![]() ![]() Pioneering designs in this field from the likes of Groove Tubes (the SE and SEII), Palmer (the now almost legendary PDI03 and the current PGA04 model), and Hughes & Kettner (the Red Box series) are all noted for their somewhat less characterful and slightly darker tonality, shaving off the dreaded crackle and fizz at the expense of much of the life and soul of the sound (in my opinion, at least 'your mileage may vary.'). It was only ever the inherent low-pass filtering of guitar speakers that made the first forays into distorted sounds seem at all attractive, throwing away the less harmonically related overtones and leaving us guitarists with the richer, punchier, more interesting sounds that we have come to love.īut therein lies the challenge for designers of speaker simulators, because the top-end response of a guitar speaker in a cabinet exhibits some quite complex behaviour that is not easily replicated with electronics. Take away the latter, and the former does not sound 'nice' at all, full of fizzy upper-harmonic trash that leaves single notes and especially chords sounding harsh and unmusical - OK, I know there are styles of music where the sound of a DI'd fuzz box is appropriate, but for most people this is the audible equivalent of sucking a lemon. Most of the sounds we think of as classic electric guitar tones are the product of two primary components the distortion produced by a valve output stage driven into clipping, and the inherently bandwidth-limited response of a guitar speaker. ![]() ![]() (Original Motherload owners can get their units upgraded to the latest spec by contacting the manufacturer.) The Design Challenge Of Speaker Simulation Responding to feedback from guitar players and recording engineers, UK-based Motherload designer Rick Cawley, manufacturing under the Sequis name, continued to refine the filter stages until he came up with this, the 'new improved' Motherload, reborn as a single-channel 1U chassis, with a sound to make even the most sceptical sit up and take notice. What it did have, however, was some of the fizz and grit in the 5-6kHz region that real loudspeakers are so adept at getting rid of to give us what our ears have become attuned to as a 'proper' distorted electric guitar sound. It worked, in so far as amps were happy driving it, and it certainly didn't have the choked, gutless sound of most other passive speaker sims. It offered a reactive (as opposed to purely resistive) dummy load, like a real cone driver, and a series of sophisticated passive filters designed to replicate the response of a typical guitar speaker. The Motherload, a combined dummy load and speaker simulator, was originally launched a few years ago as a two-channel unit in a 2U chassis. Could this be the one that finally nails it? The trouble is, none of the designs so far have managed to sound close enough to a real speaker. Using a combination of dummy load and speaker simulator lets you record your favourite valve guitar amp at full tilt without disturbing your neighbours. ![]()
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