‘90s. I wanted something functional but
unique, so Bob came up with a bunch of
cool ideas for various ergonomic designs
for the pedal housings, and after going
round and round a bit, the current shape
was born. The rear protection rollbar was a
slight tweak I made to make it look a little
more like an old convertible roadster, and it
protects the knobs as you step over our
pedal to hit the pedals in the second row.
I’ve designed many different solid state
circuits to emulate various guitar amp
tones, and designed 12 patented circuits
while at Peavey, so while there's nothing
particularly wrong with a Tube Screamer
design, I wanted to try my hand at doing
something unique. Tube preamps use
multiple stages of gain, each one inverting
and clipping the opposite end of the
waveform harder than the previous, and the
result is that the note changes in harmonic
content as it dies down. You can look at it
on an oscilloscope and see the asymmetry
of the “square wave” changing with smaller
or higher signals, and at different
frequencies. Most of the Tube Screamer-ish
circuits, even ones with asymmetry, don’t
have that “changing” phenomenon, so
making a circuit that accomplishes this
tube-esque quality was important to me. I
spent a lot of time on the TightDrive
developing a new approach, and added
more stages to get the higher gain
TightMetal and TightRock, and so on.
Now about the Tight control, back when I
was working at on the 5150 with Eddie Van
Halen, the tone was muddy due to the
lower power of the combo compared with
the head. It’s a tough balance to get it
chimey and chunky without going to the
point where you think it sounds thin. We
hadn’t really discussed this tightness issue
while I was designing the 5150 head. Once
Eddie had said he was happy, I had stopped
tweaking! So anyway, on the combo I
started adjusting the tightness in the
preamp, and he got really excited about it,
and asked me to modify one of his 5150
heads to have this same change. That
modified head was used on the Balance
tour, and became the basis for the
5150 II amp.
Years later when working on the JSX head
with Joe Satriani, he had kind of the
opposite request, he wanted to get more
legato tone out of the lead channel. So I
added a Fat switch that changed the low
end to make it less chunky and a little more
fluid. Over the years from designing amps
and tweaking rigs for guys like Van Halen,
Satriani, George Lynch, Steve Cropper,
Shawn Lane and so on, I found that the feel
of the pick attack was one of the most
critical parts to each player. Since
Amptweaker is all about building pedals to
help guys tweak their amps, I focused a
great deal of time in developing a way to
adjust that with a knob, and that’s where
the Tight control came from.
It can be tough sometimes to balance
between having lots of options and
oversimplifying too much. On the one hand
if you specialize a to