Can you increase girth without increasing wattage?

[mikeywoll]

There are two big problems lurking here.The biggest one is probably subjectivism and the most obvious is the lack of a definition of "girth", "big iron sound", or "punch"....

This post was excellent. Really did a great job defining the magic and challenges behind amp design/modding.

[ngw]

RG,
Thank you for another informative post.
Is is OK with you, if I use or quote your explanation, to help answer my clients questions?
It is so difficult sometimes, to explain the need for diagnostic testing, to avoid the debate about what various guitarists will think is the answer, due to their subjective analysis of the issue.

When are you going to start giving lectures?
You could set up a YouTube channel and help us expand our knowledge; and learn ways of dealing with “guitarist speak” questions from our clients.

I’m sure many, if not all of us, would enrol at the RG School.
Cheers, Noel

[R.G.]

Sure. Feel free to use it.

Making good music is all about subjectivism - expressing how some concept feels is, after all, what music is about. But making and keeping electronics running requires some real, factual instrument-based numbers. I suspect that, on average, the more deeply a musician feels their music, the harder it may be for them to accept that some things are purely technical. What's needed is a partnership to keep the music flowing.

[Roe]

Yes, it is possible to let an amp appear bigger - with more "girth" without increasing wattage. A typical example would be a jtm/bass marshall, which has excessive low bass for guitar. If you remove some of the low bass early on in the circuit the amp suddenly appears more punchy, powerful and big sounding since it does not use so much power to reproduce low bass

[brewdude]

I would think less bass would imply less “girth”… but, once again, subjective interpretation of the ambiguous definition.

[pdf64]

I would think less bass would imply less “girth”… but, once again, subjective interpretation of the ambiguous definition.

Consider the monster fat tones obtained in the 60s and 70s using ubiquitous Rangemaster treble booster, which roll off below 2kHz!

The point is to roll off deep / sub sonic bass, below the guitar’s range. Make the lower corner freq of each high pass filter 20-40Hz if you like, so no actual guitar bandwidth is lost - that still allows coupling caps to a 1M load (eg vol pot) to be brought down to 4n7F (from the typical vintage value of 22nF), and ghose to 220k load (eg output valve grid leak) to 22nF (from the typical 0.1uF). Thereby reducing operating point recovery times (ie bias shift leading to blocking distortion / farty overdrive) by 1/4.