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HH VS Bassamp "valve sound"


Rich
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A mate of mine has just got rid of his old HH VS Bassamp combo -- I was chatting to him about it and he said he would have got rid of the HH ages ago because it’s far too heavy to carry around, but he really liked the “Valve Sound” feature it had which sounded great with his fretless and allowed him to pretend he was Jaco :). He runs a much smaller G-K combo these days and was wondering if there are any FX/stomps/whatever that would go any way towards emulating the sound he got from that HH valvesound control?
Any ideas?

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How about a HH VS bass amp head? :)

I have one, and it's light enough. Not pedalboard material, but very easy to carry around. And it's got green lights.

I understand the "valvesound" is a relatively early version of valve simulation using MOSFET, and you can switch it on and off. Can't say how valvey it actually is, but it is an interesting sound, and can get very very dirty.

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Weirdly enough I found a site the other day that was dissecting the workings of the HH VS circuit. They seemed somewhat amazed at how complicated the circuit was and were trying to figure out why it was put together that way. I seemto remember someone commenting that it was a CMOS circuit so probably similar in sound to the Red Llama./Polish Love/ Craig Anderton design.

I'll see if I can find the site when I get home tonight.

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Just been reading up on the HH Valve Sound a little and have seen comments indicating that the module was a fairly simple FET gain stage and it would sound similar to an overdriven 12AX7 valve (as found in a valve preamp). Coincidentally Gallien Krueger are supposed to have tried something similar with their GIVE (Gate Induced Valve Effect) technology...

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Ok, I took a scout through my history and found [url="http://groupdiy.com/index.php?topic=38257.0"]this page[/url] which has a link to a thread with the schematic - if you're not a member of freestompboxes you'll have to sign up to read it. A couple of points to mention though: the discussion there is of the guitar version which had three positions for the valve sound switch (although there is some discussion of values for the bass version) and secondly I can't find any mention of the Red Llama so I obviously dreamt that up. :rolleyes:

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