Help me understand Soldano

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rstites said:
The SLO is, at its heart, a heavily modified Marshall 2203. The rhythm channel is the exact same topology and you can see the DNA right there. You can also hear the DNA and similarities when you play it. Likewise, the lead channel is very much a 2203+1 topology that is seen in many of the extreme Marshall modifications. Mike just did both of those better than anyone else and combined them.

That's not to take away from what he did because he tweaked every single gain stage and the tone controls, but you can still see the 2203 right there. He went the tighter power section that pretty much all high gain amps go for. (If you try to tweak classic Marshalls up to high gain amps, they'll tend to get mushy because the power section doesn't have enough definition. You can get around that partially by just sticking with 6550 or 5881/6L6 tubes, but the SLO goes further.)

At the end of the day, I still think of a SLO as the super hotrodded version of a Marshall 2203. It covers the same ground and does similar things, just with a bit lower, smoother voice and a built-in lead boost. If you like one, you'll like the other. If you don't like one, you won't like the other. Whether the SLO's extra features are worth double the price to the 2203 to someone is a worthy question.
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Mike started - actually - with modding Fender Bassmans; not Marshalls, not Mesas.
And his first amplifier was a circuit he concocted and ended up calling it Mr. Science.
If there's any overlap to that of 2203s or the like, it's due to fundamental current and signal routing; otherwise Mike's take on his amps was totally independent of looking at other amps.
 
Smashedguitarist said:
So I don't know everything obviously, but as I understand it, Mike Soldano claims to have created the cascading gain staging. Mesa makes a similar claim with the Mesa mkIIc. Maybe the c is for cascading, i don't know.
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Neither of these invented cascading gain. That's been a well understood principle from the various first triode introduced in the early 1900s. All amplifiers have cascading gain in their preamps, unless they have a single stage. Even classic clean Fenders have cascading gain. Randall Smith took a classic Fender design and stuck another couple of gain stages in the middle of it. Originally, it was because he wasn't sure how much gain he'd need to a certain application (electric organ?) and then discovered that he could get a pretty sweet distortion out of it. That is the genesis of the MkI Mesa Boogies that would evolved into the later Boogies. This is also why they have a fairly unique gain structure and sound. The classic Fender preamp with distortion in the middle, the tone stack in the middle, and no driver for the tone stack is a mess with distortion. Pretty much the entire evolution of the Mesa Mk series is a continual attempt to fix these various issues. That's also why they aren't much copied by anyone else.

Marshall copied the Fender Bassman which has a unique topology among the Fender line is why everything else high gain descends through them. They started cascading the two parallel input gain stages into each other for more gain around 1970 for various artists, and then introduced the 2203 as a model with the same concept. It does the exact same thing as Mesa was doing, but it built from a platform better able to support the distortion it created. Of course, that distortion wasn't enough for a lot of people so you got lots of variation on that design: clipping stages in the middle the amp, boosting it out front, clipping pedals, and of course stuffing an extra gain stage or two right in the middle of the circuit to get even more gain. Soldano wasn't the first to do this, but was arguably the best, or at least the first to do it on a commercially successful level. (There are some competitors to Marshall that get in the act at the same time.)

History lesson over! :) I can talk about any of these amp designs as much as you want, but I'd just note it's really simple to trace the history of what's going on just by reading schematics. You can watch the evolution of circuit development in guitar amps by reading schematics. It's all evolutionary, not revolutionary, and none of it is particularly groundbreaking in the greater electronic world.
 
Ventura said:
Mike started - actually - with modding Fender Bassmans; not Marshalls, not Mesas.
And his first amplifier was a circuit he concocted and ended up calling it Mr. Science.
If there's any overlap to that of 2203s or the like, it's due to fundamental current and signal routing; otherwise Mike's take on his amps was totally independent of looking at other amps.
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I'm sure he started with a Bassman as they're relatively simple amps. They're also the ancestor of all Marshalls. However, I guarantee you that he knew Marshalls before he completed designing his own. After all, he was selling Marshall modifications at the time to pay the bills. In fact, I'm sure he'd also seen the inside of a Mesa too.

Mike had a great design, but he wasn't this guru on the mountaintop that had god hand down the schematics from on high. He did what everyone else does: learn from what's out there and then try to improve it in what ways you think you can.
 
Mr. Willy said:
Lynch Mob - Wicked Sensation



Scorpions - Crazy World



Killswitch Engage - Holy Diver



Van Halen - For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge (there a a handful of tracks that aren’t SLO)



High on Fire



Gary Moore - Live at Montreux (1990)



Ratt - Detonator / Reach for the Sky





Eric Clapton - Journeyman



Gov’t Mule



Not 100% on this one, but it sounds like definitive SLO to me:
Warrant - Dog Eat Dog

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Agree that Detonator was a great tone (and his zenith as a player IMO), but the SLO was only on a couple of tracks -- the bulk of that album is Warren's famed Super Trem with the stupid hot plate voltage.
 
skullfxr said:
SLO for me (not owned) was a letdown in comparison to the hype when I was 18 and I first played on one for a few days. I have played a lot more amps since then and played a SLO way more times since then, it still honestly does not live up to the hype. Is it a great sounding amp? YES. Definitely. But for the cash, there are other amps that I have bought and many more that I have played that I would use first.

The 3D thing for me is the articulation and the blooming nature that is pretty cool, I am not going to lie, it's cool. But it certainly does not live up to the internet hype at all, which lead to my disappointment when I first played one.

Cool amp, yes. $4k cool? Nope.
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It’s that ‘bloom, articulation/3D’ thing that sets my favorite amps above the rest. SLOs, Wizards, vintage Marshall’s, Triple F/G, C+ have all of those to some degree; that’s why I like them best. There’s something about an amp that sounds better and better the more you turn up..yes most amps react that way but some just get a little better louder; others start sounding incredible with more volume
 
Blind Dog knows where this started
Croassorads-2.jpg
 
Smashedguitarist said:
Just so you know, it came out in late '88 and a lot of people didn't even know what it was back then.
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I am well aware when it came out. Luke and many others tone chasers from then / studio musicians were all over the amp and were playing on all kinds of records in 87. Forgive me for not being so precise on my timeframe. The thread has a lot of listings of stuff we all know that used the amp so at this point most folks are simply arguing to argue and nitpicking.
 
I just wanted to head off the people that would have inevitably come to the conclusion that literally more than 4/5 of the music that came out in the 80s would not have been SLO related by math alone.
 
Smashedguitarist said:
I just wanted to head off the people that would have inevitably come to the conclusion that literally more than 4/5 of the music that came out in the 80s would not have been SLO related by math alone.
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This is like people thinking the Marshall Silver Jubilee was Slash's sound on Appetite, but the album came out before the amp. As I recall, he was using a Marshall Super Bass. (They're identical to a Super Lead outside of a few of capacitors and easily switched back-n-forth.)
 
rstites said:
This is like people thinking the Marshall Silver Jubilee was Slash's sound on Appetite, but the album came out before the amp. As I recall, he was using a Marshall Super Bass. (They're identical to a Super Lead outside of a few of capacitors and easily switched back-n-forth.)
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It was a caswell modded Marshall I believe
 
Philo Beddoe said:
Is there a wizard or cameron on any album?
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Presumably there is some Modern Classic blended in with some of Herfield's tone in a few Metallica albums?

Not sure if AC/DC records with them; don't they use Wizards at least on tour?
 
cardinal said:
Presumably there is some Modern Classic blended in with some of Herfield's tone in a few Metallica albums?

Not sure if AC/DC records with them; don't they use Wizards at least on tour?
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I know very little of this subject, but I thought i remembered reading that they used wizards for a long time, then went back to marshalls.
 
Mr. Willy said:
No problem! Those were what I could remember off the top of my head.

Forgot about this one:


Vai used a rack mounted SLO during the Sex and Religion time period. He also used them pretty exclusively during the Whitesnake SOTT tour 89-90.
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This is something I never knew. Big fan of that album
 
Not sure what it is, but Soldanos are always polarizing and the threads all talk about the loop, price, etc

Before the crazy pre bad price hike I got a used Soldano hr25 and I love it. Normal channel is awesome and to me the star of the amp. So much versatility on the normal channel. The overdrive channel to my is better for leads than rhythm, but it’s a classic. What I love about the hr25 is the articulation, you really have to be on your game playing wise. It’s made me work harder in practice to improve, which to me is a good thing. I actually like the hr25 better than my venerable Marshall 2553 jubilee, just is less quirky and sounds better at low volumes. The hr25 is kind of noisy, that is my main issue. I did also put two 5751 tubes to tame the gain a bit, as about 4 and it’s just not usable and I wanted to be able to dial in a strong crunch on the overdrive channel and now I can.
 
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