Laney GH100L

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jamesblood

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Hi,
got myself a used Laney GH100L + Cabinet yesterday. :D
Today I will test it at rehearsal. With the Laney cab and my own Celestion Vintage 30 cab.

I will have to come up with something to get clean and distortion sounds though...
:rock:
stay tuned...
 
Nice. I've liked Laneys gear. I think Gilbert used either the GH100 or the TT100. Seem like a killer deal.
 
Ok, so guess what: the drummer didn't show up at rehearsal :cry:

Anyway our other guitarist/singer and me tried the Laney with both cabs, and compared it to his Crate Blue Voodoo.
Before turning it on I took a look at the tubes, because the Laney takes both el34 and 6l6. This one has 6l6. Great!

The first cab is the Laney 4x12. It's an older one with HH speakers. The sound was not bad, the Laney is very easy to tweak. It almost can't sound bad, no matter where you set the controls.

Next we tried my DIY 4x12 oversized Celestion Vintage 30 cab. This sounded much darker, with more power and punch over all and especially in the lower frequencies. Very good, I don't like too bright sounding amps. The Laney is quite bright and this cab takes away much of the brightness. And it takes bass frequencies much better, without getting muddy.

Ok, maybe it might help to tell what style of music we play. Well we play death metal with a little bit of black metal mixed in occationally. Something like Dying Fetus meets Behemoth.

Back to the Laney. As I said, I much preferred the way it sounded with my Vintage 30 cab. Next step: tweaking the sound, aaaahhhh now were talking! It sounded very good with the setting for the Laney cab, but that Laney really came alive when i optimized the EQ and Gain for this cab! :D
Then I turned up the master :lol: :LOL:
I turned up more, wow that Laney is really loud and powerful and has a mighty punch :rock:
It's really fun to play with it, it's very articulate, you hear every little bit of your playing.

But the drawback is when you stop playing, well it's quite a noisy amp. And you can only have either clean and crunch, or crunch and distorted. Ok, I know (and I tried it, and it works very good) you can turn back the volume on the guitar to get a clean sound. A very nice clean sound by the way. But in our songs I don't have the time to turn the guitar volume... The clean part would be over already when I finally get to the clean sound.
But I like to tweak, mod, build, change, customize, so I will do just that to get what I need out of the GH100L.

So what's next?
1. Holiday :D
2. get a noisegate (Boss NS-2, Behringer NR100, ...)
3. get some new tubes (the tubes in the amp are about 4 years old)
4. increase the difference between the clean and boosted sounds, to get a real clean sound and still be able to get the heavy distorted sound
5. other mods: switchable FX-Loop, trying to reduce the noise, some tweaking of the preamp... => amp porn ahead!!!

Ok, so much for now...
 
Finally, the long awaited update for this thread...
:lol: :LOL:

So this is it:


Since my last update I played a gig with it, but I only used it's poweramp, because as I said before, I need a clean sound as well as a distorted sound. This amp can do both. But to get from distorted to clean you have to turn off the "drive" (footswitchable) and turn down the gain. :(
So I just used my Digitech 2112 and a Behringer parametric EQ and went from there to the slave in of the Laney.
With a little tweaking (2112 users might know what I'm talking about ;) ) I managed to get a usable sound.
It's much better than the solid state poweramp I used before, much more dynamic and it sounds better the more you turn it up :rock:

Finally, as promised a gut shot:
 

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I've got the GH50L - the younger brother to your amp, and I couldn't be happier with it. An EQ pedal in front or in the loop (or both!) can help a lot in terms of tone shaping since the EQ controls on the amp are fairly straightforward. Also I prefer boosting with an OD to engaging the drive channel when going for a hard rock sound, but for metal I use the drive switch.

Have you tried this amp with greenbacks? I'm curious as to how it would sound
 
Hi Xanthomatose,
I can only agree! The Laney GH Series are amps with great potential. They are designed in a very straight forward way, no bells no whizzles, just pure tube amp tone and raw power.
But since I am very interested in the inner workings of tube amps (reading up on the matter since more than two years), I think instead of shaping my sound with external EQ, I'd rather tweak the circuit of the amp. Later on I'll try to make it a little more flexible (clean and distortion) and it would be great if I could get rid of some of the noise...

Sorry, I don't have a greenback equipped cab around...

But before I start tearing the amp apart I have to get my head around the construction, since I want to change as little as possible, so I can reverse my change in case it sucks...

So right now, I am studiying the schematic, reading everything I can find about amp mods and comparing the schematic to other amps (SLO, Engl, Recto) to find possible mods I can try without screwing up the whole amp.
So what I want is (sorted by amount of changes needed):
1.) much less gain in the clean channel, which means making the two "channels" more independent
2.) a little bit more gain in the drive-channel
3.) reduce the noise (change resistors, if that's not enough: add "noise gate")
4.) fx-loop for clean and solo channel
5.) a third channel (solo channel)
 
Get an ISP noise gate if you need one.
The other 2 are garbage.
 
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