Initial thoughts about the Ceritatone DC30
In which our hero seeks to learn about his amplifier, but rediscovers his guitars instead.
I worked on cover letters, resumes, civil service exams and psychometric tests this weekend and promised myself I would refrain from working on the DC30 or playing guitar until the career stuff was sorted out. The last of the paperwork was finished today, so it was time to play!
But before getting to involved in playing, I opened the back of the Avatar Vintage 212 cab up and pulled out the Celestion Vintage 30 and G12H30. In their place, I installed the Tone Tubby H-Bomb—a H1E alnico and H1E ceramic combination. Don’t ask me to compare the Tone Tubbies to the Celestions—I probably spent less than two hours with the Celestions before changing them.
I plugged in my Weddington Custom and started to have a go at the clean channel first. Clean channel is a misnomer—12AX7 channel is a better description since this channel can get dirty once the channel volume gets above 11:00. By 1:00, it’s pretty crunchy and it just gets crunchier as more volume is dialed in. Cool. But there’s a hitch—it’s also a little flabby. With the bass and treble controls set straight up, the mid and treble notes were relatively clear and articulate, but the low e and a strings were, well, flabby and poorly defined. Not cool. The only way to control the flab was to completely was to nudge the treble up a bit, to about 2:00, and cut the bass entirely. Much better, but I still room for improvement.
Switching over the the dirty ah, EF86, channel pushed the gain up a notch or three. The crunch kicked in by 11:00, and by 1:00 the amp was snarling. Cool. But the EF86 channel was, if anything, flabbier than the 12AX7 channel. Not cool. There’s no bass and treble controls on the EF86 channel, so the only way to alter the sound is the 6-position tone and treble cut controls. The tone control works, but only the top two positions seemed to do much to alleviate the flabbiness; I settled on setting this at the fifth click up from the bottom which seemed to have the most articulate bass. I pushed the cut control up to about 1:00 to take some of the edge off the treble.
At this point I was glad that the amp was working, if far from delighted by the sound.
After dinner I decided to pull out my ‘89 PRS Custom 24. I plugged straight in and was immediately rewarded with high-gain rock tones from some sonic heaven. Much better. The bass was more controlled and the top end simply screamed. String-to-string articulation was stunning. Oh, yeah, this is what I was looking for. And, DAMN, I forgot how light the PRS is, especially compared to the Weddington Custom. There are many similarities between the guitars—they’re both mahogany body and neck, maple top, dual humbucker guitars. Both have 5-positions selectors that offer up classic humbucker tones and some single coil emulations. But they’re soooo different. The PRS’ pickups are more powerful, easily pushing the DC30 into distortion, but they’re also articulate. They scream, but each note is separate and distinct. Could it be that building guitars like this one is what put PRS on the map? Could be.
With the PRS plugged in, I started pushing clean 12AX7 channel into higher gain territory. I nudged the volume up to about 2:00, the bass up to 10:00 and dimed the treble. Oh, yeah, now here are some good rock tones. And just rolling off the guitar volume cleaned up the tone to anything from shimmering cleans to slightly overdriven blues tones depending on string attack. Switching over to the dirty EF86 channel, I cut back on the cut control but left the 6-position tone control in the fifth position. This is where the snarling lead rock tones live. Not nu-metal, or dimed Marshall territory, but cutting Voxy lead tones. Think Brian May’s lead tones on News of the World and you’ll have a good idea what I was hearing. Depending on how the amp and guitar are set, this should be good for just about everything from shimmering cleans, to mildly overdriven rock and blues rock, to modern indie and alt rock. Punk even. It won’t give the creamy overdriven tones of a JTM45, but what it does, it does very well.