FEATURE
Everything You
Wanted to
Know About
TUBES
but Were Too
Afraid to Ask
BY DAVE HUNTER
Part 1: Preamp
Tubes
Ah, tubes. We love ’em, don’t we? But to
help them really love us back—and I mean
with big, juicy, bear-hug love—we need to
know a little bit about what makes them
tick, how they vary, and what they do for
our precious guitar tone. A quick and easy
tube change can make the most dramatic
tonal alteration achievable from a single-component swap within our amplifiers,
other than perhaps a speaker change, but
unless you know a little about what different tubes can achieve sonically, that
change will be entirely random. Welcome
to a two-part feature in Premier Guitar
that will give the uninitiated all the basics
needed to help them launch their quest
for tubehead status. We’ll also provide
plenty of under-the-hood details to further
bolster the knowledge of players who are
already in the know about these glorious
audio devices. I’ll discuss preamp tubes
this issue and output (power) tubes next
issue, but before diving in, let’s take a
brief look at how tubes perform their
sonic magic in the first place.
Once upon a time, vacuum tubes were
used all over the place. They glowed their
little hearts out in our television sets,
car and home radios, hi-fi systems, and
guitar amplifiers, and were crucial com-
ponents in myriad military applications,
from radar technology to missile guidance
systems and more. Bit by bit they have
been replaced in all of these functions by
other forms of more compact and more
stable technology… except in guitar
amps, where they maintain their preeminence over all kinds of far more advanced
electronics. Is this just nostalgia, or mere
perversity on the part of guitarists? Not
in the least: when used to amplify electric
guitars, tubes still simply sound better
than anything else out there. Sure, there
are some respectable sounding solid-state
amps, and digital modeling amps have
also made inroads into the market, but
ninety-nine out of a hundred serious pros
