Clips are coming!! Sorry for the delay in getting them up here, pretty crazy session schedule of late... Anyway, will have some v4 and some v5 clips - depending on the tone and the cab, the difference between v4 and v5 is sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle. Here's what I'm hearing...
v4 had a really forward aggressive upper mid characteristic, and when the amp was driven to breakup, the top end got REALLY crunchy (as evidenced in the first round of clips). Depending on what you're looking for this is either an AMAZING thing, or not so amazing. Also, because of the detail in the top end, even the slightest amount of breakup was evident, so it didn't feel like there was as much clean headroom as you'd sometimes like...
v5 - now let me state this up front, the tone is still very forward, bright and crunchy... and there's still all kinds of detail... but what v5 does for me is remove the undesirable moments from v4 and replace them with desirable ones. So, if you want that really bright, crunchy, aggressive, forward thing - it's still in there, just not all the time, and it doesn't get ugly. And if you want more clean headroom, it's in there now too - probably about the same amount of clean headroom in the Triwatt as in the TC-15. The thing the Triwatt didn't have much of before was "smooth" or "round". v5 adds this - not at the expense of toughness, after all it ALWAYS sounds like a Hiwatt - but it's now possible to get a bit more creaminess out of it. It's also a bit "deeper" sounding... frankly, every tone you dial up on the thing gets a "YEAH!" from the guy with the guitar in his hands...
And to put this into perspective in tangible terms, v4 was not all that pleasing when paired with TTA speakers. The TTA's were just too bright and detailed to yield any kind of warmth... Fanes and Greens were preferable. With v5, the TTA's sound incredible, different from the Fanes when Mark was playing but equally pleasing. I think Mark even preferred the TTA's to the Fanes!!
With the v5 mod, another interesting character has come out - because the amp is a bit darker, when using bright/normal the amp has a very "vintage" quality. I think before it was a bit too bright to sound vintage - I equate bright with modern. Anyway, so we're vintage in the bright/normal inputs... engage OD... and the bright modern thing comes back. I described it to Stephen and Phil as like having a JTM45 and a JCM800 in the same amp! But with a Hiwatt tone!!
It really is like this though, no kidding around. Very cool...
Anyway, there was some talk that the OD stage could be darkened a bit too - how I feel right now is that I like the contrast between the dark/bright. I'll spend some more time with the amp/clips before I completely decide, but as of right now I'm really digging the amp exactly how it is...
What a fun journey this has been!! Clips soon!
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Brent Bodrug
Producer-Engineer/Songwriter
www.slyfichapel.com