How Important are Pristine Cleans to You?

[JTyson]

I'll usually settle for what I can get with the volume knob, and a middle of the road clean channel, it usually ends up being at least acceptable. The clean channel on the JVM is workable for most things I do, I keep it on a switcher
Its not really pristine, but its decent with a neck pup set to single coil

 

[jlbaxe]

I like Crystal Clean and have plenty of amps and pedals to get anything broken up/dirty overdrive/distortion.

 

[glpg80]

this is an interesting topic - answers are all over the place

i LOVE crystal cleans. excellent noodling and practicing tone - especially with complex chords.

i do agree i like a full type of 3D clean normally found by pickup selection on the crunch channel with the gain turned down OR using your volume knob

 

[jet66]

I like a really clean sound for tones that are crystalline with delay, chorus, detune, etc., but can be dirtied up ever so slightly with an OD. The Rivera clean on the K Tre with the middle notch engaged works great for that, sort of a 'blackface' clean.

 

[Mailman1971]

I just roll the volume back on the guitar and thats about as clean as I need in certain songs.

 

[Heritage Softail]

I like a really clean sound for tones that are crystalline with delay, chorus, detune, etc., but can be dirtied up ever so slightly with an OD. The Rivera clean on the K Tre with the middle notch engaged works great for that, sort of a 'blackface' clean.

Absolutely on this ^^^^

I just finished a few hours of jamming on my KT. Pulled two power tubes, run it thru a Matchless V30&Greenback combo cab. The cleans are really good. It just loves the neck pup w/coil tap on my Parker. I have the Notch and Brite pulled. Strange amp, really. Beat down metal channel, and great clean channel. I would have never thought that SRV tone was hiding in a ultra high gain amp...

 

['63-Strat]

I do not like pristine cleans very much. When playing with a band super clean sounds do not sound right to my ears.

If you check out what a lot of people think of as great cleans .... Fender / Vox tones ~ you well find they are not super clean .... just listen to all the recordings of these amps. They are more distorted than a lot of people think. I am talking about below edge of break up sounds / blues overdrive tones.

You need a few harmonics being created by the amp to give the sound warmth. If I wanted pristine cleans I would be looking at solid state amps (never owned one).

I agree, totally clean sounds don't work that well live unless there's a little compression going on and even then I prefer a little bit of preamp warmth. I love my xtc classic's clean channel, it can do loud and clean or it can get dirty, and another crunch channel is more useful to me anyways. It can do a great jazz clean tone when I need it, but really, I don't think I use a totally clean sound in any of the bands I'm playing with live right now so I guess it's not that important to me. I am always confused by reading people's reviews of clean channels. They often read something like "I could crank it and it stayed perfectly clean!" That would not be my idea of a good clean channel at all but ymmv. I definitely want to be able to get a little hair out of the preamp if its a mv clean channel.