I Need an Amplifier to Play Jazz
My friend Andres is not only a really good flamenco guitarist, but he’s been my bebop teacher for a while now, and he really loves playing jazz. For a long time on gigs though, he used whatever backline amps were provided until last year, when he decided to get serious about having a consistently good tone. Last year, he wanted rig built for maximum portability, so he went with a small pedalboard featuring a Mooer preamp pedal and power amp/speaker cab simulation pedal. The advantage of this kind of setup, besides ease of transport, is that sound techs love it — it plugs right into a PA system and your tone will always be the same. But over time, Andres began to realize that even though the tone was consistent, it just wasn’t that inspiring.
It’s the worst feeling to have, when you try to express your musical ideas but the tone just isn’t cooperating. Even if you are professional and experienced enough that you can find a way to play through bad tone, it can be a profoundly depressing ordeal. Really good tone, on the other hand, takes your playing to new places, allows you to confidently explore and expand the limits of what you can do. I know it sounds magical and fantastic, but it’s true. And so Andres decided that he needed to take the plunge and commit to an amplifier.
But what amplifier to get? There are so many options today for so many different niches, that the world of amplifiers can be daunting. This article is not intended to solve your amp selection problems as much as it will describe a certain thinking process for a bebop jazz player. The most important question is, what kind of tone do you want? In Andres’ case, he needs a superb clean tone that is strongly fundamental, fat, and round. What does that mean?
When you play a note, you aren’t just hearing the indicated note, you’re also hearing overtones and harmonics. It’s the resonance between all of those frequencies that creates the character of the tone. Strong fundamental tone means that the tone emphasizes the base note that is being played, so you get less overtones. For a rock or blues trio, you might want more overtones, which make the tone sound more energized, on the edge of feedback with the right gain structure, but for Andres, he wanted a strong fundamental tone because in the kind of jazz he plays, he often needs to play with a pianist, so for his comping he wants a tone that will stay in its lane and fit into the band a bit more. At the same time, he needs notes to sound fat, meaty, and thick, without the muddiness that comes from fighting the bass guitar or the kick drum. And traditionally, bebop guitar tone features a rounded top end, just enough to cut through and be heard, but without the kind of sizzle you need in, say, a hard rock band.
Once you understand what you’re looking for, the traditional amps that people use for jazz just make sense: Fender tweed and blackface amps, known for their clean headroom, rounded treble, and bell-like tone — the tweeds of course have less headroom and more hair, while the blackfaces are cleaner with more volume. Polytone and Roland JC solid state amps are built to produce exactly that kind of strongly fundamental clean tone as well. Part of the reason you find not so many players using Vox or Marshall amps for bebop jazz (but they are abundant in fusion and funk, where more gain is desirable) is the sparkling treble, those amps often don’t sound round enough for a traditional bebop tone without a lot of help.
Andres decided quickly that with the main guitar he planned to use, a Hofner Verythin, which is a thinline semihollow similar to a Gibson ES-335, he really wanted to use a Fender blackface type combo amp. Choosing a Fender blackface type also comes with other advantages — most of those amps come with a spring reverb, and sometimes a tremolo, which means that you get options for effects without having to carry a pedalboard, or maybe just one gain effect for solo boosting — although again, generally with a high headroom clean amp, it is easy to control your volume level from the guitar controls. The combo amp made sense for portability as well.
The only remaining question was, what size amp to get? The vaunted Fender Twin Reverb, named for its two 12" speakers, was a terrific tonal choice, but at 85 watts, reaching the sweet spot in the amplifier meant having to turn up much louder than most of his gigs required — causing problems for the sound tech, the venue, and the other members of the band, especially singers. Remember that as we’ve discussed before, the relationship between power and volume is not linear, but logarithmic, meaning that a 50 watt amp is actually nearly as loud as a 100 watt amp. A 10 watt amp at full volume is half as loud as a 100 watt amp, and a 1 watt amp is half as loud as a 10 watt amp. So for all practical intents and purposes, a gigging musician needs to consider the kind of music s/he plays and the kind of band in order to have the appropriate amp.
In the end, Andres decided to save up for the Fender Princeton Reverb, a tube combo amp that stays pretty clean and gets the type of EQ that Andres wanted for his bebop tone. At 15 watts, it has the power to compete with a bebop jazz drummer and enough volume to be used as its own monitor, and even to be the only source of guitar sound at a small gig.
Were there other choices? Yes, many! There are plenty of other boutique and custom amps that might even provide better tone or more flexibility, i.e. more options for gain that make them versatile for use in more genres. However, in general, I usually recommend the simplest circuit for what you need, as I tend to believe that the less things in between you and your expression on the instrument, the better. That doesn’t make someone using an Egnater Tweaker or a Mesa Boogie with a billion switches and options wrong, definitely not. But for Andres, the Princeton was the perfect choice, simple, easy, with a tone that he finds inspiring every time he plugs in.
You can check out Andres’ gigging all over Shanghai with various jazz, folk, funk, and flamenco groups, and if you see him, don’t forget to tell him how great his tone is!
Check out his YouTube at http://yt.vu/+andrescoca
