I need an amp for my violin

November 9, 2007 1:15 PM

What kind of cheap but good amp should I get for my electric violin?

Ok so I have a relatively long history as a musician but have been playing acoustic (Irish) music on the violin for most of the last 10 years. I haven't dealt with amps for quite a while, and only upright bass amps (i.e. I don't really know anything about guitar amps).

I just got an electric violin. It is very sweet. Perhaps the sweetest thing ever. It sounds very good. Currently I'm playing it through the massive glory of a Marshall Stack. The kind with the 9 volt battery.

It is not loud enough.

I would like to start playing with other people with this violin, perhaps some paying gigs in small to medium sized clubs. I need to buy an amp. The other problem: I'm quite poor at the moment, having moved to a new city recently.

I don't really know what I'm looking for but basically something that sounds generally warm. The option to distort or overdrive a bit would be nice but definitely not essential. Something that's very cheap initially but is useable would be great, and perhaps a suggestion for something to get down the line a little further, once all the electric violin dollars start rolling in.

Ok so cheap=<$200
Down the line=$~800?

I was thinking a Fender Twin down the line, something like that. But really I need something cheap and now.

Oh and I'm happy to hunt around on ebay if there is something good to look for used. My friend has a Roland Cube (it's orange, that's all I know) I might be able to get him to sell me.

posted by sully75 to media & arts (12 comments total)

Since you mentioned Fender, I thought of an amp a friend of mine has for tooling around on -- a Fender Pro Junior amp.

It's an all tube amp with 15 watts of power driving a 10" speaker. Definitely has the warm tone you're looking for. There's some beautiful warm distortion at higher volume levels.

They retail for a hair over $300 new, you should be able to score a deal on one used. And I think I just convinced myself to shop around for one, too.
posted by empyrean at 1:44 PM on November 9, 2007

The fiddle player in our band used a Fender Pro Jr as well. Most fiddle players (according to her) swear by them.
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 2:05 PM on November 9, 2007

Just a note on the wattage; yes it's only 15 watts of tube power but you'd never know it. Especially when miking it in a club, it more than held it's own. The trend for live performance these days is lower wattage on stage and making the P.A. do the work (try telling a guitar player that though!).
posted by KevinSkomsvold at 2:07 PM on November 9, 2007

Fender Pro Jr. or a used Blues Jr. if you want a more dirty sound.

If you want to spend less money than that, and you still want tubes, the new Epiphone Valve Jr. head and cabinet set are surprisingly good sounding for a very low price. With some tinkering from a good amp tech, they can be incredible.

Where wattage is concerned, a little goes a long way if it's a tube amp. A 15-watt Fender Pro Jr. or Blues Jr. has enough volume for a guitarist to play a loud club gig. Those guys you see at clubs playing 100-watt Marshalls have them turned up to 2.
posted by The World Famous at 2:15 PM on November 9, 2007

A friend of mine favored Pignose amps for this purpose. Though whether it was because he liked the sound of his violin through it, or the way it looked, I couldn't tell you.
posted by quin at 3:14 PM on November 9, 2007

World Famous: I'd actually seen this in a catalog, 5 watts is enough?
http://www.sweetwater.com/store/detail/VSJunior/
posted by sully75 at 3:15 PM on November 9, 2007

5 watts can be enough, depending on what you're using it for. If you're playing with a full rock band at volume in a practice space, you'll hear it as long as you have it pointed in the right direction.

In a live setting with a full rock band, 5 watts is enough if there's a mic on it and it's going through the P.A., which is how pretty much every gig I play is. If you're going to be playing gigs in big open spaces and your amps aren't going to be mic'd up, 5 watts won't cut it.

But you need to try the amp out at concert volume before you buy it. Never buy an amp if you don't crank it up first. Take your violin to the store, and ask them to let you plug in and really, really crank it up. If they have an amp room, make them take the amp in the amp room so you can go all out and see how the amp behaves at volume, since every amp's dynamics change as the volume increases.

If you have a guitarist buddy, have him/her go with you and play electric guitar in the amp room along with you, but through a much bigger amp, so that you can see how well the smaller amp competes with the bigger one. You'll be surprised. A 4x12 cabinet moves a lot of air, so you'll notice that right of the bat, but on stage that doesn't really matter, since chances are one speaker will be mic'd up and the big amp will have to be turned way down for the mix.

Also, with a smaller tube amp at high volume, you'll get really, really loud but you'll also be driving the amp hard enough for it to break up. With guitar, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you're playing stuff like Mahavishnu Orchestra, then you'll want an amp that breaks up at volume, and a 5 or 15 watt tube amp should do just fine. I've actually read that the Fender Champion 600 amp, which is 5 watts and all-tube, sounds better than the Epiphone, but I haven't heard it in person.

But if you don't want it to break up, but instead want endless clean headroom, then you want a higher wattage amp that is tubed in a way that it will give you that headroom. That's where the Fender Twin comes in, since it is so big and so loud that you will never, ever play it loud enough for the sound to break up. Another great amp for endless, loud, clean, beautiful tone is the Roland JC-120, which is 120 watts solid state, but has, I think, the warmth of tubes without any break up at all (but is so loud that when I use mine for even very large gigs I never get to turn it up above about 2.5).

In live settings, I mostly play medium-sized clubs at high volume in a very loud rock band, and I either run through a Fender Hot Rod Deluxe with a Jensen speaker and some swapped out tubes (40 watts) or a JC-120. If I turn the Fender up above 4.5 or the Roland up above 3, it's loud enough on stage that the drummer complains that he can't hear himself play. I have a friend who plays harmonica on stage through a Fender Pro Jr. and it cuts right through a full 5-piece band playing through Twin Reverbs and Marshalls. And he doesn't have to push the Pro Jr. hard at all.

Oh, and I got my Hot Rod Deluxe off Craigslist for $300, so I do recommend that as a good way to get an amp on the cheap.
posted by The World Famous at 4:08 PM on November 9, 2007

I think if I were you I'd first make a choice between modelling amps and tube amps. Solid state amps that don't do modeling, in my opinion, lock you in to a certain tone. That said, a lot of the electric bowed instrument players I've known have used Roland Jazz Chorus amps of various size and that is a solid-state amp. So I'd make an exception only for those.

If you want a modelling amp, Line 6 has a stranglehold on that market, although I've liked the Vox Valvetronics amps I've looked at.

For small tube amps, I like the old Mesa amps - the .22 cal, .50 cal, and Subway Rockets, not the DCs - and the Carvin Vintage series tube amps I've played through struck me as extremely great value for money. If you can find a 1x12 or 2x12 Mesa Maverick it's a fantastic little amp. Marshall amps are expensive but there is nothing like them. Smaller boutique amps like Pignose, Soldanos, Dr. Z's, etc can often be had but the prices are often very high.

Do not buy a new amp if you are trying to get good value for money. Amps are pretty sturdy and you can always dig up a used one. Cruise ebay for a few weeks, cruise your favorite guitar forum's for-sale area (the used/forsale forum at BAM always has great stuff on offer), cruise your local music shop that sells used gear, cruise your local craigslist.
posted by ikkyu2 at 4:40 PM on November 9, 2007

By the way, 5 watts is not enough to play a paying gig in a club unless you're mic'd through the PA. 30 tube watts is probably enough to break windows in any club, unless you really want a sterile, crystal-clean tone, in which case you'd be safer with 50.
posted by ikkyu2 at 4:44 PM on November 9, 2007

ikku2 is exactly correct.
posted by The World Famous at 5:07 PM on November 9, 2007 [1 favorite]

One question I have: If I got a more powerful amp so that I'd have the possibility of getting a louder, cleaner tone, can I dirty that up in the preamp/stomp box stage? Is that a cheesy thing to do? I'm not sure if you can take a clean amp and then dirty up your signal and end up with a overdriven sound.
posted by sully75 at 8:40 PM on November 9, 2007

You can use a stompbox with any kind of amp.

Most tube amps - all of them in the 30+ watt range, to be sure -have a preamp and a separate power amp. Most modern amps let you dial in some overdrive in the preamp, which sounds great.

The thing I'm particularly fond of in my 35 watt Maverick is that it has two separate preamps with two separate tone stacks. One preamp is for warm tube cleans that can fuzz up ever so slightly; the other preamp can be driven into AC/DC style distortion. Each preamp has a gain knob (which adds loudness and also distortion), a treble/mid/bass set of knobs, and then a channel volume. You can swap preamps on-the-fly by stepping on the footswitch. In addition to that there's a master volume knob that you can use to drive the power tubes into distortion if you're feeling LOUD.

It is not possible to drive even a row of 4 EL84 power tubes into serious distortion without getting really loud; the 100 watt amps with EL-34 (Marshall) and 6L6 (Fender) power tube distortion are so loud by the time the power tubes are overdriving that you can produce hearing loss through earplugs. Most tube amps that produce tube distortion these days do it in the preamp.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:21 PM on November 9, 2007