unmistakably Marshall, with its prominent mid range.

On its own, without a booster, the plugin sounds already quite good, but obviously it doesn't let you reach high gain levels: if the gain is pushed and the boost is on it can get a bit muddy, but for genres up to the hard rock there is more than enough distortion and clarity, and it's also possible to obtain the typical Marshall ringy clean; the only annoying thing I had to deal with was some harsh resonance in the 4k area.

It has also been a wise choice to use the impulse taken from a 4x12 since the original Lead 12 was a 1x10 inches combo, which would have sounded much thinner. 

In conclusion I suggest you all to check out the Audiority website, which features also some other very interesting freebie: it's a good producer and we'll surely be talking about them again.

Thumbs up!

Specs taken from the website:

- Analog Modelled Solid State Amplifier

- 2 Channels (Clean/Boost)

- 3 bands tone stack

- Contour

- Integrated Cabinet Simulator

- Resizable interface

- Standalone included

- No License File required

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What is a sound? And What is FM Synthesis?

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about something that sounds almost phylosophical, and I won't go too much into detail, but I would just like to try to explain, to give a different point of view on what is a sound and what composes it.

A sound, and specifically in our blog we're talking about sounds that can be used to make music, is a wave that starts from a source and arrives to the human ear.

Let's imagine a note, for example the C in the same octave, played with a guitar or with a piano, or with a trumpet: the note is the same, but the sound is indeed different, right?
This depends from the harmonics of that note, not from the note itself. I will re-use the same pictures I have captured for a previous article to explain it: 

This is a sine wave, only the fundamental note of a sound, without overtones.
It's the purest form a sound can be.

This fundamental note is also called basic harmonic.
If this same sound would be more complex (for example if it would pass through a guitar amplifier), we would see a serie of repetitions of this fundamental note, distributed at regular intervals towards the spectrum (these intervals compose a scale which is called Harmonic scale): we would find out that the fundamental note is the same through all the instruments, and what changes, what makes the aforementioned C distinguishable from a piano to a guitar is the interaction between the repetitions, which are called harmonics.
The harmonics that are after the fundamental one are also called "overtones". 

So we can say that everything we hear in nature is a sum of some fundamental note and its harmonics, and Frequency Modulation Synthesis is the combining, mixing and modulating various sine waves in order to try to get close to sounds existent in nature, or to create completely new ones.
That's how a Synth can recreate (sometimes sounding more realistic, sometimes sounding more "synthetic") for example a violin or a piano.

Today we are launching the new tag, "Synth", and we'll start exploring here and there also this complicated yet fascinating world.

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