Dani Paige Band:

A while back, one of my favorite musician friends sent me this email: "I'm interested in your ideas regarding the use of tube amps for guitar. I was hoping you could give me further insight as to your preference for tubes over using solid state or modeling amps." Since I had a bunch of work to do that I wasn't particularly excited about, I procrastinated by writing the following answer:  

I guess there are a few reasons. First off, the kinds of electric guitar tones I'm into all have a certain amount of distortion. You've heard me play a lot so you know I don't go for the ultra-saturated or fuzzed out or overly compressed sounds (unless I'm playing a part in a cover song that demands it). In fact, most of the time I'm playing with a tone that the average guitar player wouldn't even call distorted at all. But the distortion is there: it smooths out some of the harshness and thickens up the natural sound of an electric guitar. As I'm sure you've found, if you plug an electric guitar into a keyboard or bass amp and play ultra-clean, especially with a tweeter, it's pretty thin and tinny sounding.

So if we can agree that a hi-fi reproduction of the guitar's output isn't what we're looking for, that narrows down the choices. You can go for a straight solid-state amp with no modeling or digital processing and get a little of that overdriven sound by clipping the transistors. But to my ear that's a pretty flat sound, even for jazz. A good tube amp set up correctly has a nice, complex, "round" sound, and even more importantly it's a dynamic, touch-sensitive sound. Meaning that if you play softly, you can get a cleaner chimey sound, and if you really dig in it gets fatter as it gets louder. To my ear, the solid-state amps that I've played lack that complexity and touch-sensitivity -- you set the tone and you can play loud or soft, but you're just getting loud or soft versions of the same tone. 

As for digital modeling amps, I know many people are pretty happy with them and I'll be the first to admit that you could probably fool me in a blind listening test with some well-done recordings. But actually playing my instrument through a modeling amp is a different matter. It's analogous to playing a keyboard that has digital samples of (for example) a clavinet. The latest and greatest clav patches have gotten very sophisticated and would probably fool 99% of the listeners in an audience. But when you're playing it, does it really respond like a Hohner E7? Probably not, and that's going to affect how you play it, for better or worse. But it's a whole lot more convenient than bringing an E7 to a gig, so you accept the tradeoff.

For guitar, I guess the main advantages of modeling vs. tube amps are versatility and reliability. For me, versatility isn't a big deal. With a 2-channel tube amp, a 2-pickup guitar and a couple of (analog) pedals, I've got all the sounds I want to deal with. Sometimes I'll bring a second guitar if I need more. Anything else I find distracting. As for reliability, I'll tell you straight up: if you look at it a certain way, my tube amps have given me the LEAST trouble out of all the gear I bring to gigs. Cables go bad all the time. Output jacks on guitars go bad or at least get intermittent all the time. Strings break. Guitar volume pots get scratchy. Preamp and pedal batteries die. In the last year, I've had a Boss auto-wah pedal and an MXR phaser pedal die completely, for no apparent reason. Those are solid state pieces of gear made by reputable companies, and they're sitting in my cabinet waiting for me to find time and money to send them in for repair. My Presonus 8-channel solid-state mic preamp/digital recording interface died a few months ago and cost $85 to repair -- a relative bargain, because Presonus is known for good customer service. 

In contrast to all that, my Zinky tube amp has a lifetime warranty, so if anything besides tubes or the speaker goes out, it will be repaired for free. And here's the thing: when a tube does go bad, it's easier to fix than almost anything else in my rig. I've had to replace 2 preamp tubes in the last couple of years. Fortunately, I paid attention and caught the problems early, so it didn't interrupt a gig either time. The tubes cost $10 each, and each time it took about 10 minutes for me to figure out which tube needed replacing. This is because the "old school" design of good tube amps is meant for easy servicing. Tube amps come from a time when stuff was meant to last for many years, so repairs are simple. Any tube amp from 50 years ago can be fixed by anybody who knows how to work on amps, and usually all that needs fixing is tubes and filter capacitors. Digital gear is totally different. If one of the chips goes bad when a digital product is 10 years old, it's likely that nobody will have any idea how to fix it and a replacement chip won't be available anyway. So you get some extra short-term reliability out of digital gear, but in my opinion the price you pay for it is a shorter lifespan. (Another keyboard analogy: people will be repairing Hammond organs until the end of time. Will anybody bother trying to fix a Korg Triton in 20 years? I doubt it.)