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Post subject: Blues Jr. Amp Settings
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 11:15 am
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Hey guys!

I'm just wondering what setting people are using for their Blues Jr. amps?

I've played around quite a bit with it but can't really get the tone I'm looking for. I want a sound like SRV, or Eric Clapton from his bluesbreaker days (although he did use a les paul and marshall in those days). Any suggestions? I'm playing a Fender highway one strat and use a tube screamer as well. I want to get new pickups too (will post another thread about that).


Cheers!


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Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 11:40 am
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There are a couple of excellent threads covering amp settings. Do a search for them.

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Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 2:35 pm
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Chet Feathers gave me some great settings for oem Highway One pickups. One was like volume 5, treble 5, mid 7, bass 7, reverb 4. Onother was like volume 7, treble 5, mid 7, bass 7, reverb 2. Those setting really work well with the oem Highway One pickups, and it helps with the oem Highway Ones to dial the tone down to about 3 for a really thick blues tone. Those oem pickups really drive the BJ because they are hot! Fat switch in or out for variety.

A great tone on the oem Highway One was from the bridge pickup when I'd go full blast on the volume and then the bridge gets a nice glassy quality. The oem Highway One pickups can have a metallic clang, especially clean, but when you dial the amp in right they fatten up and sound pretty sweet.

Now that I've got CS TX Spc in my Highway, I've changed around how I do the amp to get the best tone. One current favorite setting is to go about 11 on volume with the fat switch in, 7s across on eq, reverb down to 2 or 1, tone knobs on the guitar down to 3 - it's a really classic electric overdrive tone and it does sound a lot like SRV. Masters less than 3 to avoid peeling the paint off the walls. The BJ gets loud. Last night I upped the reverb to 3 and put the volume at 9 and the tone cleaned up a lot but was still a fat blues tone with great responsive overdriven sounds when playing a little harder, and excellent chords with separation. Roll the volume back to about 6 and you've got pure clean Strat tone, which really works well for just chimey open chords and surf. All the switch positions sound great, and the CS TX Spc have little hum even in the non-cancelling positions, maybe because of a lot of wax or something, I'm not sure.

To get good quack with CS Tx Spc in 2 and 4 crank the tone up to 10 and anything from clean to the volume at 9 it's great. A Strat is a world of tone.

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Post subject:
Posted: Fri May 02, 2008 8:29 pm
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Hello Countryjoe07,

To catch a wave:

Reverb=11
master=7
middle=1
bass=1
treble=11
volume=2

Cheers.


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Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 10:49 am
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hello, i use a les paul. treble 7, mid 9, bass 9 reverb 4, vol 4, master 3 to 5. fat switch in. ive never explored the different sounds this amp makes. i like these settings and leave it there. sometimes i crank the vol to 12 for songs requiring that type of crunch the entire song.


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Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 2:47 pm
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strat58cat wrote:
Chet Feathers gave me some great settings for oem Highway One pickups. One was like volume 5, treble 5, mid 7, bass 7, reverb 4. Onother was like volume 7, treble 5, mid 7, bass 7, reverb 2. Those setting really work well with the oem Highway One pickups, and it helps with the oem Highway Ones to dial the tone down to about 3 for a really thick blues tone. Those oem pickups really drive the BJ because they are hot! Fat switch in or out for variety.

A great tone on the oem Highway One was from the bridge pickup when I'd go full blast on the volume and then the bridge gets a nice glassy quality. The oem Highway One pickups can have a metallic clang, especially clean, but when you dial the amp in right they fatten up and sound pretty sweet.

Now that I've got CS TX Spc in my Highway, I've changed around how I do the amp to get the best tone. One current favorite setting is to go about 11 on volume with the fat switch in, 7s across on eq, reverb down to 2 or 1, tone knobs on the guitar down to 3 - it's a really classic electric overdrive tone and it does sound a lot like SRV. Masters less than 3 to avoid peeling the paint off the walls. The BJ gets loud. Last night I upped the reverb to 3 and put the volume at 9 and the tone cleaned up a lot but was still a fat blues tone with great responsive overdriven sounds when playing a little harder, and excellent chords with separation. Roll the volume back to about 6 and you've got pure clean Strat tone, which really works well for just chimey open chords and surf. All the switch positions sound great, and the CS TX Spc have little hum even in the non-cancelling positions, maybe because of a lot of wax or something, I'm not sure.

To get good quack with CS Tx Spc in 2 and 4 crank the tone up to 10 and anything from clean to the volume at 9 it's great. A Strat is a world of tone.



I'm actually thinking of switching my pickups to the texas specials..you mean the ones made by fender right? Can I ask what made you decided on them as opposed to other pickups out there? How do you like them so far?


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Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 4:11 pm
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Yes, I have the CS TX Spc. Imho, they are very great pickups. They are very different from the Highway One oems I had for many months, the ceramic oems on my nearly a decade-old Squier, the SCN noiseless I was interested in, and the and the Delta Tones I've played on American Standards. They're kind of like a real version of what the Squier was going for but not getting.

From what I understand, the CS TX Spc are based on a late 1950s set in SRV's Strat. They are vintage, with a reverse wound middle for hum cancelling. They have plenty of high end - they're Fender single coils not humbuckers - but probably more mid than say a pure vintage set of CS 54s. The CS TX Spc sound is basically vintagish, although I've never played them back-to-back with 54s. I wanted hum cancelling, which works well, and the 54s don't offer it from what I was seeing. The CS TX Spc are not hot like a humbucker or even the oem Highways. They're just a little bit hotter than a pure vintage single coil according to the chart on the box, and noticeably less hot than the oem Highways.

On noise, the CS TX Spc are low noise in all settings. Compared to the old Squier and the oem Highways, every position has much less noise. Positions 2 and 4 essentially are noiseless because the hum cancelling works. So, really, you're getting hum cancelling without compromise, although I'd still like to see totally noiseless that really sound like this, but nobody can do that yet.

What sets these CS Tx Specials apart is the tone. Clean, they are everything a Fender Single coil should be - chimey, countoured, complex. Playing the neck and neck mid you almost get a kind of delay or chorus effect with notes blossoming like I've never heard. With bridge and bridg-mid also sounds great clean with a very chimey vintage Strat sound good for many kinds of music, even Blues if you want to play it that way, but especially like the guitar music for intermediate players with a lot of open chords, g and c and d chords and so forth, which i still like to play because a lot of it sounds good (played double time from how it's written probably). Knopfler has these in his Sig model and you know he plays a lot of chimey stuff and also some stuff with more edge. The CS TX Spc do both well.

It's when you up the volume to get more gain in a BJ and you play the Blues that my Strat takes it to another level. I play a lot of BB King, maybe faster or not I'm not sure, but the way I play it would be considered blues rock I'm sure since I like that Strat tone not the jazzy 335 tone from the original BB recordings. My Highway One Strat, stock except the pickups and the five springs, is just too wickedly good for words singing the Blues with the volume up around 11 and the reverb down near 1 or 2. The neck and neck-mid with the gain going can get very SRVish tone. It's not exactly the same because I use 10s and can't play like SRV. My technique is totally different with picking like BB and EC instead of strumming, but the sound from the CS TX Spcs is extremely good with a liquid glass tone that's just fantastic. It's not SRV exactly, but reminds of SRV. Neck-mid has a little more fullness, and much of that tone, and it's great for a lot of songs, and then the neck alone can hit a zone playing some Blues type intense songs that's unreal. The bridge is real cool for playing a little surf with gain down and reverb up, but also gets extremely good for playing Blues but with a more hard sound than the neck, which is very liquid.

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Post subject:
Posted: Mon May 05, 2008 4:20 pm
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How I decided on the CS TX Spc set was accidental. Initially, I got scared away from the CS TX Spc because I read somewhere on harmonycentral or something that they were boomy, middy, muddy and other bad stuff like no sustain. That's just totally wrong. I think that whoever said that just had the pickups too close to the strings, duh. I got help with putting them in, because soldering isn't something I'm going to do in this lifetime, from real experts at Wild West Guitars in Riverside CA, which do setups for people from all over. So I took a set of Special Order CS Fat 50s in to WWG and oops the neck pickup was dead. Like many years ago I dated a woman whose best friend was dating a luthier at Fenders CS and somewhere in my refried memory I can almost recall something about some of the Fat 50s don't come out right and maybe people who want them should just buy a Cruz masterbuilt to get a really good set. Whatever, I just got a bum set with a dead pickup. Couldn't just get one, but had to give them all back to GC. I was then going to have to wait for another set to ship, try that one, etc. Arrghhh. I love SRV, love SRVs tone, and love Knopfler and Dire Straits as well, and so I decided F it, they've got CS TX Spcs in stock, that's what I'll get. I basically flowed with the wave pushing me over into the CS TX Spcs and grabbed them. Man, I'm glad I did. Can't be anything better for what I want.

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