Lab amps . . . for Shadows music?

[Bojan]

A friend of mine has two old 100W Lab amps: one is an L5 (with two 12" speaker) and the other is an L7 (with four 10" speakers). All I know about them is that they were made in the 70s by Norlin using both Gibson and Moog resources, that they are all transistor amps, and that BB King uses them a lot . . . But has anyone had any personal experience using these amps and would they be good for Shadows music ?

Cheers,
Bojan

[ernie1958]

Why not Bojan..? Actually you could use any type of amp for Shads stuff....just depends on how creative you are
(with the exception of HiFi amps of course..lol!)

[Didier]

A friend of mine has two old 100W Lab amps: one is an L5 (with two 12" speaker) and the other is an L7 (with four 10" speakers). All I know about them is that they were made in the 70s by Norlin using both Gibson and Moog resources, that they are all transistor amps, and that BB King uses them a lot . . . But has anyone had any personal experience using these amps and would they be good for Shadows music ?

Cheers,
Bojan

The only way to know is to try them !

Didier

[JimN]

Unless you go to Les Paul-style low impedance operation, my experience of solid state amplification (and I have a couple of such units) is that branding makes very little difference. Of course, quality of implementation is as important as it is with valve circuitry, but by and large, provided that there is enough clean headroom and good enough EQ available, you can get a wide range of sounds from any well-built amp.

The Lab Series equipment was released by Norlin at just the wrong time. Solid-state (in my opinion, unjustifiably) had become almost a dirty word - and like other SS ranges of the time, it was ignored by potential buyers. One result has always been low secondhand values.

[cockroach]

The trouble with most amps these days is that it is often difficult to get a good clean sound at a usable level

There's endless distortion and overdrive facilities there but not always a good clean sound.

Older transistor amps were better for this (Yamaha, Peavey, Roland etc)

Let's face it, a large part of the classic Shads sound was Vox valve amps, but they didn't overdrive them like crazy back then.

[RUSSET]

Of course, the classic clean was the Fender Twin Reverb; a great amp of which I used to have a '65 Reissue. Should never have sold it on, but, by God, it was so heavy.

Tony.

[geoff1711]

actually I don't agree that they didn't overdrive them, I think at most live performances they probably had them flat out to be heard over the screaming.

Also play a single coil pickup through a very clean amp and it sounds almost acoustic, it's only when you add a bit of overdrive that it starts to sound Shad-ish, don't forget that even in the studio the valve echo would drive the front end of their amps and by the time you had a good volume mix with the drums the amps would be cooking and the low powered speakers would be being driven hard.

And then later on Hank used lots of different effects distortion included.

We're not talking high gain humbuckers driving cascading gain stages but an electric guitar, played totally clean, sounds a touch sterile without overdrive and the notes attack and decay is too quick, too pingy rather than twangy?

If you listen to the opening notes of Man of Mystery you don't get that sound without distoting the sound.

But as far as solid state amps, a number of good sounding modelling amps have a full range speaker plus a tweeter and the amp stage is clean so that all of the modelling is reproduced faithfully, which is why if they have a DI output they sound fine straight into the PA.

In fact it could be argued that if you take a modelled Shad's sound such as in a Zoom, Magicstomp, Valvetronic etc it'll sound better through a very clean solid state amp rather than a valve amp stamping it's own identity all over the EQ and Gain modells.

Geoff

[Didier]

If you listen to the opening notes of Man of Mystery you don't get that sound without distoting the sound.

Didn't most of the distortion come from the Meazzi echo box ?

Didier

[StuartD]

Ray Flacke, who is an English Nashville Session Guitarist, swears by them. You can here them on the early Ricky Skaggs tracks; Heartbroke, Uncle Penn and Highway Forty Blues

Regards

Stuart