Back in the mid-70s (as an old friend would say, “When the sun was little-tiny and the moon wasn’t born yet.”), I was a wannabe rock lead guitarist with a lot more confidence than talent and had just moved from rural Nebraska to a city within easy striking and gigging distance from the “Big City”: Omaha, Nebraska and, almost as often, Lincoln, Nebraska and, occasionally, Kansas City and Des Moines. It didn’t take long for me to learn that all of the hot players in town got together fairly regularly at the Saddle Creek Bar for an open mic/jam session and as soon as I figured out where Saddle Creek was I geared up to go into battle.
My amp and gear, at the time, was a 1970s Peavey Artist 100W combo with a Peavey 12” speaker. It was more than enough amp for any gig my band ever did and with an assortment of pedals screwed to a board and a Morley wah, I could handle almost anything on the pop charts at the time. That was considered a “tiny” rig at the time for a rock band guitar player. The Artist was the first amp I ever owned that had a “switched” input setup where I could go from a clean channel to a distorted one with a footswitch. The distortion that amp provided was pretty much fuzz-box quality and, at the time, my tone roll model was probably Carlos Santana.
The Saddle Creek jam session was a different setup than I’d expected. The stage backline was a permanent setup. As I remember there were a couple of Fender Twin Reverbs for the guitars, a Rhodes, a drum kit, an Ampeg bass amp of some sort, and 3 or 4 vocal mics; all set up and ready to go. This was 40 years ago, so my memory of the equipment is open to question, but I won’t be far from wrong. As a guitar player, I was “allowed” to bring myself and my guitar, but no pedals and sure-as-hell no amp. What I learned about myself that first time at Saddle Creek was that I sucked. Without the crutch of distortion and sustain to cover up my mediocre right and left hand technique, I sounded embarrassingly mediocre and having to pick every note or cleanly hammer-on or off slowed me down to 1970s country and western music territory. I went home with my tail between my legs, my ego squashed, and my confidence turned into brutal humiliation. Not that anyone I was on stage with or who heard me said anything. They didn’t need to, I said it all to myself.
After getting my ass handed to me, I went home and re-evaluated my equipment choices and my playing technique. There were a lot of terrific musicians at the Saddle Creek jam and I desperately wanted to go back and, even more, I did not want to suck in front of my peers. I started practicing on an acoustic guitar, even with the band. We lowered our practice volume drastically to accommodate my acoustic guitar and to protect our hearing. For performances, I sold the Peavey Artist and lucked into a 1950s Fender Harvard, which I immediately “hot-rodded” with a JKL K120 12” speaker, Marshall-style tone controls, and a foot-switched gain-boost circuit (all tube). [Yeah, I know. I destroyed the “collector value” of the amp. I did that sort of thing to a few hundred amps between 1974 and 1984, so get over yourself.] No more pedal board, no fuzz box sound, just a collection of tones produced by my Moonstone guitar, my amp, occasional contributions from the Morley wah pedal, and my fingers.
A few months and dozens of gigs later, I went back to Saddle Creek and I didn’t suck. I went back often over the next few years and learned more from that experience than I had from practicing and playing in bands in the previous dozen years. In the process, I also learned a lot about live sound systems, acoustics, electronics, and even audiences. Not only did I improve, as a player, enough to feel reasonably happy with my performance among the great players at the Saddle Creek Bar, but my band’s overall sound improved enough that I would often have other musicians walk right by my little Harvard, on it’s folding stand right behind me on stage, They’d often ask, “How do you get that sound from that amp?” And they’d be pointing at the bass player’s SVT, totally ignoring the little Harvard they’d walked past.
And so, sometime around 1976 I discovered “small is better” and I have never found any evidence to the contrary. But I have seen a lot of evidence that big is bad from everyone from the rich and famous to the godawful cacophony produced by wannabe guitar players in cover bands from Texas to Nebraska to California to Colorado to Minnesota and the surrounding territories. When my Nebraska sound company was designing and building sound systems for bands in the late 70s, I’d tell whoever was spending the money “For every 100W Marshall you let on to your stage, you’ll need at least 1,000W of PA system to get the vocals over the guitar.” I haven’t seen any evidence to conflict with that advice, either.
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