Guitar amp EQ question?

Question

If someone has a half stack (cab and amp) and a pedal board, why run all EQ through the pedal board and leave the EQ settings on the amp flat? What do you think is better for tone, EQing on the amp and just effects on the pedal board or everything on the pedal board?

Answer 1

I've played guitar for 45 years - played 6 nights/week in bands in the 70s and 80s etc. I've tried every combo of gear you can think of. In my humble opinion, your "tone" is going to be the absolute best when you hit that magic combination of the right guitar and the right amp. Slight tweaking on the amp to adjust for different rooms you'e playing in, etc -sure. What I've seen is players degrade their tone by trying to put 50 pedals in-line, probably with crappy patch cables and bad AC adapters (or dead 9 volt batteries) -- all of those things rob your tone. So then, they try to add still more EQ on the pedalboard to get back what they lost.



For live playing, you don't need 20 different dirt boxes and 5 different choruses and 5 different delays. For one thing - the subtle differences you hear on recordings will be lost in live environment anyway.



They guys who get away with the crazy set-ups have to go to the extreme the other direction. Have you ever checked out Joe Bonamassa's stage rig? The difference - he has a full-time guitar tech and a basically unlimited budget.



In my opinion- you should learn to use the bare minimum of stuff you need to get the sounds you're looking for - then buy great quality whenever you can - especially with cables and stomp boxes - and use EQ on your board for special effects - not to try to get back the tone you lost from shabby cables and too many stomp boxes. Put the money saved into a really great multi-channel tube amp.

Hope that helps!

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Answer 2

Basically no amp is going to give you more than a 3 band EQ with very few exceptions. A pedal EQ is often 10 bands. You will never get the same tone out of a 3 band that you can a 10 band. It's just that simple. I totally understand what Krud is saying and I'm no pedal whore either, but a quality 10 band EQ pedal can do more to make your rig sound good than almost anything you could ever purchase. And just because you use a pedal EQ doesn't mean you have tons of effects pedals. Hell, it could be the only pedal you use.

Answer 3

For my amp, I have noticed the tones I can get from it are much richer than I can from my pedals. So I usually have my amp doing a little bit just to get a thicker stronger base tone, but I use my pedals to get a more detailed tone, with all of the effects.

Answer 4

I prefer to have the EQ on my amp set to certain settings then equip effects according to it. It helps get a base sound from the amp then build off of it with all the extra stuff.

Answer 5

EQ on the amp for when you go dry and have an EQ set on your board for wet. Really, the right answer is to have both.