Robben Ford Discussion

[Red Suede]

I use the Furman AR-117, which has a toroidal transormer on board. My Two Rock Opal seems to be voltage sensitive, because I can feel and hear when it is browning out. Most of the bass players I play with use 1000 watts minimum in their rigs, so I lose out in most clubs. One night I was playing with a friend of mine who was using a 2000 watt Crown, and I had a 60 watt Boogie, and I could physically see the pilot light turning off whenever he would hit a note hard. The AR-117 solved the problem. I didn't really notice any of my other amplifiers of late having this problem (Marshalls, Fenders, Boogies et. al.) but the Opal is so quick and dynamic that the problem wsa immediately apparent. I got the AR-117 and 2290 back in the 80s when I was doing my Lukather thing. The 2290 controlled the amp channel switching, turned pedals on and off, besides having 32 seconds of delay time at full bandwidth on board. I remember calling Bob Bradshaw in the 80s thinking I needed a rack built and when I told him what I had there was silence at the other end, and he says "what do you need me for"? The 2290 did most of what his system would have done except unity gain at the effects loops, because I was running a Distortion + at one of the loops for an Eric Johnson type fuzz sound. Anyway, the AR-117 seems to be solving my problems.

[glasman]

[Daved]

We've arived safely in Lillehammer. Looooooong trip, everyone is pretty exhausted, but we're here. Get some rest and we should be good to go for tomorrow nights show.

As for conditioners....
I have used Fuhrmans and Juice gooses with different arists in the past. They are good for most applications for keeping your line voltage consistent/conditioned and I recomend them in many applications.

The drawback, however (and the reason I don't use one for Robben), is that inherant in their design is the fact that they electronically doctor your AC sine wave to monitor and/or compensate for voltage fluctuation. This is all well and good in many cases (such as with digital devices and such) but when it comes to amplifiers you can be setting yourself up for imperfect or altered power, which can affect the way your amp responds.

As explained by Aeolian above, the Variac is simply a variable transformer... what goes in comes out except that you can increase or decrease the size of the sine wave (voltage level). There is no other alteration going on. However, as he further explained, if the supplied voltage changes, one needs to manually adjust to keep the voltage your amp sees consistant. For example, as Red mentions above, bass amps and/or lighting systems can steal alot of power from you once the show gets under way. You will see me often monitoring and adjusting Robben's variac during the show.

Another advantage is that the Variac can be used as a variable step-up transformer to a point. With Robben we like to run his amp as close to 125 volts as possible. Below that he hears a "browning out" and above that he doesn't notice much difference. The Variac has, particularly overseas in countries and areas with poor power supply, saved our butts many times. I always get a kick out of pointing out to Robben the occasions when the Variac is reading slightly over 100 volts... and I have the Variac turned up to maximum! Imagine what kind of poor voltages we'd be dealing with without it! If the voltage gets low enough (and I can actually demonstrate this by turning the Variac down some) digital items (Like the TC 2290) will actually freak out or shut down.

Another 'drawback' to the Variac is that, because it is NOT a conditioner (the wave that goes in, comes out), it will not clean up dirty power. In Robben's case (as with other's who prefer a Variac over a Fuhrman or Goose) he'd rather deal with dirty, but true, waveforms on occasion than have a conditioner always altering the waveform. Alot of artists can't hear the difference, or don't care about that aspect of their amplification (If they use so many FX that their signal is heavily altered, then it really doesn't matter how their amps see the supplied voltage). But for someone like Robben whose primary sound comes from the purity of the amp signal itself, it can be a big deal.

Fuhrman's and Gooses and such, with line conditioning capabilities, I would highly recommend for electronic keyboards and digital processing units (dirty/noisy AC CAN potentially damage these kind of items).

But when it comes to audio amps upon which you rely on the pure analog sound of the amp itself, you might want to consider going with the Variac when considering how you power your amp.
_________________
B C-ing U!
( }:-Daved
"This boy's diseased with rhythm!" -Bing Crosby (Road To Rio, '49)

[JackD]

Daved:

Would your comments on the Furman stuff apply to their new Power Factor Pro?:

http://www.furmansound.com/products/pro/pwr_cond_seq/cond/pfpro.php

Damn, I just bought one!! If it does, gues I'll just use it to power my TC 2290.

[Red Suede]

For me, it was which was the lesser of two evils? It was either the browning out of the amplifier or the altered more sterile tone caused by the AR-117 ? With the AR-117, it was kind of like when you use a TC chorus for the first time. It cleans up your tone almost to the point of sterility, to my ear. But when you see your amp wiggin out, like on that date with my bass player friend, you accept the tone change a little easier than the brown out thing.

[frank0936]

Thank you Daved. I really appreciate you taking the time to explain that when I know you are dragging after such a long trip. The venue where I think we are getting dirty power is one where I get a lot of noise on my Blues Jr. amp. I don't get it in other places where we play. It seems like the stage lights are on the same circuit with the power receps. We can turn off some of the stage lights and get rid of some of it, but not all. That's why I was considering a power conditioner such as the new Furman PF-Pro. You've given me some more to think about. Thank you again and have a great show.
Frank

[Aeolian]

There are a couple of different things in play here. One is voltage correction. Daved uses a variac and Red Suede uses an AR117. Both accomplish the same thing, just that the AR117 is automatic. Both are transformers. There are autotransformers that switch taps as the voltage changes using relays. The AR117 uses a bit more sophistication and waits until the power waveform hits zero before electronically switching taps. This really minimizes the effect of the switching, in not generating random noises as with conventional autotransformers. So when RS's bass player buddy jumps on his 2400W amp, his AR117 can react within 1/60 of a second, whereas Daved has to average out what all the other things are sucking and kind of find a middle ground. But the variac doesn't create any other artifacts. Maybe I'll get together with RS and put the AR117 on a scope while someone bangs on my 1400W bass rig, and we can see what kinds of anomolies show up when it compensates the voltage.

Another thing under play is reduction of noise in the line. That noise can have many different frequencies.

A line transformer like a variac being built to handle 50-60 line frequency, it is by nature not going to be very good at high frequencies. And so behaves like a filter. This will be pretty effective at killing radio frequency stuff. A much cheaper method is a simple capacitor, like the tone control in a guitar rolled down. This is what is in the Juice Goose/Furman power "conditioners". Sometimes along with a series inductor, the same as the low pass crossover in a hi-fi speaker. Another thing usually thrown into a power "conditioner" is a Metal Oxide Varistor (MOV) which can clamp down on very high voltage peaks. These do create spurious effects, some of which are filtered by the rest of the box. But they are not very popular with audiophiles because of these effects. Buzzing from lighting controllers and such is much lower in frequency and much harder to kill. The ISObar conditioners have circuits which are very resonant at 60 Hz and so have much steeper filter slopes than simple caps. Filtering out more noise.

The PowerFactor is a whole different thing. Although it does have filtering and surge protection like a power strip, it's primary purpose is energy storage. The filter caps in your amp do the same thing. Thats why amps with more and larger filter caps are less "saggy". A common tweak to hi-fi amps, that really works with production bass amps like SWR and Eden, is to simply put more caps in the power supply. This means that when the output stage wants to deliver some power to the speaker terminals, that power is available, right now. It doesn't have to wait for the power to come though the resistance of all the 115 wiring between the amp and the generation source. This is what Furman is refering to in their literature about "lowering the impedance" of the wall socket.

There are very expensive boxes being developed for deep pocket audiophiles that actually re-generate very clean and stiff AC waveforms to maximize the performance of the amps hooked to it. This has been done in turntables for years. Early "syncronous" motors locked onto the line frequency (bit of trivia, these were invented by Laurens Hammond so that his electric organs would stay at pitch regardless of voltage fluctuations, so they were dealing with that even before megawatt bass amps ) so they would turn a fixed speed. It was found that noise in the line power causes all kinds of odd pulsing in the motors which worked their way into the platter and ultimately into the reproduced sound. By electronically generating a very pure waveform, the turntable motors wouldn't add any extraneous noises to the sound. It takes a bit more ommph to drive an amplifier than a turntable motor, so the regeneration equipment is much larger and more expensive, and took much longer to develop.
_________________
There are no such things as wrong notes, there's only the look on your face.
My Stuff: www.stevekirbymusic.com

[Red Suede]

Thanks Aeolian and Daved,
The culprit that day was Myron Dove, world class bass player, childhood friend and user of 5-6 string basses, so to reproduce the lower strings cleanly, you need the power. This was long ago at a sushi bar in Santa Cruz, a place not meant to have live music. (Goes for most clubs,eh)?

[Aeolian]

Figured it was Myron and his 2400W Stewart. Wonder what Daved does when Myron is on the Robben gigs. He does draw a few more amps out of the wall than Dewayne's GK rig.

Too bad I missed you folks in my new neck of the woods.
_________________
There are no such things as wrong notes, there's only the look on your face.
My Stuff: www.stevekirbymusic.com

[JackD]

Aeolian:

So just to clarify, does your comment that the Furman Power Factor Pro is a "whole other thing" mean that it has less of the down-side issues of some of the power conditioners you and Daved mentioned? Does the more limited conditioning plus the power storage feature make this a realtivley useful unit? I bought my PF Pro to protect my TC 2290 from dirty power and spike issues while at the same time helping the tone of my amps. I don't think I've ever played with a bass player who uses thousands of watts, nor do I play venues with massive light systems. Therefore, my conditions may be less demanding. I'm just wondering if the PF Pro will serve the purpose or if there's a Variac in my future.

[Aeolian]

Jack, while I haven't studied the output waveforms of the particular devices in question, the massive storage of the Power Factor would make it filter better than a small L/C circuit in a regular "conditioner" power strip. Those power reserves will help for short instantaneous brownouts, but once the reserves are depeted the line voltage will fall and the amp will brownout again. I'm not sure which setup would be more "Myron proof". You have to see that guy in action. I remember during the Tiger Walk tours watching Robben look over at him and just shake his head, the groove and power of Myron's playing is just so deep. Course, RS grew up with the guy and is accustomed to it.

So the differences are that the AR117 and Power Factor are dynamic. That is they attempt to correct the intermitent voltage sag insantaneously. (I know I'm not spelling that right Liz). The Power Factor by storing enough (hopefully) energy to make up for short term drops, and the AR117 by actually changing transformer ratios to bring the voltage back where it belongs. Note that the Power Factor cannot bring 115V up to 125 as the AR117 and Variac can. It can only try to maintain whatever is going in.

Comparitively, the Variac doesn't introduce any potential for glitching as something automatic does, but it can't dynamically react to sagging power either, unless Daved can stand there staring at the meter and spin the dial exactly the right amount as the voltage bounces up and down.

Maybe the best thing would be to have a Power Factor to smooth out temporary drops followed by a Variac to bring the voltage up to where the amp runs best.

Course, neither will eliminate 120-1000 Hz noise from lighting systems and refrigeration motors. The best defense against that is grounding which would be the subject of a whole nother dissertation.
_________________
There are no such things as wrong notes, there's only the look on your face.
My Stuff: www.stevekirbymusic.com

[JackD]

Aeolian:

That sound like an interesting combination. The PF pro first (I can also run my rack with my TC 2290 off of the PF pro) and then the Variac after the PF with the amp pluged in to the Variac. Sounds like the best of all worlds (potentially). The only issue is whether the PF pro conditions (or modifies) the power in a way that would be unpleasing (as discussed by Daved earlier).

[scottl]

Jack,

Aeolian is correct. The PF Pro will do bupkis to keep your voltage at constant level. If the wall is at 110v, you will not get 120v.

Seems like a worthless investment. I'd want the 120V

Fwiw, why don't you see how the GDS sounds before getting these items?? I use the Furman AR1215 and my dog ears give it a thumbs up....

Scott
_________________
www.scottlernermusic.com

[bettervue]

glasman

The drummer for Robben and Roscoe at Jos's Generic last summer was Brannen Temple and since they were sitting in with Joe's regular, Alan Haynes, his drummer started out the set. Don't know his name but I do like Alan Haynes. Doyle Braham (Jr I think) also sat in.

Question for the form, why is Robben so camera shy. He came down on a female photographer at Joe's and asked her to back off? And at the National Guitar Workshop I attended last summer, he wouldn't let me get a photo, just an autograph.

[JackD]

In term of the photos, it's my understanding that the flash photos really bother his eyes. At gigs, it's a real big distraction to him and I think it gets him off his game. Outside of gigs, I think he's generally cool with photos as long as there's not flash involved. Last year when I went to his clinic in Ojai, some of the guys wanted to take some pictures and he was OK with it, but he asked them not to use the flash.