The tilt control allows you to change the tone of the amp from normal, to favouring high treble. Chorus makes it sound like multiple guitars are playing, phaser and flanger add a “whooshing” sound, octaver changes the pitch and delay causes a note to be played repeatedly. The FX control will allow you to select digital effects such as chorus, phaser, flanger, delay and octave. Some Marshall amps have treble and high-treble setting that may need carefully balancing. Be careful about turning it too high or the sound may become too piercing and difficult to listen to. High treble to the treble setting, but controls the very highest frequencies. For lead guitar, the treble is often higher to allow it to cut through.

Turn this up if the tone sounds muddy and undefined, and turn it down if you’re interfering with the vocalist or playing rhythm guitar. Lots of treble causes the tone to be crisp and sharp, allowing separate notes to be heard more distinctly. Treble or “treb” provides the high-range frequencies. Guitars are usually responsible for providing this kind of frequency in a band setting, whilst singers provide a lot of the treble and bass guitars of course provide the low-end to produce a balanced sound. Consider turning the mids up to provide depth to the tone. Most of the time, the mids should be mid-high to make the tone sound full. The “middle” or “mids” control adjust the mid-range frequencies. If it sounds a bit too heavy and muddy, then you’ll need to lower it. If you want a “boomy” kind of sound, then you’ll need a high bass setting. The bass setting controls the low-end frequencies that are amplified. The bass setting is part of the “equaliser” or “EQ” family of settings, as are the middle and treble controls. If you want a crystal clear tone, then have the gain as low as possible.

If you’re just looking for a crunchy, crackly tone then have the gain around midway to start with.

For heavy metal and rock, the gain setting will likely be quite high. The gain setting is common on solid-state Marshall amps and adjusts the level of distortion. Different amps have different controls available, so here is a list of all the most common ones you’ll find on your amp and what they actually do. Things may have a softer edge at higher volumes, but dynamic peaks that can be a big part of musical enjoyment must suffer to some extent when clipping occurs, which is more often than many people think, especially with good quality recordings.Your Marshall amp will likely have around 6-8 controls you can adjust. So 30 watts of tube power (soft clipping usually) is probably safer for the speakers in general than 30 watts of most but not all SS amps (SS amps tend towards hard clipping more in general than tube amps).Ĭlipping is always bad for the sound though, even if no damage occurs. Tube amps tend to 'soft clip' meaning less intense waveform distortion occurs during clipping which also has lower risk of causing damage to speakers/tweeters. More power means less likelihood of clipping and damage generally, all other things the same.

Any speaker can be damaged (usually to tweeter) by any amp when it clips, and all amps clip at some point.ģ0 watts to Dynaudios certainly has practical potential to clip and damage speakers if volume of peak dynamic levels gets too high.

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