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possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby trogular » 25 Jul 2011, 12:41

Hello,

Before i travel to the store to test it out (not so easy here in Andalusia) i'd like to ask if some of you think the fender princeton reverb reissue amp, suitably miked into PA for volume, would do justice to the electro's array of sounds. I'm tempted to buy it for the onboard reverb, tremolo, and natural distortion as it is a low wattage amp designed with that in mind. I have a vintage Champ which does beautifully with guitar but lacks in volume for the keyboard and obviously has neither reverb nor distortion. I know that some players use Fender Twins but i'd like some amp-generated distortion.

Thanks!
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possibility of using fender princeton reverb


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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby trogular » 25 Jul 2011, 12:42

sorry on previous message the bit about the champ should read "neither reverb or tremolo". it has the most beautiful distortion in existence...
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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby kagamul » 25 Jul 2011, 21:27

The reissue Fender Princeton Reverb is a great little amp, but it won't sound like a Twin Reverb.
One thing I would be worried about is the low end since it has a very small cabinet with only a 10" speaker.

My 15 watt tube amp with a 1x12" cabinet is NOT loud enough for keeping up with a band. But if you put a microphone in front of it, that's no problem.
It is great for studio and home use.

Try it out before you buy - if it works for you, why not!

When you try the Princeton, be careful and set the Electro's volume very low at first!

Cheers!
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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby bdodds » 26 Jul 2011, 05:40

The only problem with this solution is that it's really only suitable to electric piano and clav, though I guess acoustic piano and organ would be interesting.. When I used to gig with a Rhodes I used a blackface Twin and yeah, it sounded fantastic.. I ran my original Electro through it for a while and it also sounded great, but different because the levels are different coming out of the output than from a Rhodes, so lower volume on the Twin and it broke up at a different point - it actually got too loud for the band I was in and we had to bury it at the back of the stage.. I'd say a smaller amp would remove this problem.. For the low-end concern above, I'll echo the thought of a 1x12 - those 2 extra inches give you a lot of bass.. Set the volume low like was said, and turn the drive completely off, get as clean a tone out of the Electro as you can and push it up until the amp breaks up, and viola, deliciousness!

I would actually do an outboard reverb and tremolo (fender's vibrato) - I really prefer a brownface tremolo (i.e. original vibrolux) or if I can do stereo a ping-pong square wave with about 70-80% mix towards wet so it's not completely disorienting but it's more dramatic. For my money, unless you find an amp that you absolutely love, end-of-story, I'd go with a quality pedal like a Line6 or similar to get the reverbs and tremolo.. This way you get an amp that gives you the crunch you want, which pedals rarely do, and you can get the reverb and tremulant effect you really want, but have much more control over it. I've never found a pedal that gives me growl like a real tube amp (aside from the Ventilator) the way I like, but I've found many convincing and suitable verb/trem/phase modelers..

Hope I've helped in some way, I wish you the best in your Quest For Tone, it's a fun and expensive journey. :)
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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby trogular » 15 Aug 2011, 10:06

thanks for the replies on this. I've been doing more experimentation with amplifying the electro and i've discovered the following, and am curious for reactions. you can skip all of this message and jsut go to the last question (what amps do you all use):

1. the keyboard requires high volume to sound good
2. i have tried it through my original fender champ, through my peavey PA, and through my 50W tube carlsboro from the 70s, and the latter is definitely the best option-
3. outboard effects sound better. the wah effect using the expression pedal or autowah "kill" the non-effected sound of the clav. much better if i use my dunlop cry baby (which doesn't sound that good in the first place). something similar happens with turning on the leslie on the organ. the onboard distortion is drastically inferior to this 40-euro ARTEC blues distortion pedal I have. is this normal?

regardless of the above, here are my questions:

1. my electro is the electro 1, second operating system. we're talking about 10 years ago i think... i'm satisfied with the rhodes sound (i also own a real rhodes). but the others of interest to me all give me headaches: organ, clavinet, and acoustic piano. obviously emulating the rhodes is easier than the other sounds from a technological standpoint... still i don't understand why clavia don't have a good acoustic piano sound as good as the yamaha or roland. have the sounds substantially improved in all these years? in particular the acoustic piano sounds? this would probably motivate to buying a new board like the electro 3 HP or 61.
2. organ: i'm only starting to play organ, but can't get my head around it, including playing with the expression pedal, distortion etc i just can't get it to sound anywhere close to organ on records i like. maybe when everybody is playing at high volume i can play a high-register solo that's ok but if i play something more like a riff, forget it. the kind of hammond sound on cypress hill's "what go around come around" and d'angelo's "brown sugar" are two specific sounds i'd like to get close to and can't. if anyone has suggestions on how to set up the organ parameters to get these sounds i would be really grateful. (i realize some of it has to do with my playing, i'm slowly but surely finding out how deeply different organ playing is from piano or even rhodes or clavinet, especially how mixing harmony and lead is not as easy, maybe not the idea at all in fact)
3. last is my most important question: if i follow the advice of getting reverb and tremolo from pedals and just stick to an amp for distortion then should i look at something less powerful than 50W? what amp would give me for the keyboard the distortion the champ gives me for guitar? and if i give up trying to get distortion from a lower wattage amp like i do on guitar, then would stereo keyboard amps like those made by roland be a good idea? what amps do you all use? and what distortion pedals if any?

thanks for any and all answers
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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby bdodds » 16 Aug 2011, 06:18

I've been tweaking my nords's (multiple nords) tone for the past few (10) years, and this is what i've found about it. The nords - any of them - have a good basic organ sound, and a good basic piano sound. I've never been happy with any of the effects. They do a decent job overall, but I've been on a quest to nail the sound.

Taking a step back, and obviously not to insult anyone who already knows all of this, we look at what we want to emulate. The legendary Hammond sound has two major amplification components, the integral preamp and the amp in the Leslie. The Leslie cabinet is also key to splitting frequencies properly, imparting tone with the cabinet dimensions, and of course the movement. All of these details need to be addressed in order to get the sound. The pianos and clav traditionally go through regular stomp boxes and into an amp for the color.

The nords do a very good job of emulating the raw sound of the original instruments before amplification. Personally, I could never get a satisfactory tone out of just the electro alone. So what I've done has been to take the raw sound and process it myself. Initially I took the organ output and put it through a Leslie 145, driven by a Speakeasy Preamp - it's what I had used previously with my Voce V5. This pretty much nailed it. What you do at this stage is to turn the volume on the amp up and the volume on the preamp up until you get the range of breakup that you want as you push the expression pedal. So far the Ventilator is the only thing that's been good enough for me to leave the Leslie home. This takes tweaking still, and I've retained the Speakeasy preamp to drive the Ventilator with its color. So we use the Speakeasy to play the part of the Hammond's preamp, and we use the Leslie to be the Leslie (duh) or now the Ventilator. Now the problem with the Ventilator is that you've got a great sound, but no amplification at the end, so you'll want to cleanly amplify the signal, I use a PA. If the venue is too small for a PA, I have to hump the Leslie or make do with a small, quality amplified wedge like an EV SA250 or similar.

For the pianos I use a mono output to a Fulltone Clyde wah, and into a Line6 M9. Stereo out of the M9 for effects like the ping-pong trem that the suitcases have. I find the M9 gives me way more control (and with the delays, more options) than the internal effects. I've been going for a cleaner tone lately, but when I wanted to have vintage distortion I went into a Twin Reverb. The amp sims in the Electro are pretty good at low levels of drive, in my opinion, you can get a good bark out of it just by dialing in a little. To get complete crunch though, you'll want an actual amp to do it for you.

Now, the electro is a perfectly capable board on its own, the amp sims and effects built in are more than sufficient for most situations, but those of us giant dorks who really need the exact harmonic distortions imparted by a 12ax7, well, you kinda have to turn back to the original signal path and try to peg those components. And, this is pretty pedantic stuff, everyone's ear is a bit different, and chasing tone is something that can drive people nuts and cause them to spend a lot of money - the companies we support count on it. ;)
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Re: possibility of using fender princeton reverb

Postby trogular » 02 Sep 2011, 18:10

Thanks very much for that, very useful.it confirms my intuition that the organ and clav are much better without the board's effects, including the leslie. !i don't have 500 dollars for a leslie emulator, so i'm gonna try other things. In teh meantime I've actually discovered more things that are useful and i'm registering all i can in the keyboard's memory slots and committing the rest to my own memory... also a new trick i use is to try to accept an imperfect sound and put more emphasis on my actual playing than tweaking volme knobs etc i'm guessing there's a philosophical lesson in tehre somehwere...
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