Grateful Dead Music Forum

After a long long long wait my Shakedown amp has arrived. It took 2 years & 4 months. Many changes occurred from original request to what was delivered. It was worth the wait.It was not an easy road. I had many many delivery dates come and go. I bailed a few times and and even just gave up and forgot about it all together a bunch of times. In the end the amp is everything I expected and more. It's not that Joe is slow , but that he does have to rely on other people (call them vendors) for certain components. He has a vid up on his Shakedown amps FB page that shows it but does not do it justice.I will need to adjust my playing style 80%+ because I have never really found the Jerry tone and would play a style that worked best for me with the gear I had (which was not bad) but this is the real deal. Joe is a good guy and he cares about tone and knows tone. He is a player as well with good chops which is key VS a guy who knows amps inside and out but doesn't play. He delivered the amp to me personally. It did have a hiss with the blaster on and I hate noisy amps and was a little bummed (I would have kept the amp regardless) but we took it apart found where the issue was Joe had some filters with him in his car and problem was solved ( and I was was sooo relieved) I would have been happyish with it but with that resolved I am VERY happy. I had rehearsal that night and the amp was dead quite and performed flawlessly. the band will also need to adjust to the sound now as well. Even though it is loud crisp and clear there seems to be more room in the mix because my old rig seemed to envelope the space and this jerry tone is far more focused. So the band needs to up their game because they are now exposed or say hanging in the wind. So to make a long story short this amp has what we all talk about here (those lows the growl) it is full on jerry tone. Did I mention the built in strato blaster and propriatary compressor. Don't ask what it is or how it works (propriatry) and I don't know and don't really care I know what the knobs do and will spend a lifetime tweaking them for sure. I had my doubts but now that I've got to know Joe and hear and see his work I would say he is a solid stand up guy. I would only recommend patience.Good things come to those that wait.

Wonderful outcome! Enjoy your new amp.

What amp was it?

Any pics or clips?

Smolder wrote:What amp was it?

Any pics or clips?

He has a vid up on his Shakedown amps FB page

I'm sure they sound great...but 2 years and 4 months for an amp? Come on, now.

I had Joe go through my pro reverb and make some tweaks. It sounded good before, but he helped voice it like the Dead preamp sound. He's got that voice pretty well nailed. I still shoot for more of a early Garcia sound when I do the Deads music, before the Mac power amp gets involved. So my power tubes are getting into the mix a bit and there's more low end in my tone too...Joe was great to work with, in fact he and I played a gig together and he's a fun bandmate too. He's local enough that I can get work done while I wait. I think a big problem for folks who've sent him amps is wait time, but keep in mind he's dealing with his local clients at the same time as the builds in his shop. There's like 4-10 twins at any given time in that place all getting juiced up. Then there's this compressor he's getting into the mix. I've yet to hear it in person, though I've been meaning to.

Glad you've found another piece of the puzzle.

Well I'm glad it all worked out for you and you obviously like it. He did a great job on mine too. Joe would have one hell of a business if he could cut down the wait time from 2 years (which it took) to something a little more practical. I'd be sending him all kinds of stuff to tweak.

Can't wait to hear it bud

Easy to say now but I would compare it to a custom guitar build ,that would take years as well. Also this was not an amp I sent to be modified it was all Joes. So other than a resonator guitar and an ES335 I guess I'm done.

Here are some samples of the Shakedown GD50 amp. I was so caught up in the scene and rush to set up that I did not realize I was in humbucker mode until half way through this set. I also used my MAC250 because I can not help myself from tinkering ,but I think the amp is designed and sounds better using the tubes. The feature of the built in blaster and compressor react more with the tubes as well. I'll get a video up useing the tubes shortly. Also I hope to do some with a strat and tele.

I'm a little confused. Clearly the Shakedown amps are wonderful sounding and of very high quality, but why would a guitarist ever want to use a compressor when going for Garcia tones? He was absolutely and completely anti-compression, the king of dynamic pick control. Even Healy would expound on the evils of compression, would openly gripe about Weir's use of one and would praise Garcia's total manual control of dynamics. The use of a compressor seems to be overtly antithetical to a Garcia tone & sound, an effect you'd avoid like the plague when going for that JG dynamic pick response, goes against everything Garcia, destroys the heart of what his dynamic approach was all about, dramtaically alters the natural attack/decay envelope we all know and love...

I'm just confused by this. Am I missing something here?


Brad

Hey Brad I'll try to explain from a user stand point which I'm sure won't satisfy your technical curiosity. The compressor is a different design patent pending so I was not told a lot about it which is fine because I figured I can leave it off and out of the circuit if I choose to . I can say it's not like any compressor I've ever used. It is very very transparent and very adjustable. Threshold control in the back and compressor control in front along with on off. The amp is 135W (because there is something to be said about big iron). In an outdoor setting I'm not sure it would be used ,but in a smaller venue indoors is where it comes in handy. It rounds off, tapers....subtely rounds out those spikes we've all expierenced using Jerry rigs. You know those times when they can get away from you. I think that's where it can be really useful all the while maintaining a decent volume. It also has a very useful master volume unlike the late 70s twin master. Like I said it's very transparent if you turn it off and on no one would hear the difference (except maybe guys like us) but as a player you would know the difference. Having it is a bonus It's not intergral to jerry tone but helps to maintain Jerry tone at reasonable levels. The jerry thing is a side project and great and a 32 year obessesion for me, but I find the amp and the compressor to be very useful with a strat and tele as well. I think any country player would love having it onboard.
So long story short it does not hurt Jerry tone whatsoever (in my opinion anyway) it can only help. Having the blaster available onboard is cool too. Having different options available is always a plus.I think if Joe gets the compressor technology off the ground he would have something completey unique.

I've read a bit about Joe's clever compressor circuit and how it's highly integrated into the circuit. It seems quite brilliant actually. It sounds great, don't get me wrong. He may have broken some very special new ground with his compressor design.

My take on it is that the central factor to what I think of as a Jerry sound is that of a nearly perfectly linear response up to the point of clipping. And it's the clipping where the magic happens, that bit of class AB distortion and speaker saturation that shaves off the "ice pick" attack transients and turns them into juicy, squirty, brief bits of harmonic distortion. As a picker, just riding that edge of clean into dirty, to my ears, IS the Garcia sound. A compressor will radically alter that natural dynamic envelope and prevent that pick transient from busting thru the power thresholds where that sweet bit of distortion happens.

I like compression, love it on country clean sounds, love it on Trey's classic tone, Knopfler's old Sultans of Swing sound, etc., but it just seems that one of the primary efforts of anyone going for a Jerry tone is seeking out that magical hard clipping threshold and in a way that sounds right. I listened to the video and it really is a nice sound, very present and smooth and sweet. But to me it's just missing that "kiss", that little squirt of distortion that made Jerry's pick attack have such a magical sparkle and sweetness. To me, that's where a compressor destroy's the very heart of what made Jerry's sound so special, that linearity up to the point of clipping. And with that linearity comes the dynamic expression, the TOTAL pick control over the loudness of a note. That totally linear (aka: dynamic) clean range is a tough and unforgiving approach, but it made all of Jerry's nuance and expression come thru big and accurately. Add to that totally linear expression the clipping at the top, and there is that magic sound.

I know it's a technical/philosophical argument. In practice, I admit that the actual result you're getting is quite nice sounding (as is the playing), but in that very specific aspect of how the attack transients respond and how the notes decay after the attack, it's just not Jerry sounding to my ears. It was hammered into my head 30 years ago how and why Jerry disliked compression on guitar so much and that he absolutely avoided it.


Brad

I thought you sounded great at Jerry Jam, Paul!

Regarding compressors, I don't every use them and I don't get any "spikes" either. I believe that is because my twin and mac have been modded properly and the highs are super creamy. So, I don't think a compressor is needed if everything is set up right (or modded right) and the tone is set up right.

I did get those spikes before I did any mods to my rig though....

Anyway, the new guitar and rig sounded great! Here is The Garcia Project with Melvin Seals from Jerry Jam ( I used my full rig with the waldo maestro mod up until THATS WHAT LOVE WILL MAKE YOU DO, when my twins preamp tube circuit shut down - I have since had the twin completely rewired and re soldered!) After TWLWMYD, I used a borrowed fender 4 x 10 amp. See if you hear any difference in my tone...

https://archive.org/details/TGP2015-07- ... elvinseals

For clarification, is it a compressor or a limiter? I can see a limiter successfully doing what you've described. But not a guitar pedal type compressor.

It's a pretty fuzzy distinction between a compressor and a limiter. In the studio, they're almost always the same device. It just depends on how you run it and where you set the threshold that makes the difference between compression and limiting. There's a big grey area where compression begins to become more like limiting. Limiting could be described as a high ratio and high threshold that only grabs and clamps down on the highest peaks while compression could be described as generally a lower ratio and a threshold set to where it is acting on more of the sound more of the time than just the highest peaks. What I'm hearing in the demo video sounds like compression, taking control over quite a bit of the attack and decay envelope, re-shaping most of the signal, not just the peak transients.

In this case, the compressor is a pretty advanced circuit that is built into the preamp itself, deeply integrated into the preamp stages, at least that's what I read about it. Definitely not a pedal type, more of a studio, line-level type of approach. Regardless, compression is compression, guitar pedal or line-level, same principle.

In either case, limiting vs compression, you are altering dynamics, reducing peaks, preventing the vital clipping and all the sweet harmonics that result from that clipping.


B