Guitar gain what is

These amps are designed to have preamps where the clean headroom limit is always higher or at least at the extreme settings of Gain. You can find examples of these on my post i wrote about the best cheap guitar amps. This means that you can turn the gain up really high on these amps and your sound will result in an increase in volume, as opposed to a significant increase in distortion. Marshall is a great example of this, as is Fender, because both amps can have great clean tones at loud volumes.

This kind of sound is what amp builders were going after in the early sixties, which resulted in companies like Fender creating the Bassman and the Twin Reverb. These amps had enough headroom that you could play loud enough to easily overpower drums, while staying nice and clean. I recommend listening for the loudest point where your amp remains clean even when you play hard. This can be achieved by rolling the Gain down.

If your amp has a separate Master Volume control, you will want to turn this control up. In these amps, the only way to control the gain is with the Volume control. The edge of breakup sound lies in a certain sweet spot where the tone is neither clean nor dirty.

This is the ideal tone for many, so how can you achieve it with Gain? In this case, you want to set the Gain to a point where picking lightly creates clean notes, while digging into the strings creates a small amount of compression or distortion. Getting this tone on a non-master volume amp may require you to crank up a bit, but I promise it is worth it!

Turn your Gain control past noon for starters and experiment with your amp from there. Hopefully, after reading this article, you will be able know what Gain is on a guitar amplifier and how it can be used to dial in your tone. But there are important distinctions to be made here. This is the measure of how much a gain stage amplifies a signal, and is expressed as a factor. Figure A shows a typical input stage found in most guitar amplifiers. The guitar signal enters on the left, passes through R2 and into the control grid of the valve V1.

The signal is then amplified by the valve and exits by the anode at the top via C2. At this point, you can see that the signal has increased in size or amplitude from 0. In this example of a typical amplifier input stage, an input signal of 0. You can then say that this amplifier stage has a gain factor of That value will remain the same, and is dictated by all the components in the circuit, the HT voltage applied at R4, and the valve model itself. If you were to double the size of the input voltage to 0.

It could be a transistor commonly found in simple, clean boost pedals and the like — they all increase the size of your guitar signal, just in different ways. Gain stages are not perfect though. They have limits and, if pushed beyond them, begin to fall apart. In an ideal world, you would be able to inject any size signal into the stage and receive a signal that was identical in every way other than its increased amplitude.

Unfortunately, this can never be the case. A preamplifier is required to amplify a signal, when the source level is too low and has to be pre-amplified in order to be usable for further processing, control or any other use.

It's also where all EQ measures are applied. Bass, mid and treble are all functionality that get adjusted and implemented in the preamp stage.

After the preamp, your guitar's signal gets moved to the power amp, where it's output through the amp's speaker or an external speaker cabinet. Turning gain up at the preamp stage and either keeping master volume the same or lowering it, at the power amp stage, is how you get a distorted signal. Gain is applied at the preamp stage while volume is applied at the power amp stage.

We see right above the volume knob the MASTER label, indicating it's controlling the master volume of the power amp after the preamp has already done its work. The higher the gain, the more we're overloading the preamp, thus creating the fuzz or distortion that you hear. This is why gain knobs can also be referred to as the following:.

Gain is also what you're utilizing when you put a preamp at the beginning of your pedal chain, which is why many preamp pedals are simply called "boosts" or "booster pedals. That knob functions the same as the gain knob on an amplifier, in that it takes the signal from your guitar, increases the volume then sends the boosted signal on it's way the final volume adjustment.

Again, you get distortion when the gain goes up and the master volume either comes down or remains stagnant. Preamps can have other functionality as well, like basic EQ or even effects, which we see on the amplifiers in the form of a three-band EQ, presence, reverb controls and sometimes more.

Here are a few resources I'd recommend for continued reading on the differences between gain and volume:. You can drill down into this topic a lot more if you start to consider aspects of amplification and audio engineering that aren't strictly limited to your guitar amp. For our purposes, knowing how gain impacts the preamp and how volume impacts the power amp is enough to know how to properly utilize whatever guitar gear you might be sporting. Once you understand the difference between gain and volume, your amp dials will start to make a lot more sense.

You can shoot me an email if you want. I can also be reached via Twitter or the comments section below. HD video courses by Guitar Tricks, from beginner to advanced. Checkout the entire program, FREE for 14 days. You can shoot him an email to get in touch. Ok this is a good basics; appreciate it. It will only get clipped and distortion becomes a side effect.

Most amps have separate clean and distorted channels. The gain for the clean channel is less sensitive so clipping is unlikely. Meanwhile, the gain for the distorted channel is much more sensitive to clipping. Gain has a tremendous influence on the shape of the sound because of its position at the start of the signal chain. Volume controls, on the other hand, are located at the very end just before the signal goes into the speakers.

The volume dial is not meant to change the tone. It will only vary the strength of the signal. Stop It Fast! The word distortion has a bad connotation but it should not be seen as something negative. In fact, it is often seen as a good thing in the world of electric guitars. Distorted signals have become the definitive sound of rock for many years.

Musicians have found ways to work with the distortion and to control it in such a ways as to produce songs that sound more raw and radical than clean signals. Distortion can add depth and character if used in the right way with the right songs. On the other hand, pushing the gain to get distortion randomly can backfire. Instead of getting a nice textured sound, you might end up with a mushy tone that makes the notes hard to distinguish. Your audience can get overwhelmed by the distortion because the melody is pushed to the background.