Good Morning Fellow Marshall users,
I have created a few of my own clean reggae sounds but I was wondering if anyone else has any tips on settings to get something close the the classy dubby sound!
Cheers
Matthew
I recently did a Reggae set with my Code 50. Having the "right" pickup configuration and string weight will have a big impact on what the Code has to work with. You want that Fender single coil twang which is really hard to similate on a Code if you have monster humbucker pickups. Here's a few tips I learned:
1. If you don't have single coil pickups but you can split or tap thems, that will help. I have a Gibson Les Paul with Burst Buckers, and those pickups are super overkill for Reggae. Fortunately the coil splitting (and inner/outer selection) worked very nicely.
2. If you are stuck with humbuckers, you can try to lean out the signal by turning your volume down (somewhat) and turning the gain on the amp to almost nothing. You'll need to crank the amp volume to compensate (be careful!) but that will help get that tinny, light sound.
3. Play around with your pick up selector. Some Reggae songs are tinny, others seems to have the highs chopped off. Switching between bridge and neck pickups is good first step. You can play around with bass and trebble settings after that.
4. Use light or superlight strings. I used 9-42s.
Here's what I used for the rhythm guitar on Your House (Steel Pulse)-- this is a "real" Reggae song.
Bluesbreaker pre amp
American A/B power amp
3.5 resonance and presence
1912 cabinet
3.0 gain, 5.0 bass, 4.0 middle, 0 treble, 2.5 gate, 2.5 volume
Compressor (5 tone, 5 ratio, 5 compression, 5 level)
My pickups were split, screw (outer) coils only, neck (rhythm) pickups.
Obviously your setup will be different but perhaps this will help.