jimmer_5
Senior Member
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2011
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As a father of young children, I have been struggling to come to grips with the fact that it can be hard to find moments to play my tube amps at any volume. My home has a fairly open layout, and while my big amps sound glorious in that space, it can also be really loud for my wife and kids. I've been trying to get into modeling software, but I haven't really been happy with the sound in my headphones.
What I need in my life is awesome tone out of good speakers at a reasonable volume.
So...... My new solution is to bring a spare 2x12 into the far bedroom and shut the door. This has helped, but I don't have space for a bunch of heads in the room. Enter the two new beauties you see in the pictures below.
DUAL TERROR
I've had the Orange Dual Terror for a month or so, but I haven't really posted about it yet. I have owned several of the Orange lunchbox amps (Dark Terror, Jim Root Terror), and a TH30 to boot. I love the Rockerverb tone, but I want a smaller package that has a footswitchable clean channel. The Dual Terror has been a great little amps so far, made even better by some tube rolling. It has a beefy "crunch" that is more like a Rockerverb or a Jim Root Terror - not exactly, but closer to that than to the fizzier distortion of the Dark Terror and the TH30. The Fat channel does mid to high gain well, and has plenty of gain around 3 o'clock where I tend to leave the gain knob. Lead sounds are not quite as liquid/violin like as the Rockerverb, but it sounds great in it's own right.
Meanwhile, the Tiny Terror channel can do vintage crunch, but it also has enough headroom to do clear, loud, cleans. I was surprised to find that I like the sound of the cleans - they're not as beautiful as the TH30, but they're far from sterile.
In my tube rolling, I ended up having to compromise a bit. Some preamp tubes really improved the TT (clean) channel, but robbed the Fat channel of bass and gain. The cheap unlabeled chinese tubes that came in the amp were ok, but not great. I got the best clean sounds with a JJ Gold pin ECC83 in V1. The Electro Harmonix 12AX7 also was great for cleans. Tung Sol 12AX7's sounded the best for high gain, and good for cleans. I compromised on a Tung Sol Gold pin 12AX7 in V1 - it had the best mixture of high and low gain sounds.
Overall, I think this amp is a keeper. It gets the Orange vibe, and has great all tube sounds with simple controls. In a perfect world, I would buy a 30 watt Rockerverb with power scaling and this is as close as I have come so far. I might see if it shares enough DNA with the Jim Root Terror to make some component swaps and get my mini Rockerverb.
FRIEDMAN RUNT 20
I have been dying to try a Runt since they were first announced. I have always loved the sound of the Friedman Brown Eye and JJ (at least what I have heard in videos) but I have never been in the same room as a Friedman before, much less played one. I have played (and own) amps that are supposedly in the same tonal ballpark, and I REALLY like the sound of a Marshall with Jose Arredondo style modding.
My goodness, this is a pretty amp. It looks so good sitting on my vintage style 2x12, and it's beautifully built. The head is surprisingly light, and in a world where I am seeing more and more large low wattage heads, this one is surprisingly compact. I would call the Runt aptly named.
As tone goes, I am hesitant to write this review yet, because I really haven't had as much play time as I'd like, but I think I have learned a few things so far. When I play a new amp, I tend to start out with all the knobs at 12 o'clock, with the notable exception of the gain knob. Typically on high gain amps, my gain knob ends up living between 1 and 3 o'clock. I tried this with the Runt 20, and found it to be a very bright and present amp. I struggled with this until I tried a few settings that were unusual for me.
The biggest revelation was turning the presence down to 9 o'clock. This tamed the high end, but it also loosened up the bass. I found that around 10 - 10:30 was a happy medium. I experimented with low treble/higher presence settings, but I was happier just cutting some presence. This gave the amp a little darker, thicker sound. The amp is not bass heavy by nature either, and turning the bass all the way up didn't seem to change that. The controls do have great sweep and taper, and you can hear a quite noticeable change as you turn them up.
As others have stated, the master volume works quite well, and the amp is loud. I was playing quite loud, and the volume on the dirty channel was rarely above 9:30. The clean channel volume was generally around 11-12 to match the dirty channel, and it had enough headroom to stay clean at those settings. The three way bright switch works well, and I didn't find myself missing the EQ knobs much. I did notice that as I backed off the presence control, I had to switch to the brightest setting on the clean channel (with humbuckers). I found the darkest setting to be too dark for me to use much, but I haven't tried it with a single coil guitar yet.
For what I assumed to be a high gain amp, the Runt does not have a surplus of gain. It sounds good at various higher and lower gain settings, but I found myself wanting a bit more. In all fairness, it should have enough gain on tap for most hard rock players. This is where I made my other "unusual setting" discovery: This amp sounds really good with the gain control dimed. I rarely ever do this as I find that the full gain setting doesn't sound very good on a lot of high gain amps. The Friedman continued to dish out saturated goodness from 3 o'clock to max gain.
I was also surprised to find that single note soloing sounded very smooth and saturated on max gain. I typically find bright amps to lack that smooth "liquid" feel when soloing, but the Runt pulled it off. Credit where credit is due, I think Friedman did a good job with this. It's not as smooth as my Rockerverb, but that's a totally different amp, and not really a fair comparison.
Overall, the Runt has a very good clean channel. It doesn't sound like a true Fender clean to my ears, but it is pleasant to play, and I'd call it an above average clean. The cleans have a good amount of bass and the bright switch is enough to give you some flexibility when switching between brighter and darker guitars.
The dirty channel is also very good, and I can tell why so many people like it. It does power chords, riffs, and single note solos well, and I would imagine it cuts through the mix nicely. As a non-professional stay-at-home home guitar player, I would have liked a bit more bass response, but I tend to favor amps with more low mids in general. Overall, I think most people will be more than happy to own this amp - I'm just not yet sure if it's going to be a keeper for me.
What I need in my life is awesome tone out of good speakers at a reasonable volume.
So...... My new solution is to bring a spare 2x12 into the far bedroom and shut the door. This has helped, but I don't have space for a bunch of heads in the room. Enter the two new beauties you see in the pictures below.
DUAL TERROR
I've had the Orange Dual Terror for a month or so, but I haven't really posted about it yet. I have owned several of the Orange lunchbox amps (Dark Terror, Jim Root Terror), and a TH30 to boot. I love the Rockerverb tone, but I want a smaller package that has a footswitchable clean channel. The Dual Terror has been a great little amps so far, made even better by some tube rolling. It has a beefy "crunch" that is more like a Rockerverb or a Jim Root Terror - not exactly, but closer to that than to the fizzier distortion of the Dark Terror and the TH30. The Fat channel does mid to high gain well, and has plenty of gain around 3 o'clock where I tend to leave the gain knob. Lead sounds are not quite as liquid/violin like as the Rockerverb, but it sounds great in it's own right.
Meanwhile, the Tiny Terror channel can do vintage crunch, but it also has enough headroom to do clear, loud, cleans. I was surprised to find that I like the sound of the cleans - they're not as beautiful as the TH30, but they're far from sterile.
In my tube rolling, I ended up having to compromise a bit. Some preamp tubes really improved the TT (clean) channel, but robbed the Fat channel of bass and gain. The cheap unlabeled chinese tubes that came in the amp were ok, but not great. I got the best clean sounds with a JJ Gold pin ECC83 in V1. The Electro Harmonix 12AX7 also was great for cleans. Tung Sol 12AX7's sounded the best for high gain, and good for cleans. I compromised on a Tung Sol Gold pin 12AX7 in V1 - it had the best mixture of high and low gain sounds.
Overall, I think this amp is a keeper. It gets the Orange vibe, and has great all tube sounds with simple controls. In a perfect world, I would buy a 30 watt Rockerverb with power scaling and this is as close as I have come so far. I might see if it shares enough DNA with the Jim Root Terror to make some component swaps and get my mini Rockerverb.
FRIEDMAN RUNT 20
I have been dying to try a Runt since they were first announced. I have always loved the sound of the Friedman Brown Eye and JJ (at least what I have heard in videos) but I have never been in the same room as a Friedman before, much less played one. I have played (and own) amps that are supposedly in the same tonal ballpark, and I REALLY like the sound of a Marshall with Jose Arredondo style modding.
My goodness, this is a pretty amp. It looks so good sitting on my vintage style 2x12, and it's beautifully built. The head is surprisingly light, and in a world where I am seeing more and more large low wattage heads, this one is surprisingly compact. I would call the Runt aptly named.
As tone goes, I am hesitant to write this review yet, because I really haven't had as much play time as I'd like, but I think I have learned a few things so far. When I play a new amp, I tend to start out with all the knobs at 12 o'clock, with the notable exception of the gain knob. Typically on high gain amps, my gain knob ends up living between 1 and 3 o'clock. I tried this with the Runt 20, and found it to be a very bright and present amp. I struggled with this until I tried a few settings that were unusual for me.
The biggest revelation was turning the presence down to 9 o'clock. This tamed the high end, but it also loosened up the bass. I found that around 10 - 10:30 was a happy medium. I experimented with low treble/higher presence settings, but I was happier just cutting some presence. This gave the amp a little darker, thicker sound. The amp is not bass heavy by nature either, and turning the bass all the way up didn't seem to change that. The controls do have great sweep and taper, and you can hear a quite noticeable change as you turn them up.
As others have stated, the master volume works quite well, and the amp is loud. I was playing quite loud, and the volume on the dirty channel was rarely above 9:30. The clean channel volume was generally around 11-12 to match the dirty channel, and it had enough headroom to stay clean at those settings. The three way bright switch works well, and I didn't find myself missing the EQ knobs much. I did notice that as I backed off the presence control, I had to switch to the brightest setting on the clean channel (with humbuckers). I found the darkest setting to be too dark for me to use much, but I haven't tried it with a single coil guitar yet.
For what I assumed to be a high gain amp, the Runt does not have a surplus of gain. It sounds good at various higher and lower gain settings, but I found myself wanting a bit more. In all fairness, it should have enough gain on tap for most hard rock players. This is where I made my other "unusual setting" discovery: This amp sounds really good with the gain control dimed. I rarely ever do this as I find that the full gain setting doesn't sound very good on a lot of high gain amps. The Friedman continued to dish out saturated goodness from 3 o'clock to max gain.
I was also surprised to find that single note soloing sounded very smooth and saturated on max gain. I typically find bright amps to lack that smooth "liquid" feel when soloing, but the Runt pulled it off. Credit where credit is due, I think Friedman did a good job with this. It's not as smooth as my Rockerverb, but that's a totally different amp, and not really a fair comparison.
Overall, the Runt has a very good clean channel. It doesn't sound like a true Fender clean to my ears, but it is pleasant to play, and I'd call it an above average clean. The cleans have a good amount of bass and the bright switch is enough to give you some flexibility when switching between brighter and darker guitars.
The dirty channel is also very good, and I can tell why so many people like it. It does power chords, riffs, and single note solos well, and I would imagine it cuts through the mix nicely. As a non-professional stay-at-home home guitar player, I would have liked a bit more bass response, but I tend to favor amps with more low mids in general. Overall, I think most people will be more than happy to own this amp - I'm just not yet sure if it's going to be a keeper for me.
