Two things troubling me today

[roballanson]

1. What does a trussrod look like and how does it really work?

2. Can I put a distortion pedal in the link from my amp head to a speaker cab - thereby having a distorted signal in one speaker and clean in the other......

Any help greatly appreciated....

And its only Tuesday.....

 

[strummer]

1. What does a trussrod look like and how does it really work?

2. Can I put a distortion pedal in the link from my amp head to a speaker cab - thereby having a distorted signal in one speaker and clean in the other......

Any help greatly appreciated....

And its only Tuesday.....

The rod in your MM? That is a round length of steel in your neck, anchored at the head stock end (pretty close to the fret board if you look at it form the side), then going all the way down to the wheel, bent so that at the middle of the neck the rod is closer to the back of the neck.

2 No, you can't, not in any controlled way. You can mess with your speaker cones, but that isn't like normal distortion. The distortion you want is overtones, and that happens in the amp.

 

[roballanson]

ta muchly....

 

[SteveB]

+1 for Magnus' comments, and I'd add these:

1) the truss rod actually exerts some force on the neck from within, such that when you turn it one direction the neck bows, and when you turn it the other direction the neck straightens or flattens. In playing position, the 'bow' would be with the middle portion on the neck bent inward toward your body while the nut and neck pocket would remain further away from your body.. as if committing hari kari with a crossbow!

2) that would be bad.

 

[adouglas]

What does a trussrod look like? Well, it's...a rod:

This is of course a conventional trussrod, not the uber-cool EBMM trussrod with the capstan wheel -- which is certainly the greatest invention since toilet paper. I think, but am not at all sure, I also read somewhere that EBMM trussrods have a Teflon coating to make them easier to turn.

To amplify on SteveB's comments a bit. what the trussrod actually does is oppose string tension. The only reason that the neck "straightens" when you loosen the trussrod is because the strings are pulling it that way.

Imagine the neck to be really whippy and weak. The strings try to bend it like an archer's bow (old English longbows -- think Robin Hood -- were actually straight when unstrung). We want a little bit of this -- we call it "relief" -- but not much. So you need something to counteract that force. The trussrod pulls the neck exactly the same way the strings do, but in the other direction (so that the fretboard would belly out if the strings weren't there to oppose it).

Regarding plugging in a pedal AFTER your amp...well, you can do it if you like blue smoke and the smell of burning electrical components, I suppose. Pedals are meant to take instrument-level inputs (tiny fractions of a watt) not the kind of power put out by an amp head (tens to hundreds of watts).

Think of it this way: Say you wear contact lenses. Your eyes get dry. You pull out your bottle of eyedrops and put a tiny drop into your eye. That's putting the pedal in front of your amp.

Now, think what would happen if you took a firehose and fired it at your open eyeball from an inch away.

Exactly why you want to split your signal like this is not clear to me (you'd likely get some wierd phase effects that I bet would not sound good), but if you must, then the way to do it is to have two amps feeding two cabinets and a splitter box in front of them.

I suppose it's possible that somebody somewhere has made a stereo guitar amp with independent effects loops, etc. But that's just two amps in one box anyway.

 

[strummer]

Exactly why you want to split your signal like this is not clear to me

It's fairly common, at least it was in the 90's, where one channel would go clean and have a huge bottom and the distortion on another channel. Tim C, Billy Sheehan and lots others did that...

Now, of course, there are pedals that can keep lhe low end clean while giving dist to the mid and treble...

 

[adouglas]

It's fairly common, at least it was in the 90's, where one channel would go clean and have a huge bottom and the distortion on another channel.

Ya learn something new every day.

 

[roballanson]

Thats exactly what I wanted to try but might go down the split signal to a separate amp...a la Timmy C.

Thanks for the trussrod stuff - knew what it did, been adjusting them for years but realised I had never seen one......bit like the elephant in the room no one talks about....

 

[KennethB]

Tim Commerford now (from the first Audioslave record onwards) uses three amps. Three SVT Pro2 heads.!!! One clean, one "midrange grunt" mild distortion, and one for "full on" distortion. When he uses the wah-pedal (Listen to "Cochise") he actually operates two pedals at the same time. The pedals lined up side by side with a wooden board across. Fun stuff.

 

[Narcosynthesis]

It can let you get more controller distortion sounds

Take a typical fuzz or overdrive, it could sound awesome for the high end, but suck away all the bottom end, so running a stereo setup lets you have one signal distorted, and the other clean as per normal with your bottom end intact - blended together they can give you a huge sound

Probably not as important for the people who love a simple clean sound, but for those wanting to play with distortions and other noises it can be a great plan for keeping some tone intact

David