Power

When I grew up, there were two kinds of Marshalls: the 50-watt one and the 100-watt one. There might have been a bit of variety with channels and switching, but those were the power levels that were available. Eager salespeople and deaf, macho musicians made sure to fuel the myths and misconceptions. The received wisdom, which I accepted unquestioningly, was that you really needed 100 watts to keep up with a drummer, but you could possibly get away with 50. Amps of 30 watts or less were essentially bedroom practice gear.

Not that long ago, in a studio not too far from here, I plugged my Telecaster into a Vox AC30 and turned the volume up to 7 or 8. The amp was giving all it had and had gone into glorious overdrive. The doors between the studio and control room were open and the amp was facing away, but it was still absolutely terrifyingly loud. I'm not sure I have ever played on a stage big enough to be able to swallow that kind of volume. And that was a 30-watt combo—the aforementioned "bedroom amp". (Need I mention that that sound was just fantastic? It was a pity that the Vox had an annoying rattle somewhere that got caught on tape, so I was forced to use a Fender Twin instead—woe is me!)

A good long while before that, I jammed with a drummer through a borrowed Fender Deville 60-watt tube combo. The guy was a hard hitter, so going by the previously mentioned standards, I shouldn't have had a chance of keeping up. Instead it was he who asked me to turn down between jams. 60 watts, and the drummer couldn't hear himself!

A friend of mine owns or at least used to own the Marshall DSL1 1-watt combo amp. It has a selectable "quiet" mode that drops the output from 1 to 0.1 watts. When I expressed interest in the DSL1 to play at home, he just shook his head. Even at 0.1 watts, it's way too loud to play in an apartment building.

The conclusion, painfully obvious though it may seem, is that tube amplifiers are just astonishingly loud, and the wattage merely determines for how many days you are deaf after a session or a concert. Exactly how this relationship works is one of the more profound learnings I've ever taken away from the Internet.

If you compare a 50-watt amp to a 100-watt amp on paper, it is logical to assume that the one with 100 watts is twice as powerful. Indeed it is. The difference in volume levels of those amps will however not seem as dramatic. All other things being exactly equal, the 100-watter is just noticeably louder. The most obvious distinction of the louder amp is that the increased wattage projects the lower frequencies better, so it will have a more pronounced low-end kick. In order to double the perceived volume of a guitar amp, all other things being exactly equal, you need to increase the wattage tenfold.

I had great buyer's remorse after coming home with my 20-watt Blackstar head. I was afraid that I might be making a mistake, and that it was going to be hopelessly underpowered. This was the impetus for going online and learning about all this stuff. My 20-watt stack is exactly half as loud as one of the amps that Jimi Hendrix used to play Woodstock—obviously provided that we would be going through the same speaker setup. The little 2-watt Vox Nightrain that I had dismissed a couple of years earlier provided one-quarter the loudness of Hendrix' Marshall Major. All other things being exactly equal.

It is important to keep that last sentence in mind, and you've seen that I've repeated it as a bit of a mantra. If you don't reiterate that point ad nauseam, people will forget it. I've seen forum/blog discussions derailed inside of a dozen posts because of this, with Godwin soon to follow. The speakers will obviously change the equation dramatically, the more, the louder, as long as you can drive them properly. A 5-watt amp through a classic 4 x 12 sounds huge!

Going back to the issue of my 20-watt amp. It is not infinitely powerful. It would probably struggle when trying to push through a regular rhythm section as well as a second guitar player. It's as good a reason as any to stick with the power trio format. I know the amp sags a bit when playing loud with a bit of low end dialed in. Sometimes that is just what you want. But in the harder rock and metal genres where I like to be, guitar tones are usually about a saturated preamp and a clean power amp. I am also not averse to having a great deal of grit in my clean tone, indeed that is unavoidable when you do what I do and use the volume knob on the guitar to clean up the sound. But those who insist on that pristine, squeaky clean sound and still want a bit of projection simply have to up the wattage a bit. I don't think that 100 watts are that necessary in this day and age. They are more a vestige of the dinosaur rock age, before PA systems and mixing desks. If you are in a situation where you can make 100 watts work—good for you, because few things in life are more exhilarating than hitting that big chord and feeling the amp grab your ribcage with that big iron hand.