The Elegant Beauty of Vacuum Tubes

As have many guitar players before me, through the long tunnels and dry valleys of seeking the elusive 'perfect' tone I have gone. I have come to deplore the term 'tone' itself, though in practice it remains equally important to me. Let me put it like this: there are an immeasurable number of variables that make one's electric guitar sound the way that it does. I'm inclined to believe that part of the reason why people feel guitars sounded so good back in the sixties comes down to a few factors. First, the companies that made them were small and VERY different form the corporate machines that churn them out these days. One could even argue that they were (almost) handmade. Secondly, they used better parts. Why? Because the companies that made the parts were smaller, materials were better.....etc. Third, there were less choices. MANY less choices, and most of the choices made resulted in things sounding good. We North Americans with our propensity for choice may be far off the mark. Choice does not mean better folks.

So I do not intend to write some sort of treatise on the manufacture of musical instruments and gear at the moment (though that may come soon). Instead I write about tubes. For those readers who know little about electric guitar, suffice it to say that anyone in any band anywhere that you have ever thought was great, was most likely playing a tube amplifier. my guess would be that 99% of known guitarists use tube driven amps. (the other type of amplifiers are powered by solid state semi conductor circuits as opposed to vacuum tubes and they just don't sound very good. There are scientific reasons for this that I will not explain. And yes, I know that it is subjective. Sort of.) Some jazz players have historically preferred solid state amps, but that is for another discussion.

Anyway, many guitar players thusly develop a bit of a love affair with tubes. Not only do many of the great vacuum tubes come from another era signifying our deep cultural attraction to the past, but the damn things are just beautiful. Something about tiny glowing glass jars that moves us.

So then what happens is this: you come across someone somewhere who keys you on to the fact that you can still find NOS (new old stock) tubes that have been lying around some dark warehouse for fifty years. Yes they cost a fortune relatively speaking, but.....the word is they sound GREAT!

You see, you have to understand that at some point you hear something. This something is the sound of a guitar that you will someday play. It is not quite one that you've heard before, but rather an amalgamation of all of your favorite guitars and songs and recordings and live shows and overtones you've ever heard. So you begin hunting. As some of you may know (all too well) it took me MANY years to finally acquire the perfect little ball of sound that I had assembled in my mind, but I did it. Yes it is still changing in subtle ways, and hopefully always will, but the heart of it is there.

The number of factors that can effect your sound is really rather staggering. Most people would likely believe that it relies on what guitar you're playing through what amp, but I'm afraid it is far more complex than that. Perhaps the most obvious, is that you just cannot believe how different the same guitar will sound in different hands. We should not underestimate biology and the sound of the heart. There are frankly too many details for me to list, going all the way down to the different types of capacitors in your guitar's electronics, the type of magnet used in your pickup, whether it was wound by hand or with a machine, and among an endless sea of other things; your tubes.

Trust me fellow guitar players, don't even start reading about them. The philosophy works something like this: you commence reading descriptions of tubes that are NOT in your amp. The descriptions are dazzling. Then you read about the tubes that ARE in your amp, and the descriptions are bland, if not just plain bad. And you think, "man I'm selling myself short. I have this great guitar and this great amp and.....and I'm running these cheap ass tubes." So then you begin reading in earnest, having decided that you will buy some good ones dammit. You won't buy the set of two for $300 but maybe you'll drop $150. (Keep in mind the current ones in your amp cost $15 each). You get the idea.

So years ago, after WAY too much research online, I bought some NOS tubes. I can't remember how much I paid, but they weren't cheap. I took out the "mediocre" tubes, inserted the great ones and went to it. I played. And played. I could definitely hear a difference. It was not as pronounced as I expected, but it was definitely there. I played some more. Did it sound better? I don't know. Different yes, but maybe not better. So I left them in because I had bought them dammit and I couldn't return them. I toured with them and recorded with them and.....The fact is, that I am quite likely the only person alive on this earth who ever heard or knew the difference. Is that worth it? Maybe.

So after a gig on Sunday that brought some technical problems, I began inspecting my gear. A bit of trouble shooting told me that one of my tubes was not getting hot, which meant that it was probably dead. So I did all of the checking to be sure, and yes it is dead. It broke when I was trying (gently I swear) to pull it out. (No really, my baby was sleeping so I was being super quiet).

Because of the way that vacuum tubes work, I had to put both of the old ones back in. In short they run in pairs and if they are not balanced properly one may draw considerably more power than another, causing all sorts of problems. In many if not most amps you have to set the bias current to deal with the amount of power the tubes are drawing. Fortunately my amp is a "cathode bias push pull operation" amp, which means that it basically adjusts itself when there is a change in the amount of power the tubes draw.

Okay, so this must be boring you. The point is that I have concluded that buying fancy old tubes is a waste of money. Some knowledge about the matter and research is certainly helpful and a good set of tubes can't hurt, but there is a limit for sure. I really didn't mean to write that much. Go look at some photos of tubes glowing. Stunning.

Oh, and for the curious: I play through a Victoria 20112. My rectifier tube is a Bendix 5Y3GT, My power tubes are both (after the death of the 60's era coke-bottle RCA situation) Tung Sol 6V6's, and my preamp tubes are a Groovetubes 12AY7, and a Jan-Phillips 5751. (The 5751 replaces a 12AX7 and cuts the power down a bit, both lowering the overall volume of the amp, and making it breakup a bit earlier.)

Posted by jeff pitcher at November 11, 2009 05:39 PM

....................................